Small Business Buying, Building and Selling

In the last 2 weeks, my number 1 competitor has been doing more marketing than in the previous 9 months. Ironically, I don’t own a Television, don’t subscribe to the local paper, don’t listen to local radio, haven’t received anything in the mail from his company and none of our prospects have asked about that competitor. So how do I know he’s doing marketing in my area? Google Adwords told me so. As a matter of fact, Google Adwords can be used to track local industry trends, competition, market interest and even key terms (i.e. the words people on the street are using to describe your business or product offering). And the best part is, it can cost you little to no money and you don’t even need a great website to gather this information.

Widen your gaze to see all the benefits of Google Adwords

Here’s the concept. In previous blogs I’ve talked about the free tool at Wordtracker.com to help you determine which keywords are most popular on the internet. The problem with this tool for small businesses is that it’s a global tool. Meaning that it’s tracking keywords all over the world not just in your territory and so what might be a popular phrase or keyword around the world might not be in your area. More importantly, just because, on a global basis, your competition’s franchise is real popular, that doesn’t mean they are in your area. Or how about if your competition is a local restaurant that won’t even register on the tool at Wordtracker.com because only people (i.e. your potential customers) in your local area search for that business name?

Let’s look at a few examples. Keep in mind that this blog assumes you know how to set up a Google Adwords account, create a campaign for a targeted geographic area, and buy negative, broad-match, phrase-match, and term-match keywords. If all of that is foreign to you, check out my blog on Online Ads. Also review some of Google’s resources.

1. Local Industry Trends – Everyone has competition. And sometimes your direct and indirect competition might not be who you think. For instance, if you own an upscale restaurant who is your competition? You might say your direct competition would be the other upscale restaurants in town, however you would be missing out on a large part of your competition. Call it “indirect”, but any place where someone might spend discretionary income would be competing with you. After all people don’t go to your restaurant because they’re hungry. They can cook for themselves or eat fast food. They go to an upscale restaurant for a social experience. If you’re an accountant, you might consider other accountants in town as your direct competition however accounting software and people who do their own taxes are also your competition. For the water treatment industry, everyone else who sells water softeners and drinking water systems would be your competition however all the soap companies who sell people on the idea that more soaps and lotions are all they need to solve their problems are also competition. You get the point. With Google Adwords, in addition to buying your competitors’ business name as a keyword, you also need to buy all of the keywords that describe your indirect competition. You’ll catch the trends as to what’s popular in your area almost immediately and then be able to use that information in your marketing to better TALK directly to your prospects in the words they are using.
2. Competition – As I mentioned above, my top competitor just started marketing (through a direct sales telemarketing approach that’s very hard to track) in my area in the last month. How do I know this? I bought the keywords for his business name for the geographic territory that I serve about 10 months ago and in the last month more people searched for his business name than the other 9 months combined. The logic is quite simple. People are only going to search for things they’ve heard of so, one way or another, they’ve heard of his business and are doing some background checks via Google.
3. Market Interest – As you can tell, all 4 of these benefits are tightly related and so this one just builds on the last 2. Quite simply, if you’re tracking your direct and indirect competition as described in steps 1 and 2, you can gauge total market interest by simply monitoring the fluctuation in the number of searches for each term. If more people are searching for “Tax Software” than last month or last year, you better have a page on your website that directly addresses why your accounting firm is better and more cost-effective than off-the-shelf software.
4. Key Terms – The internet is an unparalleled testing ground for marketers. You can test creative, copy, calls to action, offers, coupons and just about anything else that can potentially improve your marketing. Now, with the help of Google Adwords, you can track common phrases. Last week my ad agency sent me creative on a newspaper insert we are working on. This ad agency works with dozens of franchises similar to mine around the US and part of the wording on the ad included the term “Water Analysis”. I’d been buying that keyword phrase along with a common synonym, “Water Test”, for months so I logged into my Google Adwords account to see, in my area, which was more popular. Turns out people search for “Water Test” or “Water Testing” 11 times more often than “Water Analysis”. Analysis just isn’t a word people use. So we updated the marketing to reflect the phrase that is already on prospects’ minds. The goal being that, as they’re sorting through their newspaper, they’ll be more likely to notice the term “Water Test” as they’ve already given that phrase a position in their mind. Make sense?

Now that you’re tracking all of this information, what do you do with it? You respond to their problems and let people know why your solution is the best to solve their problems. In marketing we can break up any individual marketing creative into 3 basic pieces:

1. The Target Audience – This is the MOST important piece. You can be running a buy 1 get 1 free deal on Harley’s but if you’re doing so in People or Home and Garden magazine your marketing isn’t going to perform as well as if you put it in American Motorcyclist.
2. The Copy – This is what you say and how you say it. Whether it’s written words or video or an audio recording.
3. The Offer – or Call to Action. This is what you use to try to make the prospect “Act Now.”

