The other thing that has been working against the yellow page publishers is market saturation. It used to be there were maybe two versions of the yellow pages for an area. Today at our home in McKinney we probably receive 6 or 7 different versions over the course of the year.

No one keeps all of these. Every time a new version is introduced, the marketing effectiveness of each existing version is diluted.

In May of 2007 Bill Gates predicted that “within five years, yellow page usage amongst people under age 50 would drop to near zero”. A bold prediction at the time, but at the present rate it could be less than five years.

Think of yourself. If you’re looking for the phone number of a restaurant or for an allergist what are you going to do, dig out the yellow page book or search Google?  For the majority of consumers today it’s Google.

So, as a business owner you must position yourself so you are found by the search engines, especially Google.

This is where local search engine optimization comes into play. More and more internet searchers are typing in geography specific “long tail keywords”, that is rather than simply searching for “dentist”, they’re searching for “cosmetic dentist, dallas” or “children’s dentist plano, texas”.  According to Google the average search now consists of 4 words.

If you want to maximize your businesses’ potential, your website has to be positioned so that when someone types specific, local search terms you come up high in the natural or organic search engine rankings. Ideally on the first page of Google.

Depending on your the business you’re in and the market you serve you may be able to obtain page one listings faster than you may think. With the right combination of optimization on your website and some strategic link building, the internet could quickly become your number one source of new customers.

And don’t forget about Google Maps (but that’s another topic for another post).

Everything from old fashioned direct mail to SEO and  web 2.0  social media strategies.

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Here’s the excerpt from their press release:

Man the website 24/7 with live support agents. Nothing can be more destructive for your website than having live chat OFFLINE on your website. Use live chat support only if you have adequate resources to man your website 24/7.  If you do not have resources to setup agents inhouse, there are cost effective chat providers such as (company name removed to protect the guilty) who provide agents 24/7 specifically trained for chat and customized to your specific business needs.

The lesson here – (1) Only promise what you can deliver and (2) You must have consistency at every possible customer touch point or you will forever lose credibility and a potential customer – like these poor folks did with me.

Internet Marketing with Video

This presents a huge opportunity for savvy marketers. A well done video tells your story perfectly every time and can become a lead generation tool as well as a powerful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy when properly distributed.

Having a marketing video online is  like running a commercial without having to pay for expensive air time. It provides an interactive method for educating your prospects on why they should choose you over your competitors. Or, perhaps you have a product or service that they don’t know they need – video is an excellent way to create the need.

Just having a video won’t do you  any good, you must be sure your potential customers/clients are able to find it. The best way to do that is to submit it to the major video hosting sites. And as you know, YouTube dominates that space.

Internet Video Marketing

If you’d like to discuss if/how marketing with video can help you, how to inexpensively create videos and how to effectively distribute them, give us a call.

Here are a few things you can do to enhance your credibility:

1) Always be honest. I know, it’s obvious but like so many universal truths, we can’t hear it enough. This means being honest not only with your customers but with employees, vendors, competitors – basically anyone you deal with personally or professionally.

I put honesty first because it is the cornerstone of enduring business success. A business can be built without it, but it cannot sustain long-term success without it. The house of cards will eventually fall.

2) Provide social proof.  There are several ways to accomplish this:

• Client testimonials (written, audio or video)
• Personal/character testimonials – maybe you’re just starting out & don’t have client testimonials, you can still ask people who know you well to give a testimonial of your character, knowledge, work ethic, etc.
• Case studies – documented proof of how your product/service has worked for a client
• Industry awards
• Get published in a respectable publication (there is a perception that someone who is a published author is credible)
• Write and distribute articles through online article submission services
• Get interviewed by a respectable media outlet
• Write a book
• Give a speech
• Become a Better Business Bureau accredited business
• Join local business organizations (ie. Chamber of Commerce)

3) Create an iron-clad guarantee and put it in writing. If your product or service lends itself to doing so, provide a money back guarantee if it doesn’t perform as promised.

The longer the guarantee the better. Not only will it give customers greater peace of mind, it will also reduce your return rate. Studies have shown a 30 day money back guarantee has a higher return rate than a 12 month guarantee.  Think about it, if you buy something that you’re not 100% sure of and know you only have 30 days to return it, you’re watching the clock and if you have any doubt on day 25, you’ll send it back. If you know you have a whole year, you tend to forget about it.

This will enhance your credibility while increasing sales because it will make it easier for those prospects who are on the fence to justify moving forward with you.

4) As referral expert Bob Burg says be a Go-Giver. Provide good quality content, advice, etc. without expecting anything in return. You will quickly become known as a trusted resource and will find your reputation and the number of referrals you  receive growing in tandem.

It wasn’t that long ago (5-7 years) that most people considered the yellow pages book as their primary source for finding local resources. During a few recent talks I have asked the audience to raise their hands if they still used the printed yellow pages on a regular basis and only a few hands went up in each group.

Think about how much easier it is to just Google “Family Restaurants Plano” or “Low Cost Shoes Dallas” than to pull out a phone book and “let your fingers do the walking”.

This brings up another point: According to Google executive Avinash Kaushik the average Google search now consists of 4 words. This is called “long-tail” search, meaning people are not simply typing “dentist” they are typing “pediatric dentist plano texas”

Internet users have become more sophisticated & know that if they are more detailed with their search terms they’ll receive more accurate results.

