Yes! Ka-ching!

That’s wonderful!  Don’t mess with something that’s working, keep it up!

Just don’t count on it continuing forever.  Having one campaign that works well for you in one particular media is great, but that can change in an instant, and you need to be prepared.

Stuff happens.  Facebook decides to terminate your account.  The local radio personality who was personally endorsing your business lands a new job in another state.  Your website ranking plummeted when an aggressive rival moved into town.

There’s just too much risk involved in having one, solo marketing medium.

As your financial advisor has probably told you before – you need to

diversify!

Diversity leads to stability when it comes to marketing.  I’m certainly a big proponent of websites and Internet marketing, but that’s not the be-all and end-all of any marketing campaign.  You’re very vulnerable if all your marketing efforts are online; that’s one of the reasons I started my direct mail, postcard marketing business a few months ago.  By having more than one way to reach prospects, you not only minimize your risk, but you increase your exposure across a wider spectrum of customer media preferences.

Ask about Birthday Club Marketing

Are you looking for an easy, inexpensive way to market your product or service to new and existing customers?  Then why not start a Birthday Club*?

Birthday Clubs have long been a favorite tool of savvy marketers.
Here’s why.

• People  love to be remembered, recognized and appreciated.
• Birthday Clubs help you maintain favorable “top of mind” awareness.
• Birthday Clubs generate more business (money!) for you when someone redeems the offer.
• They’re an easy way to collect contact info (name/email) for future marketing.

NEW – Birthday Club Management from Your Friend on the Web, Diana Ratliff

There’s never been such an easy, hassle-free way to set up and manage a birthday club.  I’ll set you up to collect names, email addresses and birth months on your website or Facebook page (you don’t even need a website at all.)  Coupons are automatically delivered via email, so there’s no need to remember to send out the coupon every month – the software I use does it for you.  This is truly “set and forget” marketing!

*Of course this program is not limited to people’s birthdays – why not celebrate wedding anniversaries or graduations?  How about pet birthdays?  Salespeople can celebrate the month someone bought their home/car, or the month they became a client.

Sample Birthday Club Offers

Of course YOUR offer can be whatever you want, but here are some ideas:

• Free meal or dessert
• An upgrade to your normal service
• $10 off a purchase
• Coupon for oil change, coffee – the offer does NOT have to be from your own business.  Partner with a fellow business owner and give away one of THEIR products/services!

I’ll be happy to work with you to craft a good offer – and set any terms/conditions you’d like on the offer as well.

 “Birthdays Mean Business – Contact Me TODAY”

David Ogilvy, considered by some to be the “father of modern advertising”, puts it this way:

Be suspicious of awards.

The pursuit of creative awards seduces creative people from the pursuit of sales.  We have been unable to establish any correlation whatever between awards and sales.  At Ogilvy and Mather, we now give an annual award for the campaign which contributes the most to sales. Successful advertising sells the product without drawing attention to itself, it rivets the consumer’s attention on the product.  Make the product the hero of your advertising.

More great quotes from David Ogilvy

Ben Hunt, author of “Save the Pixel”, puts it this way:

“Design your content, not the box it comes in.”

How do you know you’re talking to a web designer who’s focused on your sales, not their design?  By the questions they ask.  If she’s asking about what products make you a profit, the most desired response from your website, how you want to follow up with prospects, your plan to keep site content current – that’s a good sign.  Those questions relate to generating leads and sales.

If the conversation revolves around colors and layout and custom graphics – the designer is focused more on the “box” (the site), not your product.  Yes, the graphic and visual appeal of a site is important – but look for a designer who realizes that the underlying goal if your web presence is to make you money.

To put it another way - look for a web design company who values sales rewards over sales awards.

I’ve been hearing radio ads about a partnership between Intuit and Google.  They’re offering a free domain name, free hosting for 1 year, and a free theme.  Most hosting companies have their own website templates – in fact 1and1.com is offering theirs for free through TV ads.

