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.

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 3 blogs we reviewed the 3 pieces of your small business’ online presence:

Chichen Itza - the 7th Wonder of the World. Is your website this complex?

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 and Search Engine Optimization for Small Business. We then looked at some of the best tips for optimizing your Google Adwords campaigns in my last blog.

This time around we’re going to take a closer look at your website. From my last 3 blogs you have a lot of great ways to get people to your website, but how do you know your website is any good? Let’s break this into 3 sections:

1. Goal of your website
2. Content
3. Layout
4. Tracking or Analytics

1. Goal of your website – This is so important to understand as I think most people never even consider this point. For most people they have a website because they’re supposed to have a website and then they leave it at that. That’s not at all true, the goal of your website is to sell something! Since my small business is service-based, my goal is to sell an appointment or, in other words, get the potential customer to contact us. For other businesses the goal is to sell a product directly online. If you fail to sell your product or appointment via your website your secondary goal should be to collect your visitor’s contact information for future marketing. We’ll discuss basic ways to do that in the future.

2. Content – Since your goal is to sell your visitor something, the content of your website should be geared to do just that. How do you accomplish that? You answer all the questions that might prevent them from buying from you. That’s what your content MUST do if your customer is ever going to make a commitment to purchase from you. Here are the basic points you must cover in any marketing to earn a customer. I call these the 4.5 points of successful marketing:

1. What problem can you fix for me? – Address and detail their problems to demonstrate that you understand their needs.
2. Is your solution the best? – Explain how your solution to their problem is the best solution available.
3. Why should I work with your company? – Compare your business to your competition to show how ONLY your business can meet their needs and requirements.
4. Why do I need your solution now? – Dollarize their potential losses by not having your solution so they understand that every month, week, day or hour that they wait they’re losing money by not working with you.

4.5. What am I risking? – Make the process of either buying from you or contacting you for an appointment as risk-free as possible.

The biggest negative business owners point out to me when addressing these points is that now their competitors can see their whole “sales pitch”. My response to that is firstly, so what? They’re going to find it one way or another anyway. Secondly, if your business and product can’t highlight enough advantages, benefits, and differences to make it IMPOSSIBLE for your competitors to steal your sales pitch then you need to go back to the writing board and come up with better copy and/or a better business plan.

3. Layout – In the online world you basically have 4 types of websites:

1. Complex – You have graphics and videos and Flash programming and javascript drop-down menus and somewhere amongst the entertainment you may even address some of your customer’s questions or needs.
2. Simple – You list your business name, phone, address, a short About Us, a Contact Us page and maybe even a bit about your products. These websites do nothing more than provide contact information for people who already want to do business with you. Most visitors, however, don’t care about you until you educate them on how you can make their life better.
3. Corporate – Every major corporation has one of these. It has all the standard pages for Contact Us, About Us, Investor Relations, Products, Store-Finder, etc. etc. It answers a few questions of the 4.5 points of successful marketing but often is bordering on the too Complex described above.
4. Long-winded – These are those scrolling 1-page sales pitch websites that you just hate to visit. However the truth is, these are some of the best tracked, best-designed, best-selling websites in existence. Millions upon millions of dollars in internet fortunes have been made through this style of website. These designers have often done their homework and tweaked their website sales-machines to perfection so don’t write these off as unprofessional or ineffective. An unprofessional website is the one that doesn’t generate sales – nothing more.

So how do you optimize your site to generate the best results without getting too far off-track like the site descriptions above?

1. Make it EASY to contact your business. Their should be a phone number, email, and/or contact us button on every page so that it’s visible at all times.
2. Never make anything more than 2 menu’s deep (unless you sell millions of products). This is a lesson learned from the “Long-winded” guys. You can’t direct people through the 4.5 points of successful marketing if you have too many clicks. People want their questions answered right away and in a logical progression and if they have to click through more than 2 menus deep to get those answers they’re much more likely to leave.
3. Relate your pages to each other. I was just searching for car parts for my 2008 Mitsubishi Evolution X on a performance parts website. The website had some awesome Youtube videos of their 10 second Evo with a listing of the parts they sell and used on that car. Only problem was the list of parts didn’t link back to the spot where I can buy the parts. After 30 minutes of navigating around I’m still not sure if the parts I found were the same ones they used on their own car! The point is, don’t make every visitor have to go back to your home page to find what they need. If you reference another product, idea, or reason to do business with you on an individual page, you better have a link to your reference.
4. Provide testimonials. You can say all you want about your solutions and business however that never has the same effect as third-party testimonials from your customers. If your website doesn’t have those, start gathering them right away. Gathering testimonials is literally as simple as asking for them so be sure to ask!

4. Tracking or Analytics – Since we’re all looking for the simple answer let me give you just that. The most important performance number for your website is your conversion rate. This is the number of customers created divided by the number of visitors. In other words, if you have 100 visitors and 4 bought from you (or scheduled an appointment for a service-based business), your conversion rate would be 4% (4/100). Some benchmarks for conversion rates by industry are available courtesy of Fireclick.com where the current internet average conversion rate is 4.3%. It’s also helpful to talk to other people in your specific industry if possible. As a point of comparison, my conversion rate in the 4th quarter of 2009 was 6.5% for my local service-based business. In a future blog we’ll discuss ways to really analyze your Google Analytics stats to determine how to improve your conversion rate.

To your website’s selling success, Bryan

P.S. Here’s another short article about website design by Barry A. Densa at Melissadata.com that I think is very appropriate.