One way in which we could measure results in those days was through the use of print coupons.  If they cut one out and brought it in, we knew that the particular ad was generating a customer.  However, this still did not really give us an accurate idea of the strength of an offer.  While we may know that the newspaper had an approximate readership of around 100,000, and we knew that our coupon was presented by 50 customers, we still had no idea of how many people even saw the ad or read it.

The point is that the advertising in many cases was really not very cost effective at all.  With 100,000 readers, we still may have only had less than half of them even viewing the page where the ad was presented.  We do have some pretty accurate surveys and measurements that show the average text message is opened and read by 97% of recipients.  That’s a huge number, far better than any page in a newspaper.  We also know that there are billions of smart phones and cell phones out there, and we know that people are using them in their travels and shopping.  So, how might we make some marketing magic with text messaging?

While the steps themselves are simply stated, they’re not that easy to implement:

1. Develop a list of text message names and numbers from users who wish to be on our list.
2. Create a messaging campaign with both textual-only and coupon delivery to the list.
3. Understand that text coupons are redeemed at more than three times the rate of print coupons.
4. Create coupon offers with timing to maximize the traffic when we want it.

We’re experts, having set up local businesses all around the country with highly effective text message marketing campaigns.  These businesses are sending coupons when their acceptance will be highest, and their customers are bringing them in when the business wants them the most.  We can help you to achieve a growing customer base and higher revenues.

Then we have the massive development of websites and content, with pages and articles in the trillions.  For the local business, the days of just a storefront and sign for walking and drive-by traffic are over…really.  You can’t count on people walking by, reading your sign, looking in your window, and getting an impulse to walk in and buy something. And FORGET about them looking you up in the Yellow Pages, as that’s a dying medium offline.

People are getting their buying impulses from their searches on mobile devices and from suggestions that smart services like Google are making based on their location.  Would a Google suggestion about your business based on their search get them to walk a block over where they can see your sign?  You bet it will, and it happens millions of times every day.

You’re a small business owner, and you go into work everyday and handle a great many tasks to be successful and profitable.  From inventory to display, and from employee management to insurance, there are so many things to do that adding on these can be overwhelming:

1.  Website

2.  Lead generation tools and special landing pages to gather prospects

3.  Email follow-up marketing to keep them interested and your business top-of-mind

4.  Mobile marketing to move your message from desktops to the sidewalk

5.  Marketing with Google AdWords, as well as Bing, Yahoo and Facebook ads

6.  Text message marketing to bring traffic through the doors when you want it

It’s no problem right?  Just add a couple of more hours to your workday and learn a whole lot of new skills!  Actually, you don’t have to do that.  You could just hire a website designer/programmer, a follow-up email marketer expert with a writing team, a PPC (Pay Per Click) ads guru to set up your ad campaigns, and an expert at text message marketing.  And, of course you’ll need someone to pull all of their activities together in order to create reports of how well they are doing.

Actually, you can skip all of that as well, and just contact us.  We’re Internet marketing experts with years of experience and leading edge tools and resources.  We do all of this for our local business clients, and we do it affordably and provide consistent reporting to keep you updated on how well it’s going.  Of course your cash register will be your best performance indicator.

A recent study showed that the number is holding steady at approximately 97% of all text messages getting opened by the recipient!  Considering the hundreds of  millions of cell and smart phones with their users every minute of the day (yes, they sleep with them too), the fact that a text message sent to a list of 1000 willing recipients will get opened by 970 of them is staggering in importance and value to the marketer.

However, “opened” doesn’t mean “bought.”  With these amazing numbers for reach and opening of text messages, there are still a great many marketers dropping the ball with very low purchase or actions by their text message recipients.  The problem is normally that they tend to concentrate on one or two factors and don’t put a comprehensive text message marketing program into place.  Effective text message marketing involves several strategies done well:

1.  thorough market research and identification of the target customer group.
2.  multiple strategies and tools to gather a large opt-in list to receive texts.
3.  design of marketing campaigns that target the right prospect at the right time.
4.  follow-up with text messages that not only don’t annoy them, but that gain their trust and enthusiasm.
5.  measure results and take action to adapt to changing markets and prospect desires.

If all of these components aren’t in place and done well, there are five chances to lose business and income.  Drop the ball in any one of these areas and you’ve at best lost a sale and at worst lost a future customer when they opt out of your list.  Let us show you how we approach text messaging as a vital tool for generating sales.  The results of a well-constructed list-building effort and the right follow-up text messaging are dollars in your bank account.  Even better, doing it right actually creates excited customers looking forward to the next text with an offer they know will be of interest.

