Ideas for Business

Search and social marketing are often discussed on these pages mainly because they are have been the best use of a small business owners time and money.  Both help businesses connect with potential customers and when successfully applied, help businesses grow and become stronger. Many businesses are now finding that mobile apps are filling a missing link between the online world and their bricks and mortar businesses.

There are tens of thousands of mobile apps available, the majority of them free. They can be used to watch weight, find bargains, and even keep a watch on the kids at home. For small businesses, the thought of creating an app for their business may sound daunting and expensive – neither is true. First, you don’t need to create an app yourself. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of skilled people who can create mobile apps. When it comes to cost, in many cases, a developer will use an existing app that is quickly and simply modified for your needs.

Why are apps popular? Mobile apps allow users to bring consistency to their use of online tools. The one app can be downloaded to a cell phone, a tablet pc, and often a notebook computer as well. With cloud computing growing, a user can store everything in one place, then access that data from a variety of equipment, all seamlessly and without having to learn new skills.

Apps are well suited to instant purchase type businesses. Food, alcohol, entertainment, accommodation and transport are typical businesses that have found apps to be essential for connecting their customers with the latest offers. That’s not to say that other businesses can’t gain a benefit from a mobile app. Think of how customers connect with your business, and there’s bound to be an app that can help make that connection even easier. Because apps are free, consumers lap them up, even if they rarely use them. Give them a good enough reason and they will regularly use your app, and your business will grow because of that use. Mobile apps could well be the future of online and offline marketing.

Across the web, search engines deliver around 30% of all traffic. That’s means that 70% traffic is flowing around the web from social media, bookmarks, advertising, links  and because users directly type urls into browsers. With that in mind, should you be targeting that 70% rather than the 30%? If you talk to some SEO experts, search is the be-all and end-all of traffic – no where else matters. Some marketing experts now lean heavily towards social media, especially Facebook, Twitter and now Google+.

They can’t all be right, and yet, they are not completely wrong either. That 70% figure may sound attractive, however, it’s spread across a wide range of user options, whereas that 30% is from a single concentrated source – search.  Whilst I wouldn’t ignore SEO by any means, there is a lot to be said about attracting that 70% that comes from non-search activity.  So how do you attract that traffic.

One of the benefits of marketing online is that you can work directly within your niche. This means your marketing efforts are not being sprayed and the world in general – which is what the print and television marketing channels often suffered from. Online, you can put in an appearance where your niche market is.

In doing so, rather than broadcasting your content, you have the perfect opportunity to become a community leader within your niche.  Rather than promoting your products, you can promote yourself, your expertise, and your willingness to help others, even if it is simply by answering their questions, and helping to solve problems (niche related of course). You can promote yourself (and your business) where your customers hang out. That may well be Facebook or Twitter. Often, it is going to be more niche related areas such as forums and the blog community. You can access these channels, and if used wisely, can make you a community leader that everyone recognizes and trusts. That can be a powerful tool when it comes to attracting traffic and sales. As good as search? From all accounts, it is at least on a par with search. What I do know, if your reputation stinks, it doesn’t matter how many pages you have at number one in search, you wont receive a lot of traffic or sales.

When it comes to meaningful comments, and deep discussions, forget Facebook and Twitter. If anything, they can flood you with banal comments that take a lot of time yet deliver little in results. If you do go the Facebook and Twitter route, you need to maintain a lot of control over what you do and don’t become involved in. There are other sites where comments reach a more meaningful level, and often lead to much deeper conversations. The best sites for meaningful comments include:

• LinkedIn – if you are looking for indepth conversations on particular topics then it’s hard to go past LinkedIn. Although a more B2B social media site, it can be a great resource for gathering new information, solving problems, and sharing solutions.
• Google+ – whilst not as popular as Facebook or Twitter, that is a plus (excuse the pun) since you are not being flooded by off topic chatter. Like LinkedIn, you can find some very useful conversations taking place on Google+.
• Instagram - Instagram (now in the Facebook stable) and the following two websites are the reverse of LinkedIn and Google+. People are not leaving a lot of comments, however, millions of viewers are sharing content on a daily basis. That makes sites like Instagram a perfect place to leave meaningful comments that could start conversations whilst drawing attention to your expertise on the subject matter.
• Pinterest – like Instagram, Pinterest is really nothing more than an image sharing website done a little differently. Images are being shared and people are starting to comment, and the comments accumulate like a Facebook or blog set of comments. Another great place to leave meaningful and insightful comments.
• Foursquare – this site is different again as it connects people on where they are and what they are doing right now. Few people think of leaving comments, so Foursquare becomes another well read and shared site that is empty as far as comments go.

Whilst those last three social media sites wont deliver meaningful conversations, they are devoid of large volumes of comments. It’s like being in a room full of people who are all looking and reading, but not adding much themselves. You have access to all those readers with little risk of your comments being buried under a flood of similar comments. They could be well worth adding to your social media marketing strategies if you’re not already involved.

Marketing has been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Over those years the format and approach has changed, and to a certain extent, has become quite scientific. Marketing professionals will poor over statistics and demographics in an attempt to deliver the best marketing plan possible. The arrival of the Internet has opened a lot of new possibilities, however, some of those old marketing tactics still work, even on the Internet. Compare these non-Internet marketing tactics to what is now available on the Internet.

• Paid Advertising – newspapers, billboards, television, radio. Paid advertising has been around for a long time. The online equivalent is pay-per-click advertising, banners, and video. However, there are some businesses that are finding that a combination of traditional offline marketing and online marketing still works. People do still read newspapers, they still look at billboards, and if your URL is easy to follow, they’ll look it up. Pay-per-click takes newspaper advertising one step further – you only pay if a person clicks through whereas in a newspaper, you pay one charge no matter how many views that ad gets.
• Social Marketing – traditional bricks and mortar business had a tough time of it when it came to being good community citizens. If the community took a dislike to a business, then it was doomed. To prevent this, many business owners become involved in local social activities. Sponsoring sporting events, schools or charities made good sense – you were out there shaking hands and making friends with the world. Online, social media marketing has a similar approach. You still make friends, shake hands (like, follow), and socialize to gain a good reputation.
• Newsletters – newsletters and print media in the form of catalogs or brochures/flyers were once very popular. What many businesses don’t realize is that they are still popular. E-mail marketing is still one of the most successful forms of marketing, and where paper based marketing material once considered junk mail, e-mail marketing is not so badly tarnished.
• Coupons/special discounts – many families live for coupons, they even trade them (and come to blows over them). Coupons still work online, in fact, their delivery is easier, more targeted, and can be better controlled online. Special discounts can fly around social media outlets like Twitter in an instant delivering a lot of traffic (digital or foot) and plenty of sales.

Those four traditional marketing tactics have worked well in the offline world for a long time. The online world has simply taken them, fine tuned them a little, then profited from them. Ironically, the cost of online marketing is probably a fraction now of what traditional offline marketing used to be.

A lot has been written lately about pandas and penguins being used to knock web sites out of search results if they don’t deserve their place. Whilst search does deliver a lot of traffic to website owners, it is not the only way that surfers find web sites. With that in mind, here’s a question for you – could you run a link building campaign that totally ignored an SEO effects?

Now I know the first question that many would ask is simply why? Why would you go to that effort and not take into account search engine issues? My response is simple, don’t question the question, answer it. What would happen if you ran a link building campaign that wasn’t looking to influence the search results.

If search isn’t your aim, then there can only be one other aim, you want to earn traffic from those links. Now we’re getting somewhere. How do you gain traffic from those links? You provide good quality content in the right places. Let’s do the numbers. Imagine writing a guest post that is going to be published on a web site that receives a thousand visitors each day.  If you can get 10% of those of visitors to click through, that’s potentially an increase of 100 visitors each day ,and if you can convert that to sales at the standard rate of 5%, that’s another five sales – from one guest posting.

This won’t happen across the board all of the time. However, it does drive home my point – search engine traffic is only one source of traffic. Replicate that link building approach 100 times and you’ll be getting a lot of extra traffic. You may not even need search results to survive in business. But here’s the real rub, if you took SEO out of link building, and built links to draw traffic instead of ‘link juice’, you’d probably be building the very links that search engines want to see. Think about it!