This is a presentation that I gave at the Yankee Dental Conference. Although the slides use a dentist as an example, the content is applicable to all local businesses trying to drive new customers or patients to their business using local search marketing techniques.

(Email subscribers: get the presentation on Slideshare or via the Masterful Marketing Blog directly)

Let’s face it! Your future patients, clients and customers are going to find you one of two ways:

• Through a referral from a family member or friend, or
• By searching online using keyword phrases that include a local component.

And if they look online and you aren’t there, or worse, you are there with negative reviews and an inconsistent brand, they will choose someone else to meet their needs. So in order to effectively compete, you need a high quality online presence that is consistent, controlled by you and helps your business or practice stand out from the rest.

Consumer Trends

• According to Google’s Marissa Mayer at SWSX 2011, 20% of all searches are local (40% if mobile), i.e. dentists marlborough ma
• According to comScore, there are 18 billion monthly searches across the major search engines on average, translating to approximately 3.5 billion monthly local searches. Google’s share is about 65%.
• According to the Local Search Study conducted by TMP/15Miles/comScore:
  • 80% of local business transactions occur within 15 miles of consumers’ homes
  • 69% of consumers are more likely to use a business if they find their information online
  • 82% of local searchers follow up with a phone call or visit your business
  • 61% of online local searches result in an offline purchase.

Local Search Opportunity

There is a huge opportunity for small businesses to optimize their local web presence.

• According to Marketing Sherpa, only 27% of 1500 businesses surveyed actively optimized their site for local search
• Only 16% of local businesses have claimed their Google Places page
• According to BIA/Kelsey, by 2015, 40% of the total marketing spend for small businesses will be spent on online marketing

Simple Local Search Marketing Plan

Local Search Marketing Plan

In 6 steps, you can have a simple local search marketing plan that will help you take control of your online visibility and be found more often by that profitable local prospect.

1. Conduct a Web Presence Analysis
2. Develop a consistent brand
3. Define clear messages to your ideal client/patient
4. Select which online strategies you will use that make sense for you
5. Put together an action plan for implementing the strategies
6. Review periodically and adjust as necessary

Selecting Your Online Strategies

Local Search Marketing Strategies

Being found in a local search is a combination of:

A quality website – Establish your online home base with a quality WordPress website. WordPress gives you the best option for being able to update the content and maintaining control. Do not allow someone to create your site in a way that ties your hands.

Local search - Local search includes claiming your local business listings in the top directories and optimizing them based on your top keyword phrases.

• Do a search for your business and identify the local directories that you find a listing. Then claim at least the following: Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Merchant Circle, Yelp, Insider Pages, City Search and Local.com. Select others that may be popular in your area if necessary.
• Select the top keyword phrases that people use such as “dentist marlborough ma” or “plumber sudbury ma” and use them in your descriptions in your listings.
• Ask for reviews. According to a Local Consumer Review Study conducted by BrightLocal, 69% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Put a button on your website to direct your audience to a page that lists links to all of your local business listings to encourage reviews across different sites.
• Fill out your business listings completely, including descriptions, links to your website, images and videos, etc.

Local Search & Social Media

Social media profiles – The selection of which social media platforms you use is dependent on your business and your resources. It does not make sense to try and be present on too many platforms if you don’t have the time or people to help you stay actively engaged. A simple strategy like the following may be sufficient:

• Create a Facebook Page for your business or practice
• Put a Like Box on your Website and
• Encourage your customers/patients to like your page.

Then create a system that helps you remember to post daily with tips, ideas and news of interest to your target audience.

Own Your Web Presence

Remember that your web presence is a business asset and like other assets, you need to remain in control of them.