Take that 97% and do the right things with it.  Don’t whittle away at it with poor list-building, weak marketing tools and uninteresting text message campaigns.  Let us take care of this for you and see business walking through the doors when you want it.

Focused PPC Marketing Works!

What forms of marketing and advertising are you engaged in for your local business?  If you’re like many of our clients, you’re doing some print, maybe newspaper and magazine, and you have a website.  You may also be doing some email marketing, perhaps even some T.V. or radio.  Of course, the print and T.V. or radio are the most expensive, and let’s take a look at how the demographics work.

1.  Newspapers and magazines distribute their copies with your ads to every subscriber and outlet they use.

2.  T.V. and radio broadcast on the airwaves to any and all current viewers or listeners.

3.  Your website is out there waiting for a visitor and some action on their part to bring you business.

The commonality with these marketing venues is that they are all pretty much out of your control as to if and when someone will see your advertisements or offers.  And with print and T.V. or radio, your ad is out there, but you have no idea what percentage of the audience listening when it runs are actually candidates for your products or services.

Now let’s contrast a properly constructed and executed PPC, Pay Per Click, marketing campaign:

You make sure that you build a website landing page focused on the ad text and objective.

A strong call-to-action is on this page calling for them to fill out a form, make a purchase, or take some action that hopefully brings you business.

Your landing page and PPC ad are targeted on one or two keyword phrases that are used by Web searchers interested in your products or services.

Your ad wording is such that the key phrase will display in bold to match the searcher’s query, and the searcher is attracted to the ad and likely to click on it and arrive at your landing page.

Because they searched on the precise phrase that you know brings likely customers, you now have those likely customers looking at your landing page and call-to-action … resulting in a high Return On Investment for your ad cost.

Let’s take a look at that cost and why you can’t assume that other advertisers who pay more are getting better positions in the search results.  It’s true that you and your competitors bid what you’re willing to pay for clicks, and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and comes to your site.  However, an experienced and effective Google AdWords or Yahoo or Bing marketer will know the ways in which these search engines score ads and rank them in results.  They’ll also know that better CTRs, Click Through Ratios, will increase the ad scores and move the ads up in the displayed results.  They’ll also know that at the same time, the cost per click, CPC, will go down.  Yes, you will pay less for higher positions!

There is definitely a reason for this having to do with the engines wanting their searchers to get to the very best pages that answer their questions or meet their needs.  And, we’re just the experts you need to make it all work for you.  Get the very best customers to your site and make sales with a laser focus.

Of course, businesses with longer sales cycles, those that may need to make contact with their prospects more than once to get a sale, must make an even greater effort to put ongoing marketing into place to keep touching their prospects and moving toward a purchase.  The first method and the one most familiar with businesses would be drip email, the scheduled sending of emails out at a pre-scheduled interval to prospects and customers.

What Constitutes a Good Email Campaign?

Of course, the content of the emails is going to vary a lot based on the type of business, the items or services being marketed, and the demographics of the prospect base.  However, there are some characteristics common to successful email campaigns:

All of these things done right will result in a successful email campaign that will generate sales, and/or keep customers coming back for repeat sales.  We mentioned text messaging, SMS marketing as well.  The rules are very much the same, as you can follow up with a series of text messages that are designed to accomplish the same results as email marketing.

Of course, text message marketing is more immediate and mobile, so there are a few different concerns.  It’s also more important to be careful to keep these short messages of interest and get an offer or call-to-action in their abbreviated format.  Never take your prospects or customers for granted, as it’s very easy for them to unsubscribe from your emails or texts, and that’s usually a customer lost forever.

Never send out an email or message without first considering the value it offers to your prospects or customers.  If you can’t see a significant value, it’s very likely that they won’t either.  Because a medium of communication is either free or very inexpensive doesn’t mean that you should treat your message and its interest to the recipient lightly.

Email Auto-Responders

Go to just about any business website or blog, and on the home page and many others you’re going to see a form soliciting contact information from site visitors.  After all, as business owners and Internet marketers, our goal is to sell a product or service.  To do that in any other environment other than an online product storefront, we’ll need to in some way market to the prospect other than just letting them wander around our site.  Even with online eCommerce store sites, there is a huge opportunity to follow up with product announcements and other marketing after their first visit or purchase.

So, what are we doing to entice that “suspect,” the visitor who we can’t yet identify, to become a “prospect,” a visitor who gives us their name and email address at a minimum?  Depending on the business and the sales goals, we may offer a special free report, such as a diet supplement safety report.  Or, if we’re selling higher end consulting, we may offer a report or free consultation in the market niche.  For more retail or product sales niches, we may offer a free sample or a discount coupon. The point is that our goal is to get that contact information.  Sure, there’s also just asking for it, and that works sometimes as well without any delivery of some special offer.

