From time to time people ask me what’s the biggest problem in internet marketing today in 2014. My response is that our client’s customers are broke and don’t have money.
Now, it’s not like this in every industry. Business executives still need airport transportation. People still need important packages delivered ASAP. But other industries like home remodeling, sign makers and even lawyers are struggling.
Specifically, the two problems is that some businesses are in the “WANT” business. Where customers want your service, but dont “NEED” your service. Someone might really want to remodel their kitchen, but they don’t have the money right now and have other, higher priorities. For lawyers and other businesses that charge a lot for their products or services, the problem is that the cost is too high.
It’s important to keep the clients customers in mind when figuring out the marketing strategy.
For instance, if I’m talking to a client in the “WANT business” that has a marketing budget of say $500 a month, my advice on how best to spend the money will be using it to stay in touch with every person that visits the website.
Because if the money goes towards Google advertising, the Google ads will get people to the client’s website. It’ll get the client calls. But it won’t likely produce customers for the client with the customers likely not being ready for one reason or another.
So what do we do?
Start with remarketing. With remarketing, we have the ability to track and stay in touch with every single website visitor by serving them banner ads on different websites throughout the internet. For instance, have you ever gone on a website before and then later on, start seeing banner ads for that website all over the place? That’s what remarketing is.
So let’s say there’s 100 people going on your website each month. Every month that goes by, you’ll be tracking and serving banner ads to another 100 people each month. After 6 months, you’ll be advertising to 600 people that have been on your website before. After 1 year, you’ll be advertising to 1,200 people that have been on your website before. And so on.
The value in this is that sooner or later, your former website visitors will be ready to do business with someone. Might be 2 weeks. Or 2 months. Or 6 months. But a lot will be ready at some point. In the meantime, you’re advertising your brand everyday to them. Reminding them. Building top of the mind awareness. And then the day will come when that former website visitor clicks on the banner ad and likely not only calls you, but becomes your customer too.
What else can you do?
Email marketing. There are ways we can collect email addresses from some of the people that go to your website by offering them discounts or free amenities if they submit their email address. So sending out an email blast every couple weeks is another way to stay in touch with people until their ready.
Regular display banner ads on different websites throughout the internet is a low cost and effective way of getting lots of people to your website and also increasing brand awareness. This will help too.
And finally, having a good reputation is important too. Like if you go to Google and type in your company name, it’s important no bad reviews or customer complaints pop up. If potential customers find bad reviews about your company, this can cause potential customers decide to not do business with you.
But vice-versa, positive reviews for your company can help lead to someone to be more likely to become your customers.
One of the most important things to remember about reputation management is that there’s tons of review websites out there, but the only way someone will ever go on any of them is if they show up in Google if someone types in your company name. So the main thing is to make sure is to focus on the review websites in the first 5 pages of Google when you search your company name. And if you have the budget, make sure you have no bad reviews in Bing and Yahoo as well.