• Always register your own domain – use a service like Godaddy.
• Purchase a hosting plan that supports WordPress – Blue Host or Host Gator come highly recommended but there are others. Do your research. Then find someone that will build your site in WordPress and will train you on how to maintain and update the site yourself.
• Research keywords and optimize your website using your keyword list. Have the WordPress SEO plugin installed to help you implement on page SEO for all pages on your site.
• Add Google Analytics and Webmaster tools to track progress

The bottom line is to seek help but stay in control of your web presence. It’s fine to outsource when necessary but work with someone who understands the importance of you maintaining control of your business asset. In the end, it is your business’s reputation that is on the line and as the business owner, you need to ensure you always are aware of how you are perceived.

What is your plan for adding local search marketing to your marketing activities?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Local Search Marketing – Getting Found in a Crowded Local Market is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Everyone has a personal brand, but not everyone acknowledges it and manages it proactively. Some people don’t like the term “personal brand” as they feel people aren’t brands. Some people think that it is a thinly veiled term for self-promotion, publicity or image management.

In fact, your personal brand is so much more. It is a way of consistently projecting a true, authentic view of you, your expertise and your promise of value to the marketplace.

The personal branding process enables you to:

Discover who you are, develop a consistent image and make it visible both in person and through your web presence to provide value for your audience.

Why is personal branding important?

Personal Branding Process

Having a strong personal brand is important to your success or the success of your small business. Even if you work in a corporate position, it is important that your company support its employees in developing their individual personal brands. A personal brand:

• Helps you to clearly and consistently project who you are, what you do and why you do it;

• Is a promise of value to those with whom you work;

• Answers the question what makes you different and why;
• Allows you to focus on your strengths and follow your passion.

Passion, Purpose and Personal Branding

Understanding and following your passion and purpose, whether it is the reason why you chose to go into business for yourself or the career choice you made, is the key to your personal brand. The purpose – the emotional connections you make with those you help – is why some people naturally want to connect with you and not someone else in the same field. And if you are passionate about what you do and are comfortable with the way you are perceived, your confidence will start to become contagious.

Benefits of a strong personal brand

• Increases visibility and value:  You become the expert for those needing your solution, increasing your value in their eyes and allowing you to charge fairly for your services.
• Increases confidence: When your brand is strong, authentic and compelling, it increases the confidence you have in yourself and projects that confidence to everyone around you. We all know people want to be around strong, confident and successful people and having this strong brand becomes your beacon in the sea of business owners.
• Raises credibility and authority: The more you establish yourself as the authority and expert in your area, the more people seek you out. People want to work with the experts and although someone may be just as good as you, if they aren’t known through their personal brand, they will be hidden.
• Sets expectations: Your personal brand speaks volumes about what you can do and how you will do it, differentiating you from your peers, colleagues and competitors.
• Influences whether your prospects buy from you or your competitor. Your passion and purpose will attract those that will want to work with you.
• Creates trust with your prospects and clients. A strong personal brand that is well developed adds an emotional attachment that becomes part of the decision-making process.

An exercise that will help you figure out your personal brand regardless of whether you are just starting to develop it or have one, is to answer the following questions as if you were developing your personal marketing plan. To help with this exercise, I’ve adapted the my marketing plan template to help you jot down your answers.

• What is your passion and purpose?
• What are your values? What do you stand for?
• What are your short term and long term goals? Where do you want to be in a year? Three years?
• How do you want to be perceived? (i.e. linear, focused, collaborative, connected, expert, ethical, etc.)
• What are your core strengths? What are your weaknesses? (not to beat yourself up but to understand them so you don’t try to pursue something where one of your weaknesses is mandatory)
• How do other people describe you?
• Who is your target audience? Who do you want to work with or for?
• Who is your competition?
• What makes you the ideal choice for your target audience to do business with you rather than your competition, i.e. what makes you different?

Finding your personal brand is not a quick exercise. It takes time and thought to really know your passion and purpose in life. And sometimes it evolves through comments people make, people you start to work with and seeing yourself with a different perspective.

Have you started discovering your personal brand and does it work for you?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Personal Branding – Discovering the Authentic You is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Why You Need a Powerful Web Presence

A successful web presence that attracts your ideal client and makes a great first impression is now much more complex, incorporating not only your website and blog, but also your social media profiles, business directories and review sites.