So, they fill out our form, and of course, our auto-responder email is expected to deliver any promised report, offer or coupon, so we do that.  However, if that’s all we do, we’re missing a big opportunity to use this requested email to build goodwill and maybe to offer something else, even make a sale.  After all, they’re definitely going to open the email, as they just requested it and whatever we’re delivering that they expect.  However, we can also deliver something else that they didn’t expect, possibly a bonus of some kind.

With a lot of follow-up email marketing, we’re doing our best to get their attention with the Subject headline, keep it long enough for them to open the email, and then hold on to them and get them to read it and take some action.  With our auto-responder, we’re jumping past some of that, as they’re expecting it from their request.  So, it’s in our best interests to take advantage and make the most of this first email.  We’re experts at Internet marketing, lead generation, online forms and auto-response marketing.

Don’t waste this first and most influential marketing opportunity.  Learn how to use the auto-responder message to deliver as promised, build trust, and yes, even sell something.  Our email marketing services are carefully designed and coordinated to capture prospects, market to them, and get them to take action that produces profits.  Check out what we do and get started.

Text Message Marketing

Do you have a local brick and mortar business?  The next time you have a few slow minutes, walk to the front door and take a look at how many people are driving or walking by.  You may recognize a customer, but more likely they’re a whole lot of strangers, and they may or may not even notice your business, or your signs.

There’s no argument that you want those people to notice you, walk in, and buy something.  This is true whether you sell fast food, you’re a sit-down restaurant, a shoe repair shop, clothing store, or retail store of any type.  What’s also true about most businesses is that you have slow days, or a seasonal business.  There are periods when you run sales to try and bring in customers, knowing it’s your slow time and you need to spur customer activity.

Let’s use two examples to show how text message marketing can drive business through your doors, even out business flow, and increase your profits.

Restaurant

You normally experience a drop in business on Wednesdays and Thursdays.  Those evenings, dinner business slows down.  You already reduce your hours and close on Mondays, but you’d love to increase business those two days.  If you’ve set up a text message marketing list and program, you’d simply wait until around 5 PM, when work is letting out, and send out a text coupon for a discount, free offering with a meal, or something to get those people to drive in for takeout.  They’re on their way home from a hard workday and thinking about having to cook dinner anyway.  You hit them when their need is greatest, and they’ll be motivated, especially with the discount or special offer.  They walk through the door and show you their coupon and you make a sale.

Clothing Store

Every year you run a clearance sale in the spring and fall to change out stock for the seasons.  It does pretty well, but it could be better.  What about your regular customers, people who have purchased from you before?  If you’ve been signing them up with point of sale displays to get on your “Preferred Customer Text Deal List,” you have an opportunity to make them even more loyal and drive business to your store.  Send out a text for a PRE End of Season Sale, only for those who show this text.  They get to come into the store before the sale, before the crowds and lines, and get the very best selections at sale prices not yet available to everyone else.

Now, these are just two examples of a hundred different ways in which text message marketing can drive customers to your business and also create loyal repeat business.  Text Message Marketing management is just one of our services at MediaM.us, and we’re ready to help you with that and all of our other local business-building marketing resources.

Technology & Local Business Marketing

Local business online, social and mobile advertising works.  There’s no doubt about it.  Then roll in the geo-location piece so that mobile users can find you when they’re ready to buy, and there’s gold in technology for local business advertising these days.

Website – The successful local business is using a website to generate interest in the business and its products and services.    And a few are wildly successful because they’re focusing that website, sometimes just a single page, on actually getting the visitor to provide their contact information for marketing via other methods like email and social sites.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – Of course, successful websites have the right SEO to get the visitors to the site.  Without it, traffic is low and results are minimal.  SEO is a critical component of a Web marketing strategy for local business advertising.

Location – Of course every local business has a location, but how does this location get out to their prospective customers?  If the local business online marketing plan is up-to-date, there’s a Google Places Page, as well as other geo-location tools in place to make sure that the business shows up when prospects are in the neighborhood and looking to buy.

Social Sites – Between Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, a local business can create multiple presences that reach a broad swath of potential customers.  But, there are so many techniques that can save money on social site advertising, and it’s critical that it be done right.

PPC Marketing – Pay-Per-Click marketing is one of the most targeted methods for reaching precisely the right audience without throwing money around to get your message in front of people who will never be customers.  However, done wrong it’s a huge waste of money.

