Does your mom know more than you do about how to market your business online?

Your website is the hub of your internet marketing efforts. Would you spend money putting ads in the newspaper trying to get people to come to your store if you had no sign, no staff, and the front door was boarded shut? Spending time on internet marketing without first optimizing your homepage and landing pages can often be just as futile.

Local SEO

If your business has a physical location you are eligible to show up in Google’s Local search results (usually combined with Google Maps). Here’s a list of important local search factors. You’ll see that many of the same general factors play a part in your local ranking (links, content, title) but there are a few extremely important things that you should try to do right away:

1. City/State in title tag and content
2. Address/phone number on every page of your website
3. Reviews on sites like Yelp, CitySearch, Urbanspoon, TripAdvisor

   Depending on the type of industry your business is in there are lots of different review sites that Google and Bing use as part of their local ranking factors. Encourage your customers to participate through email newsletters and point-of-sale reminders.

4. Claiming and optimizing your Google Places listing

What is Google Places?

If you are a local business and you haven’t set up/claimed your Google Places page this is your new “most important thing to do”. Learn more on this great post on Google Places optimization.

Paid Search

When you perform a search on Google you’ll often see a group of results at the top surrounded by an orange box. These are paid results. In other words, that company is paying for their result to be included, often with a CPC (cost per click) agreement.

Basically, you can set up an account with Google Adwords and start creating ads. For each of these ads you will set a maximum CPC and Google will arrange ads based on a number of factors they call “Quality Score”. To learn more about Adwords check out this post on how an Adwords auction works.

Baby, baby, baby, noooo

I just started a new business… My team of scientists just discovered a revolutionary new cure for baldness. Today we are making a plan to promote our new product, Hair Today, to the masses. The best part of the whole business plan is where we are going to sell this product: kiosks. Not mall kiosks, we’re talking kiosks outside of an event where tens of thousands of people attend daily and even more wait outside just to be near the experience. It’s a place where thousands and thousands of items are sold every night to excited people with lots of spending money. The place: Justin Beiber concerts.

Sounded pretty good until that last part, didn’t it? The reason this promotion would most-likely fail miserably is obvious; balding men aren’t Beliebers (besides the occasional extra supportive dad-of-the-year type), teenage girls are. And who is the most likely person to buy a cure for baldness? A balding man. So thousands and thousands of people are going to see our product but not many will be too interested in buying it.

This example is extreme, but the concept may apply to your business right now. Have you heard this in a meeting recently? “We need a social media presence to help get people to our website, let’s start a Facebook page.” This sounds cool and hip and may even end up getting lots of people to your site, but there is a fundamental problem. You don’t just need to get “people” to your site, you need to get potential customers to your site. Maybe your potential customers don’t even use Facebook (you might sell bongo drums to remote tribes in Africa).

Where do I find my potential customers?

To start, you need to know WHO your potential customer is. Not just demographics like how old they are and where they live; you need to know what situation they’re in, how they think, what they like, and why they like it. You especially need to know how much time they spend online and which sites they use regularly. These visualizations of your typical customers are called personas.

Personas

Profiling your typical customer

A persona is an imaginary person who represents one of your business’ typical customers. It’s similar to a target market but a little more detailed and a lot more fun. Every business has at least one persona, some have many more. If you haven’t done at least one of these yet don’t waste any more time messing around with internet marketing until you do. The information you discover will give you a whole world of insight into where customers are coming from and what their decision-making process will be like. Here are some great questions to use when you’re getting started with personas:

Where do I find this information?

There are quite a few different ways to go about finding this information. If you are an existing business your very best bet would be to start with your own customers. If you have customer information stored in a database you’re already ahead of the game. Grab whatever data you have (or have a nerd grab it) and make a chart. Try to identify some trends: Male vs. female, age, income level, marital status, how they found your website. These are all questions that you might be able to answer from information you’ve had stored for years.

Survey says… Now set up a survey. Set up your own if you can or use an online tool like Survey Monkey. Offer a prize, reward, or discount for participation. This is where you can get a great look into motivations and interests of your current customers. Ask them what they do online, how they shop for services like yours, what interests them, and what affects their decisions when shopping. Keep it short and get creative, this can end up being a great tool if you can get the right people to complete it.

Now what? There are some great tools to help you get a better feel for your audience. Google Insights and Facebook Insights can give you great… Insight on visitors to your website. There are websites with demographic data by industry like Quantcast or Google Ad Planner. You could also try offline methods like Experian Consumer Research if you have the budget for it.

Who knows this persona? Talk to anyone in your company that directly interacts with this persona. Support, customer service, and sales will all have valuable information about customer/prospective customer mindsets. Once you have a specific persona formed it can also be helpful to talk to people outside of your company who interact with someone like your persona on a day-to-day basis.

Let’s see a sample persona…

What have we learned here?

While this is a very brief example there are still a few actionable takeaways from what we now know about Flo. We can see that she is interested in more than just turtles. She’ll have questions about tanks, food, and how to care for them. With this in mind, it would be in the best interest of Joe’s Turtle’s to not only make this information available, but make sure it is easily accessible on their website. Joe’s could also make this a selling point in any of the promotional material Flo is likely to see.