It’s no longer enough to just have a website. Your website is just one component of a complex network of information about your business that projects your brand and expertise to those in search of a product or solution.

The opportunity to develop an solid web presence as part of your online marketing is immense. A well thought-out plan can help you gain visibility, develop an expert reputation and create a large digital footprint that attracts attention of your ideal prospects.

There are many steps and tactics to make your web presence effective that will be different depending on your business model. But regardless of your tactics, there are six overarching elements that are required for successfully creating a powerful web presence.

1. Solid Strategy

Developing a web presence strategy is not a difficult exercise as it should be integrated into your overall marketing strategy. If you have your marketing strategy defined, include the following additional information:

• Figure out your goals for this effort. Are you looking to increase visibility, obtain an expert reputation or drive inbound leads? Knowing what you are trying to achieve heads you towards the right activities and eliminates wasting time on exercises that won’t get you where you want to go.
• Understand all the places that your business listing can be found and determine which ones are worth the time to claim. Do a search for your business name and catalog the various directories where it is listed. Compiling this list helps you understand the overall effort it will take to pull it all together and help you plan your time and resources.

2. Coherent and Consistent Brand

Web Presence - 6 Elements to Ensure Success

Is every place I can find a reference to your company consistent in what it says and how it looks?

Think about how many businesses that have a similar name to yours. When someone searches for your business and finds you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+, or finds your Google Places page or a listing on a review site, including the Better Business Bureau, will they immediately know it is you?

To ensure people always recognize your web properties and to build a recognizable expert brand, be consistent in all you do including using the same design elements such as color, images and logos. When a visitor finds your business, make sure there is no doubt that they have found the right business.

3. Continuous Participation

You can’t just set it and forget it. You have to be present regularly to respond to questions, participate in conversations and acknowledge those who mention you on social sites. You also need to keep content flowing regularly, updating your blog, offering new content to your visitors and sharing content from others you find interesting.

On the local search front, it is also not enough to just let your business listings lay dormant. Seek them out and claim them, ensuring your company name, address, phone numbers and all other relevant information is accurate and consistent. To search engines, Masterful Marketing and Masterful Marketing, LLC are not the same.

4. Relevant Content

Creating the right content for your audience is difficult, but if you create a content strategy that defines what you are going to write and a content marketing strategy to define how you will use that great content to gain visibility, you will be more likely to be found when your audience is searching for a solution. Get their attention and help them out of a problem and you become a valuable resource they will keep going back to for advice.

5. Ongoing Optimization

You have an opportunity to optimize your web presence, including website, social profiles and business listings using your top keyword phrases. Once again, you can’t just set it and forget it because search engines change how they index web pages frequently, so you need to produce new content and incorporate basic SEO components to stay visible and highly ranked in the search engine results.

6. Religious Review

Periodically do a review of your web presence to be sure all listings are kept up to date. If something changes, update it across all properties. If you get a review on one of the review sites, know about it. You never want to be surprised by a good or bad review. Keep a spreadsheet of all the sites where you have claimed your listing so you can keep them updated when necessary.

How does your business look to searchers?

Web presence takes a commitment in time, effort and persistence, but the payoff is huge. Ensuring that all of your web properties work together to project the consistent image and professional reputation you want is important to getting found regularly. Make this the year that you commit to your online web presence and make it the best that it can be.

Have you done a web presence analysis and put together your plan?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

6 Critical Elements to Guarantee a Successful Web Presence is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

As this is the ninth and final post in the series on Inbound Marketing, it is fitting that it is about creating an inbound marketing system to ensure you remain consistent in your activities. As the final post of the year, it is also good to remind ourselves that success comes in taking little steps rather than setting lofty resolutions that get forgotten by the middle of January.

Create an Inbound Marketing System

Now that you have your inbound marketing plan and have established your WordPress website and social media outposts, it’s time to start generating and nurturing leads and turn these prospects into customers.

But how do you incorporate inbound marketing into your daily schedule while still working in your business?

