The World Business

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When you start a business, it’s natural to dream of selling it one day. In fact, more than half of America’s 27 million business owners now say they want to sell their business in the next 10 years. You may want to retire, travel, cash out, or just sleep well at night knowing you could sell your business. Unfortunately, just 1 out of every 100 business owners is successful in selling their company each year. To sell your business you need to know: • The 3 bigge… More >>

Built to Sell: Turn Your Business Into One You Can Sell

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Studio: New Line Home Video Release Date: 05/06/2008 Rating: NrAmazon.com
Is it conceivable that in the United States, profit is increasingly driving the business of birthing–sometimes at the expense of the best possible outcome for mothers and babies? Should birth be viewed and treated as a natural process or a potential medical emergency? This documentary, produced by Ricki Lake and directed by Abby Epstein, opines that money and fear are changing the… More >>

The Business of Being Born

Local Business Advertising

“I don’t need the Internet to advertise – I’m a local business!”

Okay…

If you could spend £0.04 (or $0.05 in the US) and have a new
customer – what would you do with your local business
advertising budget?

I hope you would spend that money again and again!

Granted this is the ideal example and you are likely to pay much
more then £0.04 per customer you acquire, BUT – herein lies the
rub for local businesses:

An internet presence announces your business to the world.

When you are online, you have little control about where traffic
is coming to you from (if you are not actively driving traffic
that is), but what if you could make sure that people who lived
in your area, who buy your goods and would make ideal customers
could be targeted!

Google Adwords can help you target local people, not people from
New Zealand if you live in the UK – but people close to you.

Pinpoint geographic targeting of prospects is an optimum use of
your local business advertising budget.

Is it 100% foolproof?

Alas no, but it’s a good start.

How do I do it?

Well the easiest way to do this is as follows:

Create a national campaign with your search terms and your
location terms – eg: If you’re a plumber in Poole then “plumber
poole” would be a good keyword.

Create a geo-targeted campaign (this can be done in a couple of
ways – I’ll leave the nitty gritty details out for now) which
means your ads are served to local people when they search for
your keywords.

So in the plumber example if a local person types in “plumber”
and doesn’t mention anything else, your advert will be shown.

So goes the theory anyway.

Does it work all the time?

Like I said – Not always very well.

This is because Google uses IP addresses to determine location
and this method is somewhat of a cleaver when a scalpel is
required.

It all depends how diligent ISP’s are when allocating IP
addresses to their customers, the only way you can know is
through empirical means.

What if the regional targeting is producing no results?

If this is the case then a national campaign with location terms
included (as mentioned above) is your best bet.

If you were to run a national campaign on the same keywords
without the location terms, you will be competing with other
players who have a national presence for your particular
product/service which could prove very expensive.

Your local business advertising budget spend should at the very
least give Adwords and PPC advertising in general a tryout.
Remember there are an infinite number of keywords in any target
market.

Just because the big boys may have a stranglehold on the
‘obvious’ terms does not mean your market is saturated

Online marketing has become the most successful method of advertising for any kind of business on the planet during the last decade. It is lightning fast and can promote your business to thousands of potential customers daily. As marketing is a primary factor for a long and successful business, the internet facilitates this process in a way that will ensure the maximum exposure to what you are offering.

Traditional marketing is becoming more expensive and slower to produce results. It also requires much more time and effort. It often has to be done by many employees and is restricted by many barriers and regulations which make it hard to get the most beneficial results. Then along comes the internet as it makes the entire globe seem like a short alley rather than a large city where you can reach customers overseas in a matter of seconds. Online marketing is superior to traditional ways of marketing in almost every aspect, and here we list the top 10 reasons online marketing dominates traditional advertising.

1. SPEED

Email marketing campaigns are fast, targeted, cost-effective, highly efficient method of marketing your business. They reach a lot of customers in the shortest time. Traditional mail marketing can take months and a lot of money and effort to generate results.

2. GEOGRAPHICAL RESTRICTIONS

The whole globe can be your customer base when you are marketing your business online, as the internet reaches almost every house on the planet. On the other hand, you are often restricted to local customers from a smaller geographical area when you market offline.

3. MARKETING EFFECTS

Online marketing is based on pull marketing effects, which means that online customers come across your website when they are looking for similar products of yours. While offline marketing is based on push marketing effects, which means you have to introduce your business to every single customer that come into your location.

4. SALES PROCESS

When your business is marketing online, you can make a sale in a matter of seconds; where the customer chooses what product or services they wise to buy, they move to the check out page, pays for the product or services on a secure page, and then receives their purchase. Offline advertising is very different as the selling process is very complex and requires a lot of effort and persuasion and sometimes can’t be completed after all.

5. HOURS OF OPERATION

Your website is self-managed and requires you only to make few changes, and after that it can operate non-stop and can be selling products or services while you are sleeping. Offline stores are restricted to the human active times, this means you open in the morning and close in the evening and you can’t make a sale while you are closed. In other words, the offline selling process has a shorter sales life than the online one.

6. COST OF MEDIA

If you want to make a commercial on TV or radio or a newspaper, you will pay a fortune. While online marketing allows you to make a short video or audio commercial and submit it thousands of media communities and it will cost you next to nothing.

7. LIMITED ADVERTISING LIFE SPAN

When you post an ad online about your business or website, with an article for example, it can be online forever and the place where the ad occupies will be untouched for a long time. On the other hand, offline ads can be only active for an agreed-upon period of time and then it will be replaced.

8. COST PER CUSTOMER

These costs are reasonably low with online marketing but relatively high with offline forms of advertising. They are simply the costs incurred to generate potential customers for the business.

9. CUSTOMER SUPPORT

With one email you can solve all your customer problems and concerns. This process is much more time consuming and require more effort offline.

10. ONGOING MARKETING INFORMATION

It is very easy and only takes a few seconds to collect all the information and data about every aspect of your business when you market online. Offline information and data are stored within piles of documents, where it requires a squad of employees to collect the required information.

As you can clearly see, online marketing is far superior to traditional forms of marketing. Online marketing is all about saving you money, time, and effort; yet brings you the required results you seek and most of the time exceeds your expectations.