What else? We can also see that Flo isn’t going to buy turtles that are caught in dolphin nets thrown into the ocean by slave pandas wearing baby seal pelts. We should make sure she knows our turtles are taken care of every step of the way from the wild to her “recreation” of the turtle’s nutural habitat in a 100 gallon tank with a stick in it. We can also get a sense that customer service will be a major selling point for Flo. We need to make sure that she knows whenever she needs something she can always call us or go to our website.

How? Does this slogan sound familiar? You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers. It’s the slogan for Radio Shack who, as you probably know, has sold electronics for a long time.

Why? Buying electronics in the late 20th and 21st century has become confusing even for the tech-savvy. Let’s say you’re a marketer for Radio Shack. After creating 5 personas for them you notice that 4 out of 5 list “knowledgability and helpfulness of staff/website” as something that will affect their decision to buy. If you’re smart you’ll make sure that when a visitor lands on any page of their site or walks into a store they know right away how easy it will be to get their questions answered. Often the most effective way to relay this message is simply to put it in writing.

Where are my customers?

Using the information you have gathered on your sample personas you now have a great starting point for finding ways to reach your audience online. If I know that Flo reads lots of mom blogs and loves Pinterest it would be in our best pinterest to look into guest posting on mom blogs or having products reviewed. If we don’t have a Pinterest page we should probably look into starting one. Lastly, we should come up with a content strategy for both that will make our brand more visible and more pinteresting to moms like Flo.

What do you mean by content strategy? This gets us back to the subject of being interesting as a company. Again, talking about yourself in these situations will get you nowhere. There aren’t many blogs that are going to let you guest post about how many doohickeys you sold last month. Flo doesn’t want to see your Pinterest page filled up with snapshots of you counting all of your money from this week’s sales. Luckily, you already know what sorts of things Flo likes from the research you did for her persona. If you can identify specific subjects and products that would probably be interesting to Flo your content strategy will start to form itself. Engage your audience’s interests so that your company becomes a resource and not an interruption.

How to be social

Someone who is at a party but sits in a corner by themselves is by definition a partier, but that doesn’t necessarily make them social. In fact, they may even be considered anti-social even though they’ve already made more effort than Eugene and Melvin who stayed at home to do some prank phone calls and have a World of Warcraft tournament. In terms of your business it isn’t enough just to start a blog or create a Facebook page. If you aren’t actively involving your company in your industry’s community you might as well throw some popcorn in the microwave, put on your sweatpants, grab a lightsaber, and tell Melvin to come over.

Define active… We’re not talking about spending all day on Facebook liking people’s status updates here. Being active in your community means staying up-to-date with industry thought leaders and other respected individuals/companies in your niche. It means making insightful, well-written comments on posts and updates you find useful. It means posting stories and discoveries that your followers will find interesting and asking them to be involved in the conversation.

If you are just getting started in using social it will take time to build an audience. Giveaways and contests can help give you a kickstart. Here are some great tips on using social media for your business.

80/20

I’m sure you’ve probably heard an 80/20 rule at some point in your life. It seems like there are a lot of them, many of which seem like complete guesses. This could be one of those but the concept makes sense:

80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers.

While that number will vary widely depending on your business/industry in many cases repeat business will be a fairly large part of your overall sales. Why is it, then, that so many businesses spend almost all of their time/money going after new clients, new customers, and new contracts? If you are lucky enough to have little Joey buy a turtle from your store it should be your #1 priority to make sure that he is happy with the turtle, that the turtle is eating and sleeping fine, and that the two of them are having tons of fun together. If Joey and his parents like the turtle, like you, and think that you care about them they’re likely to come back to your store many, many times for supplies, food, tanks, and finally, a turtle soup recipe book Yikes, bad joke

Trust and the Stress-Free Environment

To establish trust, you’ll want your current customers and your future customers to have as close to a stress-free experience as possible with your company. Here are some ways to make things easy on them:

• If you think there might be a problem or delay contact the customer and let them know as soon as possible. Any time a customer contacts you it is already too late for stress-free.

• Display your privacy policy any time you are asking for sensitive information including an email address, credit card numbers, or favorite 80s band.

• If you state that you won’t sell or release an email address… don’t sell or release an email address. On the flip side, if you don’t sell or release email addresses make sure you let everyone know. Loudly.

• Display badges and certifications. BBB, McAfee Secure, SSL Encrypted, etc. These will at least give your business the perception of being trustworthy.

• Encourage reviews/ratings and make these available on product pages whenever possible. If you are concerned that your product will get all 1 star reviews then customer trust is the least of your worries. Great products make great businesses and vice versa.

• Throw some client/customer testimonials up on your site, especially pages where you are trying to convert.

• Don’t have your mom write them. “What a great company, we’re so proud of you Larry!” is not helping.

• Make returns and exchanges easy.

• Make sure it is easy to find and contact your customer service.

• Answer all emails immediately if possible.

• Respond to criticism publicly. This can include news, social media, website comments, etc. Let the complainer know that your company is working hard to make it right. Then work hard to make it right.

• Care about the customer. If you truly care about your customers your business will be set up in a way that shows it. Take a look at these customer service stories: Southwest, Zappos, Amazon, and Crutchfield. There’s a reason why these guys got so big.

What’s Next?

Do you have any internet marketing tips we missed? Have you had success with any of the methods we talked about? Let us know in the comments.

Here are some great blogs to follow if you’re interested in learning more about internet marketing: