Marketing Your Business: The Neighborhood Approach

A Fresh Outlook to Alleviate the Confusion of Search Engine Marketing & Search Engine Optimization

Introduction

We have several websites that we maintain for ourselves and clients, so we are barraged with emergency notices from vendors that this website or that one is in need of SEO. And from their perspective, yes, they could use some; however, we think about more than the search result ranking when it comes to our sites. Result Ranking is highly weighted as one of the more important desired outcomes, which is why SEM & SEO are the current trends in strategic marketing. We prize their value as well, but we use these techniques as tactical tools, not strategically.

Strategic & Tactical Marketing Considerations

When you design and implement your marketing plan, the first thing you must decide is what you are selling. Most of us are selling goods, services, or both. This is critical to ascertain, especially with regards to the idea of Search Engine Results Rankings and clicks on your website. Just a mere “click” on a website can become a  product if you can cause an enormous number of clicks to happen in a short period of time, monetizing it through basing your Revenue Stream on traditional Advertising Models, certain number of impressions (=clicks) equals a particular cost to the advertiser. In this Advertising Model, as with a magazine’s circulation, what economically matters is the number-of-eyeballs on an ad. Here your objectives are to get any click on your page from anyone, stay for a certain amount of time, and that is it. This subordinates your content to bait-on-a-hook status where you do not care what your content is or what it says, just as long as it relevant enough to get a click.

Relevant enough? For what? Enough for the search engines to determine whether or not to put it at the top of the Organic Results for any reason and for anyone. Huffington Post is a good example of this. They create little of their own source content, but they are master curators of others’ content. To them, it does not matter that someone with or without cancer clicks on an abstract of a currently circulating article/subject on, say, some new research and product that helps. They delivered their value proposition to their customer segment when the page was clicked-on or a sponsored ad was clicked-through. This is SEM & SEO on steroids, and a business model in and of itself.

Wrap-up

The following posts will not be about the strategic seo gaming, although some of it is necessary and helpful. We will explore the business owners’ opportunities to seize control of their own business marketing and have the marketing investment dollar return ten-fold in new access to the targeted customer segments.

In simple terms, if you are a Locksmith with a shop in Long Beach and take great pride in your 24-7 Emergency Services within a 25-mile radius. Unless you have invented a new bullet-proof locking mechanism that you want to sell to anyone, your primary revenue streams lie within your 25-miles service area. You only deliver your value proposition when you make that service call or counter sale at the shop. So do not pay for advertising, marketing and promotions dollar for anything outside your territory. If you are good and authoritative, you will earn that fame just by being dynamite in your own market.

So next time, we will talk about drilling down to what it is that you do or what your product does and your strategic marketing plan. We will start by clearly identifying what you do that directly benefits your customer segment(s).

Be sure to bookmark us or add us to your RSS feed for more installments of this post and other good stuff.  

Social Media Marketing for Special Events

One of the topics near and dear to our hearts here at Tenth Muse Creative is Social Media Marketing for Special Events.  Our next series on this blog is on why social media marketing is important and how it can help you stretch your event marketing dollars.

Events are a shared spectacle, a form of social entertainment - a group of people comes together to experience a unique social opportunity. Using social media within this social setting is almost a no-brainer!  Because understanding how powerful social media can be is so important, we really want to focus on sharing and what makes social media social.

The actual origins of the Internet was as a space for users to exchange information, and that is still true today. The Internet is more than just a place to prop up your online brochure (website), it is where your event attendees socialize and exchange information.  The point of using social media for event marketing is for event producers to participate in the exchange – before the event – during the event - and after the event.

Social media for event marketing is NOT about blasting out a link to your website and reminding people about your event date. Social media marketing is about engaging your audience and making them a part of your marketing efforts through User Generated Content and information sharing.  When you use social media correctly, your event fans become a part of your marketing strategy, not just a digital audience who is already awash in marketing messages, most of which they are ignoring in favor of user generated social marketing.

People who engage in social media are going to drive the “conversation” about your event, they are going to blog it, tweet it, post it, and share their impressions with other social media users. Social media users are the PR department you didn’t know that you had! If you work with your social users and engage them, they will deliver your messaging far more effectively and to more people than traditional advertising. When you engage social users, you are joining in the dialog, you are providing them with content that can be shared with other users and you are building relationships with people who like to share – and there are no better relationships to build than those.

 Our next series of posts is going to look at social media platforms and how to engage your event attendees to create dynamic pre-event social interaction and during-event social opportunities that will vastly increase your event attendee enthusiasm and create a long tail marketing buzz.

Don’t forget to bookmark us as we dive into the pool of social media marketing for your special event!

Small Business Branding 101 – Lesson 2 What do you do?

When we look deeper into Small Business Branding and Marketing, we find more and more questions to be answered that helps us craft our Small Business Marketing Plan.  The next question we consider is What Do You Do?  

We know What Business You Are In now, so what exactly do you do in that business? Today we will take a page from well-known sales guru BrianTracy and take an in-depth look at what you do. 

When a new contact asks “what do you do?” your answer needs to be framed around the benefit to the customer, because the reality of people is that they are mostly interested in what the benefit is to them. If you can provide them with a benefit they desire, suddenly ears perk up and you have an interested prospect. 

The wrong way to answer the question:

New Contact: “What do you do?”

You: “I’m a Chiropractor.”

Yawn. There’s no engagement here. There is no way for you to tell automatically whether this person you are talking to is really interested in your product/service. 

The right way to answer the question:

New Contact: “What do you do?”

You: “I help people achieve better health and increased physical mobility.”

Here is where you determine whether you have a new contact who is a potential customer. The potential customer will notice a benefit to him/her in the form of better health and physical mobility. If they are interested in those benefits, you are most likely going to get a positive response asking for more information.

New Contact: “Really? How do you do that?” 

Now you get to detail your service/product offerings to an engaged prospect who has demonstrated an interest in the benefits you can provide. 

As we keep reminding you, people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems.

Sell the solutions.