With the Google Adwords system I describe above, we can improve each item to maximize our conversion rate.

1. Target Audience – We are only marketing to people who search for the keywords related to your business or competition. It doesn’t get much better then that.
2. Copy – With information on local industry trends, competition, and key terms, your website can directly talk to your prospects in their own words. More importantly, you can create individual mini-sites to address each competitor or trend that might be taking business away from you. Again, you can specifically target and respond to the EXACT problem that you can solve for the prospect.
3. Offer – The possibilities are, of course, endless. If you can pinpoint your competition and why people are choosing them over you, you can easily structure a risk-free offer to get them to choose you. For the restaurant you can describe how the quality of food, waitstaff, atmosphere etc. far exceeds anything else in town. With testimonials and specific examples of the painstaking processes you use to hire chefs and maintain the utmost food quality. Put yourself head-to-head with your competition and show how you’re better. Now that you know exactly who your direct and indirect competition are, you can really get into the minds of your prospects.

This is a huge topic to cover in a blog. The ways you can leverage the information Google Adwords can provide for you are nearly endless. It’s a marketer’s dream-come-true. The best (or worst part if you sell Google Adwords services) is that it’s not complicated, would take a few hours to setup, and maybe an hour or 2 per month to maintain to garner all of the important information you can use.

Granted, as easy as it is to track, I’ve never heard another Google Adwords guru describe this power for small businesses. They all focus on online businesses so if you’re looking for more ideas on small business marketing in today’s  marketplace be sure to follow my Facebook Fan Page or sign-up for my email list in the upper right.

To your Google Adwords marketing success, Bryan

P.S. If you don’t even have a website you can still use everything I described. Just place your bids so low that your ad will show up on page 4 and never be read. If you’re looking to bring a new product to market or start a new business, this is a great way to determine current market interest.

Marketing in a basic sense is broken down into 2 main categories: Institutional Marketing and Direct Response Marketing.

What I am personally fanatical about tracking is the results to direct response marketing. By that I simply mean that if I send out a post card, create a website, or insert a piece in a newspaper, I want to know exactly how much revenue those marketing pieces generated for me. As a small business (i.e. you don’t have $100 million dollar ad budgets) this is the ONLY type of marketing you should be focused on.

Major corporations, however, invest in very sophisticated very expensive institutional marketing programs. By that I simply mean that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to create a recognizable name, character, and/or slogan. More importantly, that advertising has created a position in people’s minds ideally relating the name, character, or slogan to their brand unlike any of their competitors are able to do. Once you have that position you never want to give it up because changing an already established position can create confusion in the prospects mind and it gives room for a competitor to take over that position. Along these precise lines, I recommend a great book written by Al Ries and Jack Trout called Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. Ries and Trout give example after example of businesses like Volkswagen, Chevrolet, Michelob, Miller, Avis and others who did and did not understand their positioning and how that affected their long-term profits. Some have messed it up horribly.

Camel cigarettes had deep enough pockets and understood the power of institutional marketing, branding, and positioning so well that more 5 year-olds in the previous generation could identify Joe Camel than Mickey Mouse. Obviously 5 year-olds can’t buy cigarettes so why do they want 5 year-olds to know Joe Camel? Because in a decade when teenagers start getting exposed to smoking by peers, whether they consciously understand it or not, Joe Camel has made a position in their mind that’s not easily forgotten. If you have a small business, you can’t possibly afford to do this. You need to pay your bills and make payroll this week, you don’t have a decade to build a position.

There are, however, 2 main “small-business” exceptions to the rule that small-businesses shouldn’t engage in institutional marketing:

1. Banks – In your lifetime, you are more likely to get divorced than change banks. For some reason, banks have customer retention rates somewhere in the high 90% range. My mother told me that when she moved across the country, married my father, and they started a family, the ladies at the bank were some of the first people who she would show her babies too. That sounds rather strange to me, but it makes sense. Any good marketing is about developing relationships and any bank worth it’s salt is going to train their tellers to do just that. If their good at it, it’s just natural that their customers would know all about their “favorite teller” and vice-versa. After all, it’s a very intimate relationship as that teller knows quite a bit about you that your best friends and family will never know. So how can banks invest in institutional marketing? I would suggest in the same way that Joe Camel did. Target children. If you know that you’ll have a 90% plus retention rate, it’s a race to see who can get that first checking account setup for the first job, right? Well what if you deposited $5 in an account for each middle school or high school student who came to the bank with an A on their report card? It may take a decade or longer before that pays off, but you’re almost guaranteed to keep that child as a customer as they need a car loan, house loan, student loans etc. etc. etc. At least you’re more likely to get those accounts from that child than you are to attend their 50 year anniversary.
2. Franchises – Obviously this is one of the benefits of a great franchise. Yes, of course, their are franchises that are downright terrible and the name isn’t worth a whole lot. However their are others that have been established for so long and have invested so much money in marketing over decades that their name is extremely valuable. This week I was speaking with a colleague who owns a franchise that’s one of the top 300 most recognizable names in marketing and has no competitor recognition in the top 1000 names. Their tag line has been known and marketed for decades. The business is a Culligan water dealership and the tag line is obviously “Hey Culligan Man.” Prior to his current business, he owned an independent pizza joint. In addition to loathing the late hours required at a pizza shop, he said it’s nearly impossible to make money when you’re competing with the big name pizza places like Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, and Domino’s. Even when you have a great product, which he did. All 3 of those pizza franchises have the resources to invest in both institutional and direct-response marketing. Each month without fail, I will get a postcard with the latest specials from each of those 3 pizza franchises. Why? They want me to cut out a coupon and take action right now to buy their pizza. Obviously they also invest a lot in commercials, websites, radio ads, sponsorships and other items that don’t generate a “direct-response” for them, however, it does help them create a position in their prospect’s mind so that when she starts thinking of pizza, they pop into her head.

So if you have a small business, what should you do? The answers is very simple, invest all of your marketing budget in direct-response advertising. If you decided to go the route of being an independent franchisee, you’ll obviously benefit from the institutional marketing your franchisor does on your behalf. However if you have any control over your own marketing dollars, you better make sure that every dollar that you spend in marketing is coming back with friends. In other words, with the use of micro-sites, web analytics, coupons, call-tracking phone numbers, and plain-old asking people (though you do always have to be skeptical of their answers) you should do your best to determine exactly which marketing investments bring money to your business.

In my business I’ve tested radio, direct-mail, newspaper, websites, gooogle adwords, yellow pages, local sponsorships, home shows, and just about everything else. Over 2 years I’ve tracked the results of each item and today can, with very high certainty, know approximately how many dollars of revenue I’ll bring in for my best marketing projects. For my business, newspaper (which was literally the last thing I decided to test because I thought it was dying) has out performed everything else even though there are still some profits to be made with home shows and direct mail if done properly.

So what does that mean to me? I’m going to put as much of my marketing budget into newspaper marketing as possible as often as possible until it stops working. Do you know what marketing projects can produce those results for your business? If you stop investing in institutional marketing and start investing in direct-response marketing, you will.

To your direct response marketing success, Bryan

P.S. If you’re looking for a great book on the subject and some more details on what numbers you should track with your marketing, check out my blog about Claude C. Hopkin’s book Scientific Advertising.

In my Internet Marketing for Small Business series of blogs we reviewed the 3 pieces of your small business’ online presence:

1. Traffic
2. Website
3. Commitment

We then discussed the 3 primary ways to get Traffic (Search Engines, Online Ads/Google Adwords, Viral Marketing) and of course reviewed videos explaining some basics of Viral Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and optimizing your Google Adwords campaigns. We most recently looked at some great tips for your website in my last blog.

The final piece to the puzzle and the item we’ll be reviewing today is the Commitment. The commitment is simply the visitors commitment to buy from you or to contact you for more information if you’re not selling any products online. Obviously we’ve been talking about the sales aspect of your website, not how it caters to current customers, so with that in mind, everything you do to your website should be geared towards that goal. Here are a few pointers for achieving that.

1. Setup your website layout and design according to my last blog.
2. Use the 4.5 points of marketing to address their questions and concerns.
3. Offer them something for free in exchange for their email address.

Since the first 2 points were addressed in the last post, we’re solely going to focus on the third.

When buying a product, the primary reason people use the internet is to educate themselves by reading information about the product or service they are interested in. They may also be looking for the best value, but without knowing what makes a product or service valuable they’ll first have to educate themselves on that product or service. This is where you have the opportunity to set yourself apart. If you’re an online retailer, the best reason for someone giving you their email address would be to receive email notifications of special sales and promotions. However, if you’re a service or knowledge-based business, they can have many reasons for dealing with you. A few thoughts your prospect may have to consider would be:

1. Your level of expertise – Can you fix their problem the right way the first time?
2. Your history – If your business is less than 5 years old chances are you’re not going to be here in another 5 years.
3. Your prices – Are they fair and reasonable for the services you deliver?
4. Your credibility – What do your customers say/think about you?
5. Your guarantee – If you turn out to not do what you told me, what do I stand to lose?

