![Local Marketing]()
Julianne Wish, Member Contributions
What is local marketing, and why do smaller businesses need to engage in it? This means targeting people in your area.
Obviously many businesses can go after people around the country. However, others can only do business with local customers.
Restaurants and financial planners are prime examples of smaller companies that do business with only local people. There’s only so far people are going to drive to do business with you if you have a physical location.
However, if you have a business that lends itself to national customers, you can also target local customers separately. There are some people that would simply rather do business with local companies. Therefore, you might want to do some local advertising apart from your national efforts.
So how do you get more local customers? There are a number of ways that work. Here are four you can start with:
#1) Newspaper advertising
This is one of the cheapest ways to target people in your area. When done right, it can be effective.
The problem with it is that it’s very untargeted. The majority of people reading the paper will not be interested in your product. However, if even a small percentage respond, it can be effective.
#2) Yellow pages
This is another one of the “traditional methods” of local advertising. It’s been around a long time, and when done right it can again be effective.
#3) Direct mail
This is hands down one of the top local advertising methods. This is where you buy a list of people in your area based on certain characteristics. You can choose based on age, gender, income level, etc. then you would send out an advertising campaign to them.
This way, you can choose exactly who you want to focus on. Therefore, it’s more targeted than the previous two.
#4) Internet
Online advertising is another effective strategy to get local customers.
So how do you convert traffic into sales? Now that you know how to drive traffic to your offer, you have to focus on making sales.
Get their contact information.
This should be your main goal, so you can keep marketing to them. The average customer requires at least four to seven touches before they do business with you. Therefore, if you give up after the first contact you are probably missing out on the majority of your sales.
Track each advertising source separately.
You might want to track each advertising method, so you can tell what’s working and what isn’t. For this reason, you might want to send the traffic from each source to a different place so you can tell what’s working and what isn’t.
The bottom line is, local advertising can be effective when done right. Implement these tips, and you will get your marketing efforts on track.
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.
Julianne Wish, Member Contributions
Large, global brands seem to be the most noticeable businesses on Facebook, but that is changing. In fact, it has already changed somewhat. There was a time when you could forget about trying to find your local business’s Facebook page, but more and more small businesses are turning to Facebook to market their products. Maybe you would like to promote your small business via Facebook. Here are some tips that may help.
1. Separate professional from personal
Your clients don’t need to see the latest pictures of your pets, or hear about your latest haircut. Keep your personal information on your personal profile, and establish a separate page for your business. If you like, you can hire someone else to be a sort of proxy for you who can represent your brand. This might be helpful if you already have a significant personal presence on Facebook.
However, you might also use your personal networking to your advantage. When you set up your business page, you can incorporate those friends who share your interests into your target market. Still, your personal profile and business pages should be separate.
2. Your page name
This is important, because you can’t change it later. You will have to shut down your page and build a new one, and that can mess with your client base. So consider key words when you develop your page name, and make it a good one. Put lots of thought into it.
3. Your landing page
This is like the “home page” of a website. It needs to have a compelling image and good information right off the bat so that visitors will be inspired to click the “Like” or “Become a Fan” buttons. You can use something called FBML, which stands for Facebook Markup Language, to create a unique and interesting landing page.
4. Tabs
You can also use FBML to create tabs, which are visible buttons on your page that represent applications, or apps. Twitter, Networked Blogs, Events, and Inbox are just some of the apps you can put on your business page. These really help promote your business as they give visitors and fans a chance to interact and connect with you and your business.
5. The value of personal communication
One of the appealing things about Facebook is the personal interaction it encourages. In a world of automation, customers appreciate a “live human” at the other end of the keyboard, mobile device, or computer screen! The telephone used to provide this, but with more and more businesses resorting to automated customer service, Facebook gives your business an edge. So try to communicate with your fans and followers regularly, and on an individual basis as often as possible. Happy fans then tell their friends.
If your business grows to the point that you can’t handle all the individual contact, consider outsourcing this to someone else who is closely associated with your business.
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.
Julianne Wish, Member Contributions
When you begin your business ventures on Facebook, you might find some tips helpful. It may help relieve some of the anxiety new users and newcomers to social networking sometimes feel. Here are some suggestions for those who are beginners on Facebook.
1. Understand the medium
It’s important to understand what Facebook is all about. It works by connecting people, either one-on-one (friends) or through groups. So you can tap into this method of social networking for your business. Facebook actually has rules, too, so you’ll want to familiarize yourself with their terms and conditions. Most likely, you aren’t going to break any Facebook rules unless you’re being really offensive, but it’s a good idea to read the rules anyway.
2. Keep your focus
When you begin your business ventures on Facebook, it’s a good idea to keep your focus. Your business has a purpose, and you’ll need a good grasp of what that purpose is. This will help you connect with the right groups and prospective customers.
When you begin filling your page with content – the information that people read when they visit your page – keep it on topic. Prospects will lose interest if your content has no focused purpose.