A marketing system enables you to consistently execute your activities and see the results. Without a system, you will find yourself in one of two places:

• Doing nothing because you don’t know where to start;
• Overwhelmed and ineffective because there’s too much to do while still servicing clients.

Create a System that Works for You

As with setting any goals, if you write them down you will be more likely to achieve them. Put your system in writing and make sure that it will work for you. Start simple and expand if you find that you can do more:

• Start with an activity plan for when you will do certain inbound marketing activities - write content, scan RSS feeds to share, post on your Facebook Page, etc.
• Book time in your calendar to make it part of your daily schedule, and stick with it. Your goal is to stay active and visible in order to continue to attract those that may want to form a trusted relationship.
• Be realistic about how much you can invest in time and money on marketing your business. If you only have 30 minutes each morning or at lunchtime, schedule it to do some inbound marketing activity that will benefit your business.

A Sample Inbound Marketing System

My system is probably simpler than you might have expected but like you, I have to balance my time between marketing my business and helping my clients. It works for my business and that’s what counts.

First a couple of recommended tools.

I use Evernote as a way of organizing my inbound marketing activities. I use it to organize content from wherever I am because it works across all of my devices – smartphone, tablet, laptop and desktop – and it syncs to a hosted service so I always have my latest “to do” list or a place to write reminders available to me.

I’ve grown very fond of Buffer App. As I read my RSS feeds, Buffer makes it very easy for me to schedule posts to my Facebook Page and Twitter. I can pick and choose which posts make more sense on either platform and set my schedules so that I can space them out. I can’t wait until they support Google+!

The Schedule

Monthly

Schedule your Inbound Marketing Activities

Spend a couple hours at the beginning (or end) of each month planning your content for the (next) month. Schedule those hours in your calendar so you won’t forget! I do my planning in Evernote so if I have a few minutes to spare, I can jot down ideas for the coming month.

• Determine topics for blog. You might want to check out Mack Collier’s Topic Bucket Trick to help you post more.
• Write monthly eNewsletter to send to email list.
• Define topics other content uses such as free download to grow your email list.
• Review my rankings in Google for my top keywords – determine changes if necessary
• Schedule the month in advance for times to work on your business!

Weekly

Schedule your time each week to work on your content. Writing consistently is very difficult for many people so don’t get discouraged! The content plan is the most important thing as that helps you decide what to write. Again, I keep a list of potential topics for blog posts in Evernote.

• Write content for my blog (well almost weekly!) and optimize.
• Review my social media profiles and update as necessary.
• Assess my Google analytics to determine keywords that would benefit from more content (and save in Evernote for my monthly planning exercise).

Daily

Figure out a time when you can take care of the daily tasks. I do mine in the morning over coffee and then at lunch. These are times when I take a little break from client work to see what’s happening and stay visible. Does it always work out? Of course not, but most days it does.

• Respond to friend, follow and connect requests.
• Scan Google RSS Reader for interesting content; Add them to Buffer App to schedule tweets and Facebook Page posts.
• Comment on a blog post or two. A comment strategy is a good strategy for building visibility and inbound links.
• Post directly to my Facebook Page. Direct posts are automatically sent to Twitter, which then sends the post to LinkedIn. This is not necessarily the best option for all small businesses, but given my resources, I need to be more efficient.

Having a plan and a schedule will make you more likely to succeed. If you book it in your calendar and treat those appointments as you would those with clients, then you will have a far better chance of staying on course.

What is your inbound marketing system for the upcoming year?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Inbound Marketing System – Keep Focused and In Control is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

This is post eight in the series on Inbound Marketing, focusing on how to nurture all those quality leads you have generated.

Lead nurturing is what it sounds like: continually providing support and nourishment to leads (in this case acquired through your inbound marketing efforts) by anticipating their needs and sending them new, fantastic content that is interesting, educational and relevant.

Lead nurturing is not new – it’s a process that has been used by quality sales people for years, taking prospects through various nurturing stages until the time is right and they are ready to buy. The major difference between traditional lead nurturing and today is you are touching your prospects using social media, email marketing and blogging.

These people gave you permission to contact them when they signed up for your offer. If you ignore them, you will let these leads turn cold and possibly drive them to buy from your competition. According to Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research, MECLABS (parent company of MarketingSherpa), “most lead nurturing programs don’t begin to impact conversion before at least five meaningful touches, and that it’s important to continue nurturing leads whether it takes five touches or 25 touches to get them to the sales-ready point”.

Nurturing the leads from your inbound marketing lead generation activities

This means you must provide the right information at the right time to help your leads move through the buying decision process. Begin to communicate with them, offering valuable information and “can’t say no” offers every time you touch them. These meaningful touches must provide the value they expect so the prospect begins to differentiate you from the competition in their minds.

Sounds Good – Now How Do I Do This?

If you truly understand your audience and you know what type of information they need, then you can craft a plan that sends the right information to them at the right time without becoming a pest. But, if it were that easy, we all would be wallowing in the fruits of our success.

Remember the content marketing strategy we wrote back in September? You thought it was just for lead generation, didn’t you?

In fact, your content marketing strategy should include the content you will need in order to provide meaningful touches for those who have opted in so you can take them from being a cool lead to a hot prospect.

This content will depend on the complexity of your product or service. Small businesses primarily need educational content that helps your prospect understand:

• Who are you and what do you offer?
• Are you an expert in your field?
• What is your value proposition?
• Can you help me solve my problem?
• Do I want to work with you?

In other words, it is not about selling your services or products through your content, but about selling you as a valuable resource for them. This type of nurturing develops a relationship built on trust and respect.

To get started, set up a schedule for when you will touch your prospects and with what content. Use varying types of content, such as your blog, articles, eNewsletters, white papers, videos and presentations, and begin nurturing your leads.

In summary

• Lead generation with content marketing is geared towards finding new prospects that are not currently in your database that may be interested in what you have to offer
• Lead nurturing is taking the leads you acquired and cultivating them over time to turn them into prospects and eventually into customers

How will you be nurturing your leads generated through your inbound marketing activities? What type of content do you plan to provide at each step of the funnel?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Lead Nurturing – Build Relationships with Future Clients is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

This is post seven in the series on Inbound Marketing, focusing on how your inbound marketing activities can help you generate quality leads. 

Lead Generation, Inbound Marketing

By now you are probably wondering “what’s in it for me” when it comes to inbound marketing. It seems like a lot of work and is there any benefit to my small business?

The ultimate goal of inbound marketing is to generate leads. All of this work is futile if in the end you have not generated any interest in your products and services. But like everything in marketing, generating leads using inbound marketing is a process.

Let’s take a look at where we are in that process to date. We:

• Have an inbound marketing plan that determines the strategy we will use;
• Understand our audience and what content they need to solve their biggest challenges;
• Know our top keywords and how to use them effectively in our content for better visibility;
• Know which social media channels we need to build communities and develop relationships.

We have the pieces in place for our small business to be found among a sea of small businesses. Now our task is to create compelling offers to attract more visitors, create solid communities and capture visitor information thereby generating leads and building a strong in-house email list.

Once we have developed our own email list, we can use it to build relationships and trust with your prospects that is both consistent and relevant to their needs. And because of the relationship you build between you and those in your communities, when they need help, it will be highly likely that they will turn to you.

The Offer

Blogging regularly and ensuring your blog, Facebook Page, LinkedIn profile and other social media outposts are well optimized to increase traffic are your first steps to becoming visible. Up to this point, you have given your visitors quality content through your blog and social media outposts without any strings attached. Taking it to the next level, what can you provide that has so much value to them that they will give you their email address?

There are many lead generation strategies that may be valuable to your audience.

• Will an eBook on the top 10 questions in your industry be something of value? How about an eBook that goes into depth on success stories and case studies?
• Can a free tele-class or webinar covering a hot topic draw your audience in? Include a free recording of the event so those who can’t make it will still sign up.
• Is your audience in need of useful templates, checklists and free tools to simplify a process?

