It won’t come as a surprise to online marketers who’ve been around for a while, but many of the same principles that worked in “old-fashioned” email marketing (Web 1.0?) apply pretty much directly to successful marketing using newer social media.

As the Web Marketing Ninja says in an article on ProBlogger.net,

You can take exactly the same approach you’ve been refining for your email list-building activity, and apply it to these new channels—the basic principles are exactly the same.

The four core attributes of successful email marketing are:

• Make your email capture findable.
• Provide incentives for people to sign up.
• Craft well-written, engaging messages.
• Give more than you ask from your list.

Translated into techniques for, say, promotion on Facebook these become

• Make your Facebook URL and Facebook pages findable.
• Provide incentives for people to sign up.
• Create content specifically targeted to your Facebook subscribers.
• Offer real value and quality content.

This means you should treat your Facebook channel as a way to connect in a meaningful way with a whole new group of people. These people are not necessarily going to subscribe to your list. You must engage them right within Facebook (and other social media.)

To read more see The Money’s Not In the List, it’s In the Connection

Matt Cutts recently suggested that SEOs “try to predict where Google is going in the future” rather than trying to “chase the algorithm”. Here are some Google predictions according to Peter Da Vanzo of SEOBook.com:

• Google will continue to dominate. Facebook is important, but not as a search engine.
• Blackhat sites will not bother Google unless they bother Google users.
• Google will continue to add services that maintain Google’s own position of prominence. This will probably mean the big boys with money will dominate even more than they do now.
• Go where your users are. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp. But Google clearly thinks Google is #1.
• Local is big and will get bigger. Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Local, Google Street View. Local on mobile. This is where a lot of the action will be over the next few years.
• SEO may change, but not that much, and not that quickly.

More on this topic:

SEOs Should Focus On Where Google Is Heading

Key Take Aways from Google’s Matt Cutts Talk at PubCon

Top 9 SEO Tips from Matt Cutts

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.

As Howard Greenstein points out in this article about Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups both of these things (pages and groups) can be used as part of a promotional strategy, but the difference between them can be confusing. It doesn’t help that Facebook has made regular changes to the way Pages works.

Anyone with a personal Facebook profile can create a Page. It has some of the features of a regular Facebook account. A Page can have “friends” – previously referred to as “fans”. It also has a wall that friends (fans) can post on. But unlike an individual page which can have only 5000 friends, a Facebook Page can have an unlimited number.

It is also fairly important that “friends” don’t have to be individually approved or accepted by the admin of the Page. They are more like “followers” in the Twitter sense. That makes it quite a bit easier to get friends for your Page.

The Page owner can enter updates which then show on the page as well as on each friend’s wall if they have set it to allow that. This is the primary way a Page owner can communicate with the friends of the Page.

What is a Group?

A Facebook Group is something like a club in the offline world. A Group can be open to anyone to join, or its membership can be tightly controlled by the administrator.

The Group’s content is also directly associated with the Group administrator. The Group is a sort of extension of the administrator. Group admins can also send messages to group members (maximum 5000) which then show up in their inboxes. This is not the case with Pages.

Differences and Uses

Groups tend to be set up for personal interaction. The Group interface is also not as versatile as that in Pages. For example, Facebook applications cannot be added to a Group.

Groups tend to be better for personal or group causes – e.g., Save The West Montrose Kissing Bridge. Pages, on the other hand are better for building brand recognition, promoting your business or band, or interacting with your fans.

It is also interesting that when you initially set up a Page you are asked to specify whether your Page is for

- Local Business
- Brand, product, or organization
- Artist, band, or public figure

This is an acknowledgment by Facebook that Pages are especially appropriate for local business owners.

More resources:
Creating a Facebook Business Page

8 Essential Apps for Your Brand’s Facebook Page – includes samples of some successful pages.

How to set up a Facebook fan page that works

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.

Of course this is not always the case, but you get the drift. Pay Per Click tends to be efficient when you can accurately target a fairly broad target market. You need to get enough clicks to make it worth your time, without getting a lot of irrelevant clicks. Those clicks can quickly make the campaign prohibitively expensive. Finding just the right mix can often be impossible for local businesses.

Targeting with Facebook ads
Facebook advertising changes all this, at least in theory, and at least as long as Facebook continues to be a regular destination for its millions of members. Why? Because Facebook lets you target your ads to narrow segments based on the information in member profiles.

For local businesses the most important targeting factor is location. Combined with other relevant factors (interests, hobbies, leisure activities, etc.) this allows you to get significant exposure to the narrow market segment you are trying to reach.

For example if you sell sports goods in your city you can target people who have indicated “sports” as an interest. Or “hockey” or “soccer” or “baseball”. Or if you want to target people interested in “ferrari” in Toronto, it’s no problem. Currently there are 2920 of them.

As Dennis Yu points out in a recent post about Facebook advertising you can even use the information in Facebook profiles to target customers of competitors.

The other nice thing about Facebook advertising is that it is cheap – at least compared to the alternatives. You can set up a campaign for a few dollars a day, let it run for a few days, and then fine tune it or replace it with something else.

You can also include a simple, non-provocative image in your ad. This not only helps you get clicks, but choosing the right image can enhance your brand and grow your presence even if nobody clicks on your ad.

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.

Breaking down your target market

Say you have a home renovation business and you want to market it to your local community. Who is in Box B? What is your “Target Market”? Or to put it another way, who should you address your marketing efforts towards?

The easy part is coming up with a rough statement something like this:

“My target market is Homeowners within a 30 mile radius of my home base”

Fair enough. But when you start to think about this a bit more you realize there are important sub-divisions within your target market. And each of these sub-divisions may require a slightly different message.

The most important sub-divisions will be between groups with different levels of attachment to your business – typically the list will look something like this:

- current customers
- warm prospects (including past customers)
- cold prospects

Generally speaking the job of the marketer is to move people up the ladder – to turn them from “cold prospects” to “warm prospects” and then to “current customers”. Having a carefully developed email list is a great way to feed right into this process.

How this applies to List Building

First, to have an effective email system you will probably need more than one list. A good place to start is to have one list for current customers, and a second list for warm prospects. What you need is the ability to tailor your messages to different segments of your target market.

Second, you have to realize we are basically talking here about a “permission-based” email system. This is one that subscribers have opted into (either explicitly or implicitly). Anybody who has voluntarily joined your list is automatically a “warm prospect” – someone who has expressed some level of interest in your products or services. And obviously current customers are the warmest contacts (and prospects for future business) that you have.

Third, “cold prospects” are, by definition, not on your list. They are just out there in a faceless mass waiting to be introduced to your company and converted to warm prospects.

Challenges of moving people up the ladder

The challenges involved in this kind of system are pretty clear.

1. First, how do you turn “cold prospects” into “warm prospects”?

This is another way of asking how you get them on your list. The standard answer is “Advertise”. Since you cannot reach these people in a “personal” way (such as email) you have to reach them in an impersonal way.

This does not usually mean sending out mass emails to people who have not opted into your list. Rather it usually means running ads in places like Google Adwords, Kijiji, or Facebook.

These ads can all be targeted to specific groups (homeowners, for example). In your ad you make an offer for a “free home renovation guide” or whatever. In order to receive the free gift they have to sign up giving you their name, email address, and (sometimes) phone number. By signing up they become “warm”. You’ve moved them up the ladder.

2. Second, how do you turn “warm” prospects into paying customers.

In theory this is relatively simple. You keep in touch with the people on your list by sending them a message on a regular basis.

Most eMail marketers will send out a combination of different types of messages. Some will be strictly informative with no sales pitch at all. Others will offer a “free” service – a “gift”. Some will encourage people to get involved by commenting on a blog post or by entering a contest. And others will be a sales pitch for products or services, often in the form of a “special offer” – a discount, for example.

The long term objective is not just to enhance your brand, but to build a relationship of trust with your warm prospects, and ultimately, to turn them into customers. Email marketing lets you reach different segments of your target market with different messages. That makes it ideal for tailoring your message to the specific job required for each segment.

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.

And I’m sure I’m not the only one. More and more people are reacting negatively to such ridiculous waste.

Just think of the millions and millions of big yellow books spread across the country. How many people do you think already refuse to use these things because of their environmental impact? Millions I would think. And millions more in the
very near future. Assuming the Yellow Pages even survive that long.

Are traditional media effective?

All of this misses the main reason advertisers have ALWAYS had serious misgivings towards traditional advertising. There is usually no way to monitor its effectiveness!

In fact, many traditional media usually discourage effectiveness monitoring. The reason is pretty simple. They know how ineffective most of their products actually are.

Is web marketing effective?

Unfortunately the same can be said for many web marketing and advertising products.

I am sure you been bombarded with advertising “systems” that promise to put your ads on thousands of websites. The pitch sounds convincing until you realize that nobody ever looks at these ads because nobody ever goes to the websites where the ads are placed.

Web marketing scams like that are a dime a dozen. There are literally thousands of them.

But the difference with web marketing scams is that you can immediately see how ineffective they are. There are hundreds of simple, inexpensive ways of monitoring your website traffic (Google Analytics, for example), and they tell you exactly how much traffic you are getting, and where it is coming from.

The other difference beetween web marketing and traditional advertising is that it is easier to monitor the effectiveness of a web campaign. Of course an effective online campaign has to be done correctly. We will discuss this further in a future post.

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