Mobile – The world is going mobile at a dizzying pace.  If your business isn’t there, you’re falling behind quickly.  What’s working today will likely be less effective next month.  It’s imperative that you move to mobile in the right way.

Measure & Report – Of course, with all of this going on at the same time, the average business person will find that they’re usually going to be reacting to situations too little and too late.  Only by constantly measuring results through data reports can the business react to changing markets and people’s habits and take action for profits.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were one resource to bring all of this together for you; one resource to put these critical marketing strategies into place, bring business through the doors, and keep you constantly informed so that you can adapt to the current markets?  It’s here, it’s Mediam.us, and we’re experts.  Contact us today so that we can do it all for your business.

Pay-Per-Click Local Advertising

There’s a bit of a “double-meaning” in the title question.  How much PPC local business marketing are you doing, and the other question is how much are you paying when you Pay-Per-Click?

The answer to the first question from most businesses is that they aren’t doing PPC at all.  Some say they’ve tried it and it didn’t work so they stopped.  Others are afraid to try it.

The second question is usually answered with “we pay too much per click.”  They’re doing local business PPC marketing, but they think they’re paying too much for the results they’re getting.  It’s sad to say that most of them are right, and they are paying more than they should.  But, in the case of the massive Google Adwords system, it’s rarely the fault of Google.

You see, like most things, there are ways to do things right, and ways to do them “not so right.”  And with Google Adwords, doing them even a little bit “not right” will cost you lots of money.  Business owners and even many online marketers fail to understand the key components of successful Google Adwords campaigns, such as:

Your ad score is crucial:  in fact, very few business advertisers even know that Google has an “ad score” for their Adwords ads.  It’s how Google determines the ad’s position in the paid results and how much you pay for each click.

No, it’s not just how much you bid:  yes, you do tell Google the most you’ll pay for a click, and that does determine your position in large part when a new ad campaign starts to run.  However, as the ad runs and Google is collecting and evaluating clicks and the searcher’s activity on your site, your ad is getting scored.

You can pay less and rank higher!:  in fact, if you’re one of our clients, we know that we’ll be able to manage your PPC campaign such that you’ll see your ad rise higher in the paid results while your cost per click goes down!

You see, we are Google Adwords specialists, and we know that Google rewards ads with relevant titles and descriptions, higher CTR (click-through-ratios) and better stickiness when the visitor gets to your site.  Your ad score goes up, your ranking in the results goes up, but your cost per click goes DOWN!  Don’t wait, contact us today.  We’re experts at PPC, and you could be spending far less than your competition for local business PPC advertising, but have your ad running in a higher position than theirs.

Local Business Text Message Marketing

We hear a lot about a “Win-Win” situation or interaction.  That’s when both parties get something of value from the meeting or transaction.  And, when we’re doing local business marketing, we of course win when someone sees our ads or other marketing and walks into our local business and actually spends money.  They win because they get something they want, and they may also get it at a sale price or gain some other discount or benefit.   So, our goal is to create a Win-Win situation with our local business advertising.

Along comes mobile phones, then smart phones, and text messaging.  Recently Verizon changes their plans to offer family plans with unlimited voice, unlimited texting, and a charge for data while surfing the Web.  Why?  First, they’ll definitely make as much or more money!  However, the fact is that people aren’t talking on their phones nearly as much anymore.  And, they have been purchasing and using unlimited texting anyway.  So, by bundling services this way, Verizon gets to charge more for the most resource-consuming activity…Web and data usage.

Why is this important to the local business marketer?  Text messaging has become the single biggest use of smart phones and cell phones by a big margin.  Some complain that their teenagers are losing the ability to speak, and creating injuries to their thumbs due to their constant communication with text messages.  It’s our job as marketers to realize that text messaging is how we can best reach our prospects and customers and create a Win-Win situation.

A busy office worker is just getting off work around 5 PM and wondering what to prepare for dinner for the family.  It’s been a long day and tiring.  Suddenly a text message with a coupon pops into their phone.  It’s an offer of a free side dish with a take-home meal deal from a local restaurant.  All they have to do is show the coupon on their screen when they order.  And, the restaurant is easy to get to on their way home from work.  Their problem is solved, and the local business advertiser’s business will benefit as well … a true Win-Win.

How do you set up your local business text message marketing campaigns and lists to actually drive traffic through your doors when you want it?  It’s really easy.  You just contact us and let us do it for you.  We can create your marketing programs to build your lists, set up your text messages and coupons, and get traffic through your doors.  Sorry, but you’ll have to actually sell to them and take their money!