Local Web Center

Mobile marketing – the latest buzz word in the marketing industry nowadays.

Your customers are on the ‘go’.  They’re looking for something that you have.  But they’re not in their desktop computers.  They have their smartphones with them.  You know, those fancy little gizmo that people carry with them nowadays thanks to the phone companies who seem to find a way to bring gimmicks to new phones every year.

Your customers begin searching online on their phones.  Got to your site but your site showed up in microscopic proportion because the phone tries to fit your web page into this small screen.  So the end result is that the customer hit the [back] button, and looked for another site.

Sounds like a major letdown to get that customer?  I don’t have the exact data but it is safe to say that most business’s web sites are not designed to be ‘mobile’ compatible.

Mobile marketing is a major marketing channel that warrant itself a long discussion.  According to comScore, there are 103 million smartphone users in the US alone.  Searches on mobile devices start to move around 9 am and peaks in the evening around 8-9PM.  That’s a 12 hr window for marketing your product to users who can’t seem to go without their phones nowadays.

Google study shows that 51% of smartphones consumers called a business on their smartphones, 25% of smartphone shoppers purchased an item in the store after looking up a business on their smartphones, and 34% made their purchases on their phone.

Now if you’re not into numbers, let’s just put it this another perspective.  Remember those thick book that phone companies sends us that we call yellow page book?  When was the last time you look up for a business on the yellow pages?  Well, chances are you don’t even know where you kept them.

So what you do is typically you ‘Google’ the business or service you wanted to get.  Now you can’t carry that block of computer everywhere you go, and you would need to  have an internet access to use it.  With smartphones, you can browse through the internet and you carry that device with you everywhere you go.

That’s the beauty of these devices.  You don’t know to carry one of those laptops with you in those shoulder bags.  It’s right there on your customer’s pocket.

Now, what does this have to do with local web?  Plenty and simple.  If you don’t have a website optimized for mobile phones, you’re losing some business to potential customers.

Of course, each site is different and have different goals.  But if your business is one of those wherein a customer is one call away, you should consider enabling your site for mobile.

Marketing is about sending out your message at the right time to the right people – your customers.  And your web being mobilized gives you a presence to be in their phones at the time they need it.  With some mobile web, all they have to do is click on the phone link on your page.  They don’t have to dial it up.  Click to call.

Next in our installation of this guide is Social Media.

Your customer was looking for something you have.  The search engines led them to your site.  The customer clicked and went to your site.  1, 2, 3 seconds… hit the [Back] button and went to the next search result.

What happened?  You’ve spent some good hard earned dollars on that site and the customer only spent 3 seconds on it.  Although I don’t have the statistics, as most survey shows, there was no clear ‘Call to Action’ on most of the pages.

Depending on the goal of the site, the common goal for most website is to make your customers take the necessary action you want them to do like:

• Do you have your phone number prominently displayed so they can call you right away if they found out that you have what they need
• Do you have the right informative article or content that will make them say, ‘This is what I’m looking for!’
• Is there a way for them to download the information they need, so they can compare it with  your competition.

I’m talking in general here but you can check it out yourself.  Check out the sites that made you perform some necessary actions  afterward.  What made you stay on their site?  Was it the information that they have that made you call them?  Only you know your customer (better than I do) but your site should perform what I think is the most important step:  Presell.

Most local business don’t have an online ecommerce site.  The smog center cannot ship the smog certificate to you without getting your car checked.  However, they could give you tips on the most common problems that car owners get into when they get their cars checked.  You could show them videos on how to correct them.

Internet is about information. People search for it, and if they found what they need, they do something. The site with the best information and shows the customer that it can be trusted usually wins.

Most often times, writing information or articles is not something that most business owners do. But what they’re good at is selling. You can ask them about specifics on a product and they could talk about it like it’s their baby.

So what to do? Do it in video! Video is one area where huge advancement has taken place in the last decade. YouTube has been one of the most visited site aside from Google and Facebook. Videos can provide you some ‘celebrity’ status.

Record a video and upload it to YouTube. Make sure you show your company name and your website, either at the beginning or end of the video, or both. Afterwards, embed the video on your site. It serves two purpose. First, people searching on YouTube would watch your video. Second, people going to search engines would lead them to your site with your video.

Video marketing is a very engaging medium right now and is highly converting. Give it a try. It’s very easy to create one with your smartphone, digital camera, or with your trusted camcorders. Some even allow uploads to YouTube right away.

Oh by the way, if you get celebrity status, don’t forget who told you to do video marketing, ahem.

At this point based from our previous discussions, we have reached a baseline that our web site should contain information or contents that will be helpful to our customers based on the goal that we want to accomplish.

That, foremost, customer experience with our site is one of the most important goal that we must accomplish.  This will ultimately determine our customer taking action to whatever we present to them.

We are now ready to tell our customers that we have a website.

Shouldn’t we talk about search engine and SEO, etc?

The short answer is No.

First, we perform what I call the Offline to Online approach.

We have not tested your pages if it works or not.  So you must test.  And there’s no better way to test than to check it with your current customers or a select target audience.

The goal here is to find out if your pages is making your customers or potential customers to take action.

Most of the time business owners, after their sites have been designed and built, stop doing anything and believe that the money would start walking to their doorstep on their way to your cash register.  Their designers now talked to them about optimization with the search engine and how it is going to take them to the first page of the search query.

So what!