To help keep your focus and avoid getting “sucked in” to the social aspects of Facebook, it may help to schedule certain times of the day when you do your social networking.
3. Keep it professional
When you set up a Facebook business page, you will need to fill out your personal information. When you fill it out, make sure the information is true and real, but also professional. Personal details are not the first thing that visitors should see when they come across your page. Think of your personal traits from a business standpoint, and describe yourself using professional criteria.
4. People want to see you
Having the neutral blue silhouette is considered a no-no from a business perspective. Your avatar – the little picture that everyone will see beside your comments, posts, and on your page – needs to show an image of your best professional you.
5. Things to avoid
When you first start up on Facebook, you will probably see a lot of frivolous games, gifts, and so forth that are not relevant to your business. It’s a good idea to block these things in your personal settings, and avoid participating in “chain mail” types of communication.
It’s also a good idea to avoid “spamming” others. This is when you send out all kinds of promotional material and information all at once to all sorts of Facebook users, and continue doing it daily. It can turn prospective clients off quickly. They may block you, or remove their status as your friend or fan.
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.
Julianne Wish, Member Contributions
If you’re thinking of sharing your business via Facebook, creating an effective profile is important. It’s easy to go into Facebook and set up a profile that doesn’t do much to reflect what you’re about. So here are some tips for Facebook beginners.
1. Be careful
It’s wise to exercise care when you set up your business profile. You may or may not already be on Facebook to socialize, but it’s a good idea to keep your business Facebook page separate. It’s also a good idea to limit who reads your status updates so that your personal news does not conflict with your professional news.
You can use Facebook’s privacy settings to control who sees your updates. And remember, privacy settings aren’t perfect; some cross-over is possible, so take care what you post. Some things you don’t need to share!
2. Your name
Most business people suggest using your real, full name in your profile – another good reason to pay attention to privacy settings. But you’re a business, so you want your name out there. Using your real name makes it a lot easier for people to get hold of you.
3. Your avatar
You will need to choose an avatar. Some successful business people suggest using a professional picture of yourself, but it’s entirely possible to get a good photo with your home camera. Let your “look” reflect the mood of your business (you don’t want to be pictured in overalls, for example, if your business is a professional marketer; but overalls would be an excellent look for a gardening business). If you have some photo software on your computer, you can adjust the background and so forth to construct a good avatar.
You can also use your business logo as your avatar. Various sources disagree as to which is the most effective from a business perspective, so ultimately it’s up to you and what you’re comfortable with. Consider your avatar’s look and colors, and see if it makes an effective avatar or not.
4. Think like a client
If you were a prospective client of your business, what would you like to see on a profile? Be thorough and truthful, but keep your prospects in mind. There are some things your clients don’t need to know, and other things they should know – remember, this is a business profile. Include those aspects of yourself that coincide with your business intent.
Something else to consider are online resources such as free printed guides and tutorials.
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.
Julianne Wish, Member Contributions
There is more to Facebook than friends and contacts! Advertising with Facebook is an up-and-coming way to enhance your business. If you’d like to consider advertising with Facebook, here are some tips on how to make it work for you.
1. Determine your demographic
Known variously as your “target market,” “target audience,” “demographic,” and so forth, determining just who it is you’re selling to is a step that shouldn’t be skipped. Facebook actually offers tools for you to research your demographics’ Facebook presence – find out the groups, events, and individual profiles that are relevant to your business.
2. Build your own business community
Facebook is about making connections. Building communities via Facebook is a good way to conglomerate members of your demographic and find new ones. For example, your clients and fans may join one of your groups and invite their friends to join as well. Keep it interesting and lively by holding discussions, virtual events, providing exciting information, and so forth.
Another note on community building – remember that this is a feature at the heart of Facebook, so direct sales ads tend not to do as well. The majority of Facebook users are on the site because they want to form relationships, not necessarily because they want to buy something.
3. Facebook resources
Facebook offers guidelines and tools for advertising. Check out www.facebook.com/FacebookAds for details on how Facebook recommends you advertise through them. You can develop your ad through a tool offered at www.facebook.com/advertising, too. You can just begin with an image and a brief tagline or description. Your ad will appear on the right side of those Facebook pages you have targeted.
4. Key words
It’s a good idea to learn to integrate key words into your ads. These are words that are gleaned from people’s profile information, and you can use these key words in your ad to customize it to a particular demographic. In fact, what you find in people’s profiles is key to filtering out who is in your target market and who is not.
5. Set a budget
Setting a budget will help prevent you from experimenting with a lot of different ad techniques, thereby wasting money and time. Your advertising campaign should have a definite budget limit, and your goals need to be clearly defined alongside it. In other words, you need to know just what it is you expect for your advertising dollar.
6. Look at the ads of others
Consider doing some research – click on the ads you see on your Facebook page, and see what they are up to. What kind of ads seem effective? Which ones have an approach that appeals to you? Which ads keep appearing over and over, indicating they have something that’s working for them?
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.
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