WordPress itself, the CMS (content management system) that has rocketed to popularity in recent years, is absolutely free.  You can buy high-quality custom themes (site templates) for less than $100.  This site was built using the extraordinarily versatile Smallbiz Theme, and I’ve used it for quite a few websites.

So what’s a web designer to do?  If your primary qualification has been “I can build you a nice-looking site”, you’re in trouble.  Because it’s never been easier to get a nice site without a web designer at all.

Disclaimer here – yes, some business people don’t have the time or inclination to build their own sites, even if they are free.  People aren’t so dumb as to think 1&1 or Google will hand them clients on a plate.  And of course there will always be a need for higher-end, custom design work.

But no longer are people willing to shell out a significant sum of money for web design work.  It’s time for customers to challenge their web designers to be web marketers.  To expect traffic and leads from their websites.

In my opinion, website designers who don’t “evolve” to this changing environment are going to die out.

What do YOU think?

Confused people don’t buy – which might explain why about half of all small business owners still don’t have websites – and why most of those who DO have sites aren’t happy with theirs.

So let me frame Internet marketing in another way – friends, it’s just another way to advertise your business.

Wikipedia defines advertising as “… is a form of communication used to persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services.”

When you print business cards or run an ad in Doormail or Columbia Marketplace magazine or buy space in the Yellow Pages or do TV commercials, you’re advertising.  Your website is advertising too – and it’s an important way to advertise, since most people look online today to find products and services.

You don’t have to understand how the printing process works to use print media effectively.  You don’t need to know how to determine the best radio stations and time slots for your commercials.  There are experts to help you with that – you find someone you trust, who DOES understand how all that works, and they’ll help you make the right decisions to make the most of your ad dollars for that particular medium.

That’s how it works with websites and Internet “stuff” too – you find an expert you can trust, who DOES understand how it works, and let them advise you on how to use your advertising budget, online.  It’s okay if you don’t understand websites and the Internet and the search engines and Facebook, as long as you work with someone who does.  It’s just advertising, and you do it all the time.

Your particular “toadstool” could be many things.  It could be your profession (realtor, web designer, plumber).  It could be your differentiator (price or selection.)  It could be your location, or your store hours, or your guarantee, or your training.

The point is that if there’s already a gnome (or two or three hundred) perched on your particular “toadstool”, it’s going to be difficult for you to claim it as your own.

Research is how you avoid this problem. If you’re in the mortgage business, and 3 million “gnomes” are already trying to rank for the keywords, “mortgage yourcity/yourstate”, maybe you should try to rank for “home loan” or “mortgage consultant” instead.

If you’re a printer, and most of your competitors have gnomes positioned on the “low price” toadstool, maybe you should position yourself on the “fast shipping” one.

A few “gnomes” are seldom problematic, but a lot of online marketers run into problems because they don’t do preliminary research on their online competition. Don’t let that happen to you!

“If you’re relying on Facebook or Google to bring in all of your new customers, you’re sharecropping. You’re hoping the landlord will continue to like you and support your business, but the fact is, the landlord has no idea who you are and doesn’t actually care.”

The article goes on to say that there’s certainly nothing wrong with using eBay or Google+ or LinkedIn or whatever.  They can be wonderful additions to your marketing mix.

It becomes risky, however, when you make your business model completely dependent on another company.

I’m seeing a lot of this with Facebook right now – please don’t neglect other aspects of your web presence!

A few fortunate website owners are savvy enough, and persistent enough, to get their site to rank without any help.

For the rest of us, hiring someone to help with SEO or SEM assumes greater importance.  I’ll describe briefly, the pros/cons of each.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  “Optimizing” your site’s content and structure to make it more appealing (relevant) to Google and the other search engines is one way to get it to rank.

The other key to SEO is backlinks – getting other sites to link back to yours, so that the search engines see your site as a popular resource for those given terms.  Sites that rank well this way show up in the natural or organic results – in the main body of the page.  You do NOT pay Google or any other search engine for these rankings.