Now your website can do a great job of addressing most of that, however you need to hold something back. You need to not let the cat out of the bag on your expertise right away. Why? After all, that may be the most important thing to your client and what they NEED to know about you before making a decision. Exactly. Because of that, if setup correctly, your potential client will gladly give you their name and email address in exchange for you sharing some of your expertise with them. Read that sentence again and let it sink in for a minute. That’s your hook. If the rest of your website is setup in such a way to address the other 4 items (and any others you may determine your prospects want to know) then they’ll trust that you are an expert.

This is where you utilize an “opt-in”. An Opt-in is where your visitor opts-into your mailing list or newsletter. Obviously the key to getting someone to decide to sign up for your newsletter is to offer them your expertise for free in return. So once they opt-in, you email them a PDF or direct them to a web page where they can download a PDF providing your expertise. (Mailchimp.com can get you started with this for free.) This would be in the form of an article, whitepaper, special report, expose’, or research paper addressing your expertise. For instance:

1. For a law firm – “The top 10 cost-saving questions you need to ask before putting down a retainer for a lawyer.”
2. For an accountant – “The top 10 things your accountant missed on your last tax return.”
3. For a plumber – “How to know if your plumber is more interested in your pipes or your wallet.”
4. For a an auto-body shop – “The quickest way to tell if your body-shop repair estimate is accurate or if the body-man has been spending too much time in the paint booth.”
5. For a photographer – “The 5 things a photographer must do to get the best picture of you – that have nothing to do with the camera!”

You get the idea. The goal is to provide a topic that is relevant and important to your visitors. Here are a few guidelines:

1. Make it generic – Don’t say “top 10 reasons to do business with us”. No one is going to give you their email in exchange for a sales pitch. They’re looking for a “free lunch” by learning from your expertise.
2. Set it up to paint a picture that only your business fits – This is, of course, the power of this sort of marketing. It allows you to define exactly what the perfect lawyer, cpa, plumber, beauty salon, etc. should look like. Make sure only your business can fit that definition. This is part of the way you can build value to demonstrate that your prices are higher but your overall value is unmatched.
3. Provide some real expertise – We’re all smart enough to see right through a thinly veiled sales pitch. This is the kind of thing that will help them decide to NOT do business with you.
4. Make it simple – Lay it out with a list or graphs and make it conversational. Write this copy, as you should with all marketing copy, as if you’re sitting across the table from this person explaining to them exactly what you’re talking about.
5. Promise not to sell their email – Unless of course you do plan to sell their email. But I don’t really recommend that.

Now some of the great internet marketers have learned that providing a PDF in exchange for an email only gets you so far. Instead they setup automatic email responder campaigns with the help of sites like aweber.com. This basically tells your visitor they’re going to receive some level of your expertise once per week for the next 4 weeks or something along those lines. This keeps you in touch with them constantly and helps you get closer to Jay Conrad Levinson’s claim that it takes 9 communications to make a prospect a customer. This is the reason gathering an email address is so important to begin with. If Levinson’s research is accurate, your chances of gaining a customer because of one visit to your website are pretty slim. However, if they visit your website and then you keep in constant contact with them via email, now the tide has turned in your favor.

To your success in gaining a commitment with your website, Bryan

In my last blog we first reviewed the 3 pieces of your small business’ online presence:

1. Traffic
2. Website
3. Commitment

We then reviewed the 3 primary ways to get Traffic and of course reviewed a video explaining some basics of Viral Marketing for Small Business:

1. Search Engines
2. Online Ads
3. Viral Marketing

This time around we’re going to take a closer look at search engines and, in particular, optimizing your website for search engines (search engine optimization) so that your website pops up as the answer to searches.

As with everything in life, there are dozens and dozens of things you can do to improve your business, cut expenses, increase profits, grow sales, and even optimize your website for a search engine. However, the 80/20 rule applies in this situation, just as in all the others, so we’ll just look at the top 4 things that will generate the most results.

1. Title Tags – The title of your webpage that shows in the top left-hand title bar of your web browser.
2. Keyword Density – The percent of times the keywords you’re optimizing for show in relation to all of the words on your page.
3. Easily crawled and indexed – Using Google Webmaster Tools to make sure your site is indexed and crawled.
4. Incoming Links – Google’s goal is to provide relevant content. So they theorize that the more people who link to your website, the better the content must be and so they give you better results on searches.

In the video I referenced:

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool on Wordtracker
Google Webmaster Tools
Merchant Circle
Google Local

To you search engine optimizing success, Bryan