If the pages gets to the first page of the search engine results and your customer do nothing, what does it give you?  Nada.  Nothing.  Zilch.

And believe me, after the site has been built, it does not stop there.  Can you show me a business where the place looks the same as it was when it started?  If your answer is yes, I assure you that business is not making any revenue at all.   Ask me how I know?

The same thing goes with your website.  Initially, it’s like setting up stage for your customers to know that you exist.  And you know what’s the good thing about it?  It’s open 24 hours, 7 days a week.

The critical discipline that you must develop is the ability to test a marketing strategy that you are developing for your business.  And the web is the most easiest way I know for you to find out about responses and be able to measure the effectivity of the strategy.

And believe me, if you laid out your site with your customers in mind, your customers will help your business in the web.  It’s the law of reciprocity.

The search engine is not even part of the equation here.  Their job is to find content.  Your job is to make your customers happy.

Offline to Online.  Most missed it.  Now, you don’t.

Let’s now tackle on how your customers will find you online.

We have established that having a web presence is now essential marketing medium for small businesses.

So we built a site around the products and services that you are offering. In the offline world, this is almost like printing a catalog or brochure for our products. What we normally do is we send this out to potential customers or people who calls the phone.

Same thing is true in the online world.

You could create your site to have all the information that your catalog might have. But, with the ease of being able to present it with other mediums that you can’t normally give if you mail a catalog to your customers.

You could have:

• Videos explaining the features and benefits of your product and how it will provide the value to your customers.
• Slide presentation complete with audio that does the above.

The benefit here is that you provide information to your customers in a way that they would want to have (in photos, video, or audio).

But George, this is elementary stuff.

Sure, but you’ll be surprised that even those who have websites for several years still does not implement and take advantage of these media.

Your site contains a pool of information that will help your customers. And that information, if presented properly, should allow your customers to connect to your business by calling you, emailing you, or referring you.

And that is accomplished with the most valuable and powerful part of a web page – the hyperlink.

The hyperlink, or link, is a word or a group of words that is tagged in a web page to take you to another web page in the internet.

What’s so important with this is that the search engines, like Gooogle, collects the linked word and the destination of the link. They store them on their database and ranks them accordingly based on their rules.

At this point, we’re not concern on how they rank the links. What should be important to you right now is that if your customer goes to the page on your website, what are the actions that he would do?

Will they:

1. Just glance on the site and go to another site
2. Take a read but do nothing
3. Got interested and call or performed some desired actions for your business.

The key point to remember is this: Your customer must act upon the information presented to them.

This determines the success of the page. We try to establish the goal of customer action. Whatever that customer action that we want should be the basis for our success.

There should be links on your site that will lead to other pages within the sites. And there should also be links from other websites that goes to your sites. The destination pages should perform whatever task you want your customers to do.

I see a lot of people jumping ahead to SEO or search engine optimization without evaluating whether the pages of their sites performs the desired goal.

I don’t want to discuss the technicality of SEO because in my experience, this is where most small business gets trapped. They feel that they need to get ranked on first page of the search engines.

Customer experience first. Determine the desired objective of the page and make it perform.

When you’re sure that the page is performing its job, then that’s the only time, we go to link from external sites to your web pages.

One of the question frequently asked by a small business owner who currently don’t have a website is ‘Do I really need a website?’

The answer: ‘Can you afford not to have one?’.

However, underneath that first question, what the business owners are really saying is, ‘I really cannot afford a website right now.  Maybe I should wait for a while until the business picks up before I have someone build it for me.‘

That mindset will create very serious consequences to your business.  Guess what, before you know it, time passed by and your customers are getting more smarter with technology.   Remember the phrase, ‘Let your fingers do the walking‘.  It’s now, ‘Let your fingers do the clicking or tapping‘.

If you’re business does not need new customers, congratulations.

But if you’re one of those probably more than 90% who’s trying to gain more customers, we need to probe into these simple questions:

1. Does your competition in your local area have a website?
2. Will it be nice if your customers come to your place and say ‘We saw this on your website and the information was really helpful.  Can I order these?’
3. Would it help establish that your business exist at all?

I will not tell you if you need a website until you answer those 3 simple questions.  Questions that I asked business owners numerous times.  (Now, you see why I have to build this site, too, huh?).

So to make it easy to justify the site, let’s analyze it based on a simple rule of thumb for your return on investment.

• What is the value of a customer that you will be serving?  How much profit or revenue does a customer bring when you serve them over a given time period.  Why?  Without these numbers, how can you measure ROI?
• Who are the type of customers that you would like to serve?

With that in mind, establish the goal for your website.

• Do you want to have your products available to them online so you could free yourself from order taking over the phone?
• Do you want your website to be able to generate leads so you could call them back or so they could call you right away.
• Do you just want to inform them about your services and show testimonials from happy customers that you have served.

Although these sounds so basic, yet most business owners fail to approach it from this standpoint thereby thinking that website development is a cost burden instead of understanding that it is a customer acquisition platform for their business.

So, gather all the marketing materials that you are currently using offline.  Sort it out and check to see which one you could use in the online world.

While the online world approach maybe different, the important thing to remember is to craft your message with the potential target customers online.

This page maybe a little bit simplistic in approach, but believe me when I say, that setting this up from the get go helps you save time later in your website design.

Next time, we’ll tackle what the online search engines are doing to help your customers find your location online.

In the meantime, the homework starts now.