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing.  THESE are what you pay for – such as the Sponsored Ads on the top and right side of the search results pages.  Through programs such as Google Adwords, you create small ads and pay every time someone clicks on the ad.  (That’s why they’re called pay-per-click or PPC ads.)  The more you pay, the higher on the page your ad shows, generally speaking.  Some really popular, competitive keywords can cost more than $50 per click!

The advantage of SEO is that it’s cumulative, usually long-term – as you improve your site and get more and more backlinks, your site’s rank steadily improves.  And once you get it to rank, it’s easier to get it to STAY there.  Also, the vast majority of web surfers click on the natural/organic results – NOT the ads – because we don’t trust advertising.  But it can take a while for SEO efforts to get results.

The advantage of PPC is that it is immediate – you can place an ad and have it show up the same day.  It’s also a good way to test pages and offers – you can use an ad to direct traffic to something new and analyze how people respond.  But when you stop paying – your site disappears.  That’s the huge disadvantage – there is no cumulative benefit.

For most of my clients, I recommend PPC only until we get the rankings we want through SEO.  After that, PPC is only for occasional testing, or perhaps when a new product is introduced.

A local business owner told me yesterday that he didn’t WANT his website to be #1 on Google’s search engine results page (SERP).

I was speechless for a few seconds… I’d never heard anyone say THAT before. I couldn’t imagine why he wouldn’t want that prime visibility – after all, the website at the very top gets more clicks than any other listing. That’s usually the goal!

So I asked why not, and he said:

“Because prospects will think I’m too expensive if I can afford to pay Google to be #1.”

I was speechless again. And asked him to tell more.

To make a long conversation short, evidently he – and he says, a lot of other business owners – think that you somehow PAY GOOGLE for high rankings. (By the way, this gentleman was very clear that he wasn’t talking about the Sponsored Ads – which you DO pay for – that appear at the top or right sides of the search results page.)

FOLKS – This IS is flat-out WRONG. You don’t pay Google anything at ALL for any ranking. Let me say that again in another way. You DO NOT have to pay Google (or Yahoo or Bing) anything at all to get found at the top of the search engine results when people look for your product or service online.

Those rankings are determined by RELEVANCE. Google’s job is to give people what they’re looking for. If they (their search algorithm) thinks a particular page on YOUR SITE is the best, most relevant match for what that person typed in, that page will rank #1.

That’s it.

Now convincing Google that YOUR site is the most relevant one – which is called SEO (or search engine optimization) – is something you might well hire someone like me to do for you. But you do not pay Google itself, nor does a SEO expert pay Google directly.

Got it?

“People are on Facebook to be social, interact with friends, check out interesting stories, post updates, etc.  People are on Google seeking information to help them answer questions, perform research, locate services, etc.”

When – and whether – Google or Facebook is more important to you when you’re seeking new business is highly dependent on that distinction.

When someone visits Facebook they’re looking to connect, to hang out, to talk to friends, to see what’s going on with the people and businesses they know and like.

When someone searches for “Columbia plumber” their intent is quite different – they’re not looking to chat, they’ve got a toilet that’s leaking or need plumbing installed, and want to find a reputable plumber.

In my opinion, putting your website or ad or offer in front of your prospect THEN – when they’re actively looking for your product or service – is what’s going to give you the greatest ROI.  Search engine optimization (SEO) – the art of making your website easy to find in Google – is a good way to make sure people find you when they’re looking.

Yes, Facebook offers ads, and because of the demographic information Facebook collects, you can really target your offers/ads.  Some businesses do very well with this approach.  But as Berman also points out:

“In my mind, this makes Facebook a more targeted version of television-style advertising.  You are blasting out your message to a certain demographic of users (or viewers in the case of television advertising) in the hopes that you catch a certain number of them at just the right time.

The advertising is interruption marketing.  You are “interrupting” the users from their socializing in order to present them with your offer.  They were not actively seeking it out at the time.  The result is that many, many more people need to see your message at just the right time in order for you to convert those people into new clients. “

I couldn’t have said it better, myself!  There are certainly sound reasons to add social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to your marketing mix.

But as Berman asserts “… doing so at the expense of marketing dollars devoted to the search channel would be a mistake.”