The Forms

So how many of you have a website with one or less lead capture forms?

That’s not a silly question. I’ve come across many websites that either require me to call them or let me leave without them knowing I stopped by. In my experience watching inbound leads for my clients, many people conduct searches for products and services at night, after dinner and after their children have gone to bed. If you don’t have a form that makes it easy for them to contact you when it is convenient for them, you are missing a huge opportunity to get qualified leads.

A well placed lead conversion form, visible above the fold, with a compelling offer is an important component of your website. Keep the form short and only ask for as much information as you really need.

Next Step

Once you have captured that email address, your next step is to build trust with your community. Remember it’s more than just collecting email addresses. You need to determine what your audience wants to get and how often. Some companies can email more frequently because they are making offers that are time based (weekly deals or coupons from Staples) or personalized (Amazon). Other companies like ours need to gauge how often your list will appreciate an email correspondence.

What offers have you provided that captured the most leads for your email list?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Lead Generation using Inbound Marketing is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Google Apps is a hosted suite of Google applications that uses your branded domain name, giving you an email and collaboration environment that is accessible from any browser. The free version includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites.

So you’re probably wondering what this has to do with marketing? Most of my clients’ prefer Gmail over the hosted email solution because it is accessible, reliable and easy to use, but as a marketer, I would prefer that my clients use an email address that reflects their website domain. Setting up Google Apps gives you the best of both worlds.

Benefits of using Google Apps

• Your email is sent using your own domain for branding, but you are still using Gmail and taking advantage of the 7GB of storage.
• You don’t need a separate mail client on your PC or Mac, however Google Apps Gmail does integrate with Outlook or Apple Mail via iMap. I’m still synching with Outlook so I have copies of important emails locally but have easy integration of my email accounts with my Android smartphone and tablet.
• Google Apps Gmail is reliable and if you want to pay $5 per month for the Google Apps for Business, you get a 99.9% up time guarantee SLA (service level agreement ) and 24×7 support (see comparison chart below).
• Gmail has one of the best spam filters I’ve experienced. I had an email account that was getting serious quantities of spam. I forwarded the email to my personal Gmail account and reduced my spam by at least 90% if not more.
• Google provides enhanced security through a single sign on option (SSO), forced SSL (note the https), custom password strength requirements and more to ensure your email account is secure.
• Shared email servers at most hosts have the challenge of ensuring their IP addresses stay off the ISP blacklists due to SPAM, which is near impossible to monitor. Unfortunately, you as a user won’t know until you get an email returned from someone with an error indicating that your IP address has been blocked. Google has specific sending limits to prevent this from happening.
• Google Calendar integrates with Outlook via Google Calendar Sync which helps you keep your schedule available in Outlook and on your smartphone or tablet.
• Contacts can be exported from Outlook and imported into Google Contacts. When you import your contacts, contacts are updated if there is a duplicate. So although there isn’t any automated sync of your contacts, an occasional export / import takes care of keeping your contacts up to date across all your environments.

The Quirks

• Messing with the Domain Name Server at my hosting account is stressful exercise that I normally prefer to avoid. I don’t like touching things that could render my entire online presence useless. However, Google walks you through how to Switch MX records at your domain host and point your email to their servers.

• I would really love to integrate all my Google (i.e. Gmail) accounts under one dashboard while keeping them separate. I now have 3 separate accounts – personal, business (which I use for Google+) and now one under the Masterful Marketing domain. I would definitely keep my personal Gmail account separate, but it would be nice to have my Google+ account, Google Reader and both Gmail accounts accessible through one interface. From the browser you can’t log into multiple Google accounts simultaneously. I managed to solve the problem for my calendar by sharing the one that syncs with Outlook and smartphone/tablet with the Google Apps account. And although you can integrate Gmail accounts, I’d rather keep the inboxes separate.

If you are a small business with under 10 user accounts, you can use the free version, giving you a very good alternative