This bodes well for smaller, local businesses. They no longer have to compete with the big national companies for their keywords, they can focus their internet marketing efforts on local areas and rank well for in the search results for their targeted audience.

Times have definitely changed and the leading small companies in every market have embraced the new rules of marketing and continue to allocate more of their advertising dollars to local online marketing. Have you?

How many times have you seen a TV commercial or read an ad in the newspaper and thought “so what”. So you’ve been in business 10 years. So you have “great” service and low prices – so do your 47 competitors, and besides these days you better or your 11^th anniversary celebration could turn into a going out of business sale.

Most advertising is what I like to refer to as name, rank, serial number. That is; here’s our company name & logo, here are our products, here’s how great we are, here’s our phone number.

It’s sometimes called image advertising or branding. There is no compelling reason for consumers to take notice or care. There is nothing in it for them.

These marketers obviously haven’t heard of radio station WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) – which is the station consumers are tuned into 24/7.

Good direct response style marketing on the other hand, uses something (usually a headline) to grab attention, then tries to join the conversation that’s already going on in the prospect’s head so they say to themselves “hey they’re talking to me”

Then it gives them a compelling reason to respond positively (call, visit a website, place an order, request a quote, visit your store). This is often done using something along the lines of a free offer, free consultation, free report, a bounce back coupon (a discount off your next purchase after making an initial purchase), etc.

The difference is a well put together branding style advertisement may entertain your prospects, but a solid direct response advertisement gets them to engage with you and either pull out their wallet or set the stage for a continuing dialog.

The good news is you can still build brand recognition using direct response style marketing and as a bonus, bring in some revenue while you’re at it.

If you went the press release route you then had to hope you put it in the exact format that the news media was looking for and then send it to a ton of journalists and hope they were in a good mood when they saw it – IF they even saw it – there was a good chance it got buried in their inbox with 100s of others.

Even then, that journalist probably only worked for one publication, so best case, your story would be published in one media outlet.

The internet has changed all of that. You still have to write the press release, although in a little bit different style. However, you are no longer at the mercy of overworked, fickle journalists.

Today your press release can be distributed worldwide almost overnight without a journalist ever laying eyes on it. You can submit your press release to press release distribution sites (some free of charge) and it will be picked up by hundreds of news media websites.

Not only will this help your natural search engine rankings for your website overall, the press release itself may rank well in the search engines.

Press Release Case Study

On March 9th, we wrote and submitted a press release using our press release distribution process that is part of all of our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) packages.

You can see the results below. For the term “Done For You Marketing” – which according to Google has 1,410,000,000 competing websites – we have three page one rankings including the number one overall position.

Three page one listings in less than one month! That is hard to do if you’re trying to rank well for “underwater basket weaving”, much less a term with 1,410,000,000 competing websites.

Check out the Google screenshot below to see the power of press releases.

There are two main reasons most advertising isn’t tracked.

1) The advertising mediums (magazines, radio, tv, newspapers, yellow pages, etc) don’t want you to track it. If you knew how ineffective it was you would stop doing it. So, they obviously aren’t recommending it.

2)  It takes work (or at least some thought up front). Most local business owners are so busy putting out fires and wear so many hats within the company this is just one more of those things that although important, isn’t urgent, so it gets pushed aside by more pressing issues.

As a result, most advertisers end up feeling like P.T. Barnam when he said “half of my advertising doesn’t work, I just don’t know which half”.

Let’s take a look at the primary ways you can track your advtising:

• Coupons – for retailers this is an easy one. Simply include a coupon that needs to be brought in to receive a discount.
• Mention this ad – they have to mention the ad to receive something of value (discount, free gift, free consultation, etc)
• Promotional code – they must provide the code to receive a special offer – use a different code for each ad
• Telephone number that is specific to that ad. There are several services that will allow you (for about $20/month per number) to generate a number that is used for each ad you are running. When someone calls that number the call is logged and forwarded to your main phone number. You can then log into their system online and view the number of calls each ad received.
• Website - have a website address (domain name) in the ad that is only used for that ad. You can buy a domain name for under $10/year from GoDaddy.com, 1and1.com or several other domain sellers. Create a domain name for each ad and then have a special page set up on your website for each ad. You then set up a redirect of that domain name so when someone types in the domain name from the ad they are taken to the specific page on your website. You can then set up Google analytics on your site to record how many visits you had to each page.  The reason you want to get separate domain names is so you don’t end up with a big long, hard to remember domain name like www.mysite.com/magazinead1 because many people won’t type in the whole thing, they’ll just type www.mysite.com and you won’t be able to track which ad they came from.

If you are doing internet advertising, tracking results is very easy. There is software that will tell you exactly how many people vistited your website from various ads you were running and can even be set up to rotate sending visitors to two versions of a web page for each ad so you can test which page (headline, language, offer, etc) is most effective.

With internet advertising you can also capture and track leads from intial contact through close. And your return on investment calculations are usually very specific. That is one of the great things about internet advertising, it is ruthlessly accountable, down to the penny.

Doesn’t it make sense to spend a little time putting a tracking system in place before committing to spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars each month on advertising?

The next time you are considering purchasing advertising ask yourself,  “will I be able to accurately track the effectiveness of this ad?”  If the answer is no – you may want to reconsider that purchase and allocate those dollars to something that is measurable.