Tag Archives: marketing
The Advantages of Local Search Marketing
The amount of attention you can get directly influences amount of income and Local search marketing is all about getting maximum exposure for your business in your area. Find out more about what’s involved and how it can help.
Local search marketing is about getting a business good exposure in local search results and local directories and there’s a lot to gain by being prominent in these. Most consumers like buying from businesses close to home : I’ve seen statistics that about 80% of customers live with 8km of the stores they go to. Search engines are now detecting searches that have a local intention and displaying the local results along with a map. This makes it far easier for consumers to find what they’re looking for and how to travel to the business as well. Local directories can also bring businesses good exposure.
You can create an account pretty easily with most online directories. In Australia the best known ones are True Local, Smart Local and Hotfrog. Google, Yahoo and Bing also allow you to claim a “Places” page where you can upload your business details, and these are used as the basis for ranking you in the local search results. You don’t need to have a website to be listed in any of these. The Places pages are free and an entry-level listing in the local directories is also free.
How are the Yellow pages going ?
Not too well from reports I see. The physical yellow pages have been pretty-much replaced by smart-phone and desktop searches. And Yellow pages listings don’t provide nearly as much info. Even online, directories like Hotfrog will tell you far more about the businesses you find.
Search engines have fast become the new Yellow pages, saving people a lot of time and energy looking for the location of businesses and the products and services they provide.
What should you do ?
We know that masses of consumers are searching online for solutions to their problems, so marketing online is a different technique to marketing offline. Rather than sending out a message indiscriminately using fliers, billboards or radio and TV commercials, the game has become getting found by people who are specifically searching for what you provide. So you need to make sure you can be found in the places they’re looking . . .
1) Local search engine results. you need to claim a places page with each search engine.
2) Local business directories
3) Review websites
4) Online Press release website
5) Online trade magazines that your type of customer may read
Easy Tactics To Use The Internet To Promote Yourself And Your Business
When it comes to the Internet, its a tough place because all of your competitors will be out there vying for a position in the same marketplace. The reason for this is that Internet marketing is a powerful tool that you could use to market every project imaginable and still be in a winning position.
In Europe alone, almost 60% of the population use the Internet regularly and in North America, that figure is almost 80%. Most people using the Internet will use it when searching for product reviews prior to buying something. Many people have now abandoned buying a daily newspaper and receive their news online. Search engines now account for approximately 80% of online traffic. All in all, the Internet is the best place to go if you want to find information.
When you are designing your web pages, or perhaps employing somebody else to do it for you, its essential that you make the Internet work for you and, for professional web designers, they will gauge their success on how much traffic they are able to attract to a particular site.
To put your Internet marketing into overdrive you need to carefully think about your keywords. How do you think the search engines will establish what the user is attempting to look for? At the very epicentre of any Internet marketing tactics is the use of keywords to drive traffic to web pages, so web designers need to focus upon the keywords that a particular target market is going to use.
As far as your website is concerned, it can be really sophisticated and complex, with Flash and all sorts of other things. However, this can be counterproductive because all any user wants is to find the information they seek. You therefore need to make sure that your site is streamlined and as simple as you can make it, with easy navigation and links that work!
Try communicating via regular newsletters. When people visit your site, hopefully what you will get out of it is an email address. You can use this to maintain regular contact with them with a monthly newsletter. This is a cost-effective way in which you can build up relationships with prospective clients, whilst promoting your products and services.
Blogging is perhaps one of the most effective ways in which to attract traffic, but it is also very time-consuming. There are some very well known bloggers who have literally thousands of people who regularly visit their blog sites, so if you are a person who really likes to write, you can use this to your advantage and drive traffic to your web pages.
Press releases can be very helpful. Large companies regularly send out press releases to the media whenever they have an event they wish to promote, or a new product or service coming out. The Internet is an inexpensive way for them to get their message across and is very effective. Ensure you put your keywords into such releases.
If you use these tips, then you should have a very successful marketing campaign.