One of the fastest growing segments of the internet over the last few years is what's known as Social Media. Facebook and Twitter are the two most well-known examples of social media sites.
Having a Facebook page is becoming more and more important, because people have come to expect it. There are over 600 million users on Facebook, and if you don't have a presence there you're missing out on a lot of potential business.
Plus, for many people Facebook has become synonymous with the internet. A lot of people spend most of their time online using Facebook, so if you aren't reaching them there, you may not have a chance to reach them at all.
Facebook started out as a way to connect on a personal level, but over the last couple of years they have added a lot of features that are targeted at businesses. You’ve probably already started to notice a lot of big companies adding “Find us on Facebook” to their websites, advertising and other places.
It can work just as well for local businesses, in fact it can work even better. Because Facebook is by nature a place to be “social” a local business fits in much better than a big, faceless corporation.
Setting up a Facebook Page for your business gives you a way to connect with your customers “virtually” and it can help to create a real sense of community.
Twitter is another social media site where you should definitely have a presence. It’s a little different beast, because the whole point is to post short updates (up to 140 characters at a time) so you can only share so much information.
It can be useful for sending out messages about special offers and other news, but more importantly it’s another way for your customers and potential customers to contact you.
Your customers can send you messages, called “Tweets”, via Twitter so it is similar to email in some ways. But because the messages are so short, it can be an effective way for them to ask quick questions or give you quick feedback, without having to invest a lot of time to do it.
Aside from reaching potential customers, there's another reason you should have a presence in these places - managing your brand. People will talk about their experiences with your company on the internet whether you're part of it or not. It's important that you are.
Managing Your Brand
One of the biggest hurdles for a lot of business owners to leap when it comes to the internet is realizing that people will be talking about your company whether you like it or not.
And that includes good AND bad. Mistakes are bound to happen in any business, but when they do it's quite possible that the story will wind up on the internet where anyone searching for your business can find it.
If you're not maintaining an effective presence on the web, you're going to have two problems if this happens.
1. The negative review could wind up ranking high in the search results, so whenever somebody searches for your business, this could be one of the first things they see. The review might be accurate if a mistake really was made, or it might be completely inaccurate, but that potential customer has no way of knowing for sure (and is more than likely going to accept it as fact).
2. You won't have a chance to explain the situation and fix it.
The solution here is to be a part of the conversation. In other words, engage your customers where these kinds of things might appear so you can try to correct any mistakes that were actually made, or explain your side if it's completely inaccurate.
We've already discussed two of the places that these kinds of discussions can happen - Facebook and Twitter. It's important that you have a presence on both, if only as a point of contact for your customers who are already in those places.
Imagine this scenario…
One of your employees has been dealing with a customer, and the customer is unhappy with the service they received. But instead of coming to you and giving you the opportunity to fix the problem, they go to these websites and post about the problem and how unhappy they were with your company.
If you don't have a presence on Twitter or Facebook, you might never know about it. But people who are looking for information about your company online could quite likely find that information whenever they search for you.
Now think about this...
If you are active on those sites, on the other hand, you can jump in and try to correct the situation. This is not only going to give you a chance to turn an unhappy customer into a happy one (who might also become one of your biggest supporters at that point) it's also going to add your side of things to the "record" of the situation on the internet.
Now when someone searching for you finds that review/complaint, they're also going to see your response, and the fact that you tried to correct the situation for that unhappy customer.
Which scenario would you prefer?
Review Sites
Another place that it's important to maintain an active presence is review sites, including:
· Yelp.com
These sites are local business directories of a sort, which let people post ratings about reviews about them. Much like any other website we've discussed, you need to maintain a presence here if you want to be able to manage your brand and what people are saying about it.
One of the reasons these sites are so important is many of them have apps for the iPhone and other smartphones, so a lot of people use them to look up local businesses when they're on the go. If they find a listing with low ratings or bad reviews, they can just choose another one - the business owner will never know they lost a potential customer.
Just like Facebook and Twitter, you want to have an opportunity to either correct the problem or explain your side of it when these low ratings and review happen.
These sites aren’t only about reviews, however. Many of them let you make special offers to your customers, in the way of discounts, giveaways and more. These special offers can be another great way to draw in both new and existing customers through their smartphones and other mobile devices.
If they are searching for a local business using one of these services, seeing an offer from your company will make them a lot more likely to visit. And if it’s combined with good reviews and interaction on your part, it’s going to cement their decision even more firmly.
Engaging Customers
Another aspect of managing your brand online is simply engaging your customers. This comes back to have a Facebook Page, setting up a Twitter account for your business and all the other things we've talked about.
This lets you connect with your customers without any of the cost associated with traditional advertising.
For example, if you have a Facebook Page where your customers can follow you, you can offer special promotions and other offers through it. A lot of people spend a great deal of their online time using Facebook, so you can reach a lot of people this way, with no advertising costs at all.
Let's look at a pub as an example. It's a Wednesday afternoon, and the week has been slower than normal. They've got an order arriving on Friday but still have too much inventory of a particularly brand of beer from the previous one. They've been building a following on Facebook by letting their customers know about their page. So they post a special offer on Facebook for that brand of beer, good for the next two days.
Do you think that might bring in a few customers who wouldn't have otherwise showed up over the next couple of days? Probably, and they more than likely won't stop with the special promotion, they'll order food as well. So a free promotion could turn a losing situation into additional profit for that business.
Facebook is one example of how to do this, but there is an even more powerful tool for getting these kind of short-notice promotions in front of your customers - mobile marketing.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is a huge growth opportunity for local businesses. More and more people are carrying smartphones that have always-on internet connections, and they're using them to find local businesses when they're on the go.
There are very few businesses that approach mobile marketing correctly, however.
Most companies have either no "mobile" version of their website, or if they do it's really just a smaller version of the same site. The latter is a little better option, but it's still not very effective.
As far as the first problem - having no mobile-specific version of your website - this makes it extremely likely that someone searching for more information will simply leave the page and look for another site that's more friendly.
Look at this website for the City of Boston, for example:
This is what a "regular" website looks like on a typical smartphone. It's practically impossible to read, and even if someone zooms in to see what's there, it's still not going to be very effective.
Having a mobile-friendly version of your website is a better option. You can see what the City of Boston’s mobile site looks like in this example:
Much easier to read, right?
This type of site might be fine for the City of Boston, since people are more than likely looking for information. But it isn’t the best option for local businesses. After all, what are people looking for when they look up a business on their mobile phone?
99% of the time, they're looking for one of two things - a phone number or an address. They don't want to read the website or anything else, they're just trying to either call or get to the right location.
Let's look at an example of a much more effective mobile website:
If someone searches for a local business on their smartphone, and winds up on a page like this, don't you think the chances are much better that they're going to actually call and/or visit as a result?
And that's not all you can do with mobile websites. Most of today's smartphones have various other functions that can be integrated into a mobile site.
Many smartphones have GPS functions built right in. What if you could include GPS coordinates on your website so all your potential customer had to do was click on the link and it would open their GPS and give them exact directions to get from wherever they are to your location?
Or how about including all that contact information on your website so that customer could click another link and automatically have it all loaded into their phone's address book? Don't you think they'd be a lot more likely to make multiple visits to your business if the details were all loaded in their phone whenever they needed your products or services?
But there's one more incredibly powerful aspect of mobile marketing that is still extremely under-used by local businesses - text messaging.
Text messaging, or SMS, has experienced huge growth in the number of people who use it regularly. And it's not only younger people who are using it - it's becoming more and more common with older users as well.
Local businesses can use text messaging to engage their customers on a much more personal basis than even email marketing can provide.
There are two huge advantages to text messaging that really can't be matched by any other method of communication.
1. Most people have their phones with them virtually all the time, so those messages will reach them no matter where they are.
2. The vast majority of text messages get read almost instantly when they're received. Compare that to email that may go unopened for several days.
How can this work in your favor? Going back to our pub example, text messaging could work much the same as Facebook promotions, except it would be even more immediate.
If the pub was slow on a particular day, they could send a text message at 5:00pm and reasonably expect a response that same evening. There's just no other advertising medium that can reach your customers as immediately that is virtually guaranteed to be seen.
So does that mean you need to be feverishly tapping out text messages to all your customers every time you want to send something?
Not at all. There are services that will broadcast a text message to everyone who has requested to receive them from you. These services let you choose a number, called a Short Code, to use as your point of contact. Your customers just have to send a text to that number to sign up to receive text messages from you whenever you broadcast something out.
You can even set up an automatic response from these short codes, giving you the ability to offer an incentive to get people to opt into receiving those messages.
For example, a restaurant might offer a coupon for a free appetizer on their next visit by texting the word “appie” to their short code number. When the customer sends the text, they get a response virtually instantly with the details of how to get the free appetizer. This can be as simple as “Show this message to your server on your next visit to claim your free appetizer.” But now whenever you broadcast a text message, they will receive it virtually instantly.
Coupon Sites
“Deal of the day” sites like Groupon and Living Social are another highly effective way to reach people through their mobile devices. You can advertise a special offer on these sites, which have apps for smartphones like the iPhone and Blackberry.
These apps offer what is known as “push” notifications of new specials. This works very similar to a text message – when a new offer is posted, the app displays a message on the phone.
Let’s look at Groupon.com as an example, since it’s the largest of these sites.
You list a special offer of some type with Groupon, offering a discounted price, a two-for-one special or any number of other special deals. Groupon posts the deal on their website, sends it out by email and pushes it to all the users of their mobile applications.
Because the offers are geographical, only people in your general area will see it by default. The users of the service benefit by getting a great deal on what you sell and your company benefits by getting a bunch of new customers who might never heard of you otherwise.
Plus, people outside of your immediate market can also view your offer, and buy it as a gift for someone who lives nearby. So you can reach people who don’t even use the service via the people that do.
Keys To An Effective Website
Having a good mobile version is one aspect of an effective website, but there are several things that your main website should offer as well. Your website is responsible for several things:
· Educating your audience
· Branding your company
· Establishing your expertise in your industry
· Generating leads and sales
· Building relationships with your audience
There are also a couple of things it's NOT responsible for, however:
· Miraculously drawing in people searching for what you offer
· Replacing personal connection and interaction
One mistake that a lot of companies make is trying to cram as much information as possible into the home page of their site. This is a sure-fire way to overwhelm any new visitors, and in many cases they will just click away and keep looking.
Instead, use the home page to grab the visitor’s attention and help them find the right page on the site for whatever information they’re looking for. Think of it as a sort of “directory” for the rest of the site. You want people to be able to find what they want within 5 seconds of landing on your website if at all possible.
Try to look at your website from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know your company and may not even know what you offer. If you look at it from the perspective of someone who already knows everything there is to know about your business, it makes it much harder to optimize for your visitors.
If you find it hard to distance yourself from your business this way, an effective way to do it is to create a customer “avatar” that you can use as a model for your typical customer.
Create a fictional customer who has most of the traits of your typical client. Give them a name, consider their age, their sex, what kind of knowledge they have about your product, their income, how many kids they have, etc. The more complete this avatar is, the better.
Then, whenever you are writing something for your customers, whether your website, an email, an article or any number of other types of content, write it as though you’re addressing that fictional customer directly. This can really help to filter out the stuff that’s either unnecessary or confusing and get right to the point you want to make.
We'll talk about how to get the people who are searching for what you offer to actually visit your website shortly (in fact, that's really the ultimate goal of everything in this book) but as far as personal connection and interaction goes, the internet has one very useful tool for this - email.
One of the most critical things you should be doing on your website is some kind of lead capture - getting your customers' names and email addresses so you can contact them via email.