SEO = The Ultimate Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses
As a small business owner or manager, you have one principal
goal: increase your profitability. Whether you are a sole
proprietor looking to increase your own income, or a corporate
manager looking to increase shareholder equity, your bottom line
is the bottom line. Whether you need to move more IPOD's or
provide more services, ultimately you need to increase your
income by expanding your revenue while decreasing your expenses.
You need to reach new customers, and keep your current customers
coming back for more.
If you want people to purchase your goods and services, they
need to know that you exist, and what you can do for them. You
need to communicate information about your products and services
to as many potential customers as possible. This requires more
than just broadcasting your message. To be truly efficient, you
need to tell your story to those who will actually want to do
business with you. You need to focus your efforts.
There are several media available to you for getting your
message across. The most basic is simple word-of-mouth. This
costs you nothing, but you also have very little control over
how your message is communicated. For a small, local business,
this may work fine, but in the Internet age, where your
customers probably don't come from a small neighborhood, this is
not enough.
Traditional electronic media are available to you. Local radio
and television spots can reach a great number of people in your
community. The question here, however, is just who your message
is reaching. These ads are focused on a rather broad
demographic: kid's cereals on Saturday mornings, beer and
luxurious cars on sports shows, and so on. If this is
sufficiently focused for you, you may be in good shape, except
that these spots can be fairly costly. A 30-second radio spot
can cost $250 or more, depending on the market; a television ad
can cost over $5000 for the same spot, with network spots going
for much more. In addition, there are production costs, with
professional actors, editing, and so forth. They are also pretty
ethereal--when the ad is finished, it goes away.
Print advertising has the advantage that it doesn't disappear
when the reader has finished looking at your ad. They can go
back and look at it again. For local coverage, print advertising
can be pretty inexpensive. A four-line classified ad in the
local newspaper costs practically nothing. Even display ads can
be fairly inexpensive, given that you will reach a large number
of people. For national coverage, print can become quite
expensive. The rate sheet for a respected national new magazine
charges over $300,000 for a one-page color ad in their national
edition!
In all these cases, you have to look at who is being targeted.
In print ad, you are looking at everybody who reads the magazine
or newspaper. Does everybody who reads that publication want to
buy your product? If not, then this is probably not the most
efficient use of your marketing dollar. Even with focused
traditional electronic media, you may be reaching a broader
segment of the population than you want to--you may not be
interested in all women in the 18-49 group, for example.
What about the World Wide Web? We've all seen banner ads on
websites. These may get your message to a more focused group,
but there are problems that come with banner ads. Banner ads
have become so ubiquitous that many people simply ignore them.
Or worse, they have software that will actually remove them from
web pages as they view the pages. Your message doesn't get to
anybody that way.
Pop-up ads and their newer incarnation, the pop-under ad, are
often not appreciated by users on the Web. Having several
browsers opened on a user's desktop can be quite disconcerting
for them.
You probably already have a website; otherwise you are probably
looking seriously at creating a presence on the Web. Your
website works for you 24/7; people can always come to your site
to see what you have to offer. You reach people who want what
you have, because they come looking for you. They want what you
have, and they want to hear your story.
If you have a famous brand, people will have an easy time
reaching your website. If, however, you aren't a Fortune 500
company, it may be a bit tougher. Search Engine Marketing may be
just the thing for you. You want your website to have high
visibility, with the goal of leading qualified traffic to you.
How much more qualified could your prospects be than to have
them actually looking for you?
Marketing via Search Engines may be the most cost-effective
techniques available to you. Many Search Engines will list your
site for free; others for a relatively small fee. Just because
your site is listed on the popular Search Engines, however,
doesn't mean you're home free. Have you ever done a search and
seen that there were a million matches for your search terms?
Have you ever tried to look at the one-millionth match? Usually
people are interested in only the first page or two of
results--typically the first thirty matches or so. If you happen
to be number 31, you are out of luck.
About the Author
Carmen is the VP Client Relations of Ms. SEO Inc., a Calgary
based Search Engine Marketing
& Internet Marketing Company. Ms. Seo Inc. works with their
sister company Ms. Hype Inc., a Calgary Website Design Company, and their
parent company Cre8 Hype Solutions Inc., a Calgary based Internet Marketing Company, to
offer their clients a powerful online presence.
About the author:
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Written By: Carmen Jackson