Local Business Marketing Blog

Facebook started out as a way for individual members to interact with each other. But many members have business interests and want the opportunity to promote their business to other members. Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages are two ways you can use to promote a cause, point of view, product or service.

What is a Facebook Page?

A “Facebook Page” is also sometimes referred to as a “Fan Page” or a “Business Page”. The reason you would create a Facebook Page is to allow you to focus on a specific topic or cause. Usually it is for the promotion of a brand, product, organization, band or celebrity.
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For local business owners one of the biggest drawbacks with online advertising has been the crude (or non-existent) ways in which you can target the reach of your ads. Placing an ad on a high traffic sight virtually guarantees getting hits from people you have no interest in reaching. And this alone can make online advertising inefficient and overly expensive.

Pay Per Click (like Google Adwords) solved this problem by allowing advertisers to target by keyword. But many local businesses cannot take advantage of keyword targeting because of the relatively small size of their target market. There simply are not enough searches done on keywords such as “Toledo sump pumps” or “Richmond Hill Indian food” to get enough clicks to justify the effort.
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Internet marketers are fond of saying “Build a list, build a list!” Under the best of circumstances this is a difficult challenge, but even more for a local business.

Say you’re a car dealer, landscaper, chiropractor, hair salon or real estate agent. What is the point of building a list of email subscribers?

The job of the marketer

If you were to draw a little schematic diagram of the marketing process you might begin with two boxes. On the left is Box A – “My Products” – the things you sell to people, and on the right is Box B – “My Target Market” – the individuals, companies or organizations you are trying to sell to.

As a marketer your job is to push information about Box A to the people in Box B. You have to do it in a convincing enough way that some people in Box B will buy some of the stuff in Box A. (more…)

Anybody who is even casually aware of how local business has evolved over the last few years knows that one of the most dramatic changes has been the way the internet has eroded traditional local media.

Traditional media have become splintered. Newspapers are losing readers and advertisers. Direct mail has become ineffective because of technology changes. Advertising in local magazines is over-priced because of high production costs and vigorous competition from the web.

And most important, the Yellow Pages are no longer the dominant force they once were because fewer and fewer people actually use them for a whole variety of reasons.

Environmental Concerns

Yellow Pages are definitely not green

So far we haven’t even mentioned the environmental concerns about traditional print-based advertising. Don’t get me wrong. I was involved in the print advertising and related businesses for more than 20 years, and I’m not suggesting all print advertising should be banned because of environmental concerns.

But let’s get real.

Every week we get a big bag of junk mail flyers thrown in our driveway. My wife dutifully retrieves the local newspaper that comes wrapped up in the junk fliers. But I would just as soon chuck the whole mess just out of principal.

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I’ve been thinking and writing about web-based promotion for local markets for years but have never really found the magic formula for converting the vast potential of this “sector” into a viable, profitable service. The obvious has been staring me in the face for at least two years, but I am just now beginning to see the light.

Most local web-based promotional programs that I am aware of have been SEO based. And I have found that, in spite of the hype, SEO is a pretty lame way to generate web traffic or, more importantly, leads.

This led me to believe that traffic-generation is where it’s at. But in fact traffic is much less than half the battle. The real gold is in lead generation. Generating and getting paid for leads is called “performance-based marketing”. Clients pay for results. No results, no charge.

This is a far cry from what most local businesses have come to expect from advertising media. They are accustomed to being sold traditional media packages that give no assurances whatsoever that results will be forthcoming.

That is why offering a performance-based advertising program to local businesses is basically a no-brainer. And why there is so much potential in this area for online marketers.

For a really good “training manual” on how you can do local lead generation for local businesses see the following:

Local Lead Plan (this is an affiliate link)

Here is an extremely informative blog post where Jeremy Shoemaker describes How To Make Money Setting Up Your Own Local Affiliate Program – a local lead generation service.

Most people who venture into web-based marketing begin by doing a web search for “online marketing” or some similar phrase. It doesn’t take long before they are diverted down the trail of the “business opportunity” seeker.

This is what I refer to as the BOM – the “business opportunity model”. An entire online industry has grown up around the idea of providing people with the opportunity to make money online, working from their homes. No 9 to 5 grind. No daily commute. No “boss” to answer to. And presumably no limit to how much money you can make.

Unfortunately most online “business opportunities” are blind alleys that end up leading nowhere for the vast majority of people who get involved with them. Business opportunity promoters are like the snake oil salesmen of the 1800s. They make all kinds of fantastic promises, but their systems rarely if ever deliver results – except for the promoter himself.

At their core most “business opportunity systems” are pyramid schemes that depend on a large base of gullible and often desperate people. What these schemes claim to sell is the “opportunity” to make lots of money by doing as little as possible.

The business opportunity model has virtually nothing to do with the real world of business. So it is important not to get sidetracked into thinking these promoters can teach you something about using the internet to market your own car dealership or coffee shop or sports bar. They can’t. Marketing real businesses online is a completely different animal from marketing to business opportunity seekers.

It may be true that the Business Opportunity Model can teach us things about the psychology of online buyers, or technical aspects of making sales online. But on the whole if you operate a legitimate business and want to do marketing on the web it will do you more harm than good to study the BOM or try to apply its methods to your own business.

To repeat, that’s because marketing concepts used by the business opportunity promoters are not addressing the real business world. They are not about real products like toothpaste, automobiles, vacation cruises or legal services. They are about selling illusion and deception and so they are best put out of your mind and forgotten.

Let’s imagine that you already have a business selling things to local customers. Or perhaps you want to develop one. It doesn’t really matter what the business is. You could be a restaurant owner, or you might make signs for real estate agents, or you may be an accountant.

Now let’s say you decide you want to promote yourself using the internet. Do you have any idea how to go about it? Is there a source of information that will tell you the alternatives, or the most important steps? Or is the “correct method” different for every type of business?

What you and millions of other local businesses would really like is a web-based marketing model that works for all types of local businesses. You want a strategy that outlines the steps in clear language that every local business person can understand.

You need a simple approach that any local business can apply – whether that business sells tires or kitchen appliances or home renovation services. You want to hear someone say “Here is how you go about marketing your business on the web. Follow this system and you can’t help but get good results.”

Does such a “system” exist? Unfortunately, most people who begin the search for online marketing advice end up wasting months and often years experimenting with schemes that simply don’t work.

Next in this series: The BOM – Business Opportunity Model