OK, so I have just got off the phone to a guy I have known for a while. He owns a £10m Turn Over business and was a marketing genius back in the day. It was marketing that got his business to where it is, however, his traditaional methods just are not working as well as they were.
Don’t get me wrong, he still get business from it but he is not sure what his ROI is. He has never tracked this because his profits more than covered the expense.
They still do, but there is now a lot less in the pot for him and his family.
My first recomendation is tracking numbers, and second is separate landing pages for different campaigns.
We talked about INBOUND MARKETING and he agreed with me that it is better to be infront of somebody when they are looking for your product or service rather than to bombard someone when they are not looking for you.
What is inbound marketing? Simply put, it is being infront of someone when they are looking for your product or service. I gave the following example to my friend:
Someone types into Google “Plumbers Birmingham” you get the following:
The Importance of optimising INBOUND MARKETING on Google
NB: Google Places is now Google Plus Local, see this post for more details.
Google tells us via the Google Keyword Tool that 480 people (roughly) searched “PLUMBERS BIRMINGHAM” last month. Did you know 72% of individuals that type in a Geo Locator (Birmingham in this example) want to pick up the telephone or buy said service there and then?
If I was a plumber I would want to be up there instead of the old types of advertising and marketing. Nearly 50% of all internet searches on Google are individuals and businesses looking for a local service or product provider. Ask yourself this question, is it best to spend £1000 a year on news paper advertising or re-invest that £1000 into online marketing?
Therefore, you are probably now asking why have I called this post “LOCAL DIGITAL VIRUS“!
The answer is simple, larger businesses are now beginning to see the power of online marketing and social media marketing. In a local market, the same goes and unfortunately I foresee that in 5 to 7 years (if not before) 50% of small businesses will be out of business. Why do I say that? Its what i am calling the
LOCAL DIGITAL VIRUS…
If a business is not investing in its DIGITAL MARKETING, the ones that do will be the ones getting all the telephone calls from that Google search, not the ones advertising in the local news paper. This is just going to increase, and once embraced by larger firms the smaller guy will fall by the wayside and just not be able to compete.
I’ll leave you with this, 1 in 3 UK businesses still do not have a website… That’s no online presence, no social media presence, no chance of benefiting from the massive advantage inbound marketing can have on a small business.
NEARLY EVERYONE GOES ONLINE TO FIND WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR, and in the future it will be even more people – in the UK nearly 50% of search is now done on mobile device, SMART Phone, iPad etc. These things are closer to hand than a news paper, yellow pages book or that pamflet thing with a magnet stuck on the side of the fridge. The people and businesses getting the calls are the ones on the first page because nobody goes past the 1st page when doing a search…
