Helping small businesses with local internet marketing

If you’re a small business owner with a target market in just your local area you might have the same feeling as many others have found to be true in the past:

 ”I’ve tried online advertising before and it didn’t work”

In our business, we hear this all the time from business owners in almost every industry.  It is always the worst for small businesses who sell products and services to just their local area.  We need to stop and take a look into why the internet marketing attempted failed to achieve the results that were desired.

• Was the audience targeted properly?
• Did the advertisement have a call-to-action or incentive to purchase?
• Is the website engaging and also encouraging visitors to buy?

If any of those elements are missing or less than perfect, you could be missing out on thousands of valuable customers, not because of the internet not working well as an advertising medium, but because it is not being used to its full potential.

The Website

First, take a look into the website or landing page to make sure that when the right visitors land there, they will take action and become your next customer.

Ask the question “What action do I want the visitors to take?”.  Although it may seem obvious to you, it might not be as obvious to the visitors who land there from an advertisement they clicked on from somewhere else.  Make things easy and painless.

In both online and offline media advertising, sales, promotions, and coupons are always one of the easiest ways to get someone interested in making the trip to visit your business.  You may want to simply have the visitor enter their email address to receive special offers by email or let them print a coupon right from the website.

If there is the possibility your customers might want to bring a friend while visiting your local business, let them share the offer on some of the common social networks.  It’s easy to add the ability to share web pages through social networks with some of the easy to use tools from sharethis.com or addthis.com (and however many others are out there).

The Advertisement

Next, be sure that the advertisement you are running reflects both the content of your landing page and the action you wish visitors to take.  Internet advertising is slightly different than conventional advertising because the ads might be clicked on a lot by people simply browsing around or possibly even ignored completely.  If you are paying per click (PPC), you want to limit the clicks down to those who have already decided to take the action you are looking for before they even click on your ad.  This is why you will want to make sure that the advertisement tells the audience exactly which customers you are looking for by listing the call-to-action in the ad.

Also, when using search marketing, advertisements that are more relevant to the search keywords selected and the content of the page generate better click-through rates and often get the benefit of lower prices when bidding.  So it is important to make sure your advertisement reflects the same content as the landing page.

“Groceries on Sale at             ” — generic
“Fresh Vegetables on Sale at             ” — related to content
“Print this coupon for 25% off Fresh Vegetables at             ” – related + call-to-action

Targeting the Audience

Targeting the right audience online can sometimes be tricky for a local business.  When it comes to mailing campaigns for products and services that can be utilized by any household, a spray shot of ads mailed to the local area is fairly easy and can be effective when done properly.  The internet audience is a bit more spread out and can be hard to pinpoint exact locations of the users.  On social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, users are able to put their location in order to be shown advertisements from their local areas.  This can be an easy way to narrow down the audience to the local area.  The PocketCents network captures the location of each member of the audience before showing advertisements as well to provide the same effect through different mediums such as local newspaper websites and forums.  Both social networks and the PocketCents network function similarly when creating an advertisement allowing you to chose a very specific area in which to advertise.  Larger search marketing networks like Google, Yahoo and Bing offer targeting to regional areas as well, but results typically cannot be narrowed down as far as most small local business owners might prefer.  For many small businesses, the location of the audience members who see the advertisement matter less than the keywords used or the websites that display the ad.  This tends to be one of the biggest reasons local advertising on the internet does not provide the best results.  While creating advertisements for the search marketing networks, it is usually a good idea to include keywords for your local area along with location keywords in your advertisement.

“Print this coupon for 25% off Fresh Vegetables at              in Detroit, Michigan”

With the website landing page set up to encourage visitors to become customers, the advertisement set up to generate only the most qualified visitors, and the audience narrowed down to target just the people in the local area, local internet advertising can generate just as good or better results than conventional marketing and on a smaller budget.

How to generate more targeted traffic to your website

After creating your website, there are many things you can do to increase the traffic and build a strong audience.  Whether you are selling products, advertising your services, or simply building an informational website, the concepts in online marketing remain relatively the same.

If you have just recently created your website and have not performed any SEO or submitted your website to directories and search engines, you may want to read our previous article about generating free traffic from various sources before jumping into some of the paid marketing tactics in this article.

Monitor the results
Before engaging in any online marketing campaign, it is best to always track the effectiveness of your efforts to make sure every dollar is well spent in generating the maximum revenue from your website.  Google Analytics is one easy (and free) way to monitor your website activity, set goals, and check how effective each form of advertising is in generating traffic and sales.

Local PPC Advertising
Local online marketing, such as the PocketCents advertising network, can help improve sales for businesses who wish to target specific areas.  The advertisements can be forced to be shown only to internet users in specific local areas, increasing the likelyhood of finding buyers for your products and/or services.  Local advertising can give a large boost to brick-and-mortar businesses looking to sell more products and services in their direct local market.  Try creating advertisements that link to printable coupons on your website and make sure you have a map or a link to get directions to your local business on the same page.  If your coupon offer is for something many people would be interested in, you will see an almost immediate increase in foot traffic to your business.

Paid Search Marketing
Bid low but enough to at least be on the first page of results.  Find inexpensive keywords with few competitors.  It is said that searches using keywords of 3 or 4 words in length are most likely to purchase what they are looking for.  Choose very specific keywords that you feel someone would be searching for to find your exact products and/or services.  There is no need to pay for huge amounts of untargeted traffic unless you are working on a branding campaign with millions of dollars to play with.  Target the traffic as much as possible because fewer clicks and traffic can mean that the clicks you do pay for in the end are the exact customers you are looking for to be on your website.  Bidding generally drives the price of keywords up and you may have to consistently monitor your accounts and rebid to keep your keywords active.  If this becomes too much effort, you may wish to look for a management tool or a service like PocketCents with a low fixed PPC price.

Internet marketing can seem like a difficult and time-consuming task at times, but there are many tools and services to make things easier.  The results from marketing online are easy to monitor and can easily increase website traffic, internet sales and even walk-ins to your local business location.  If you are not yet advertising your business online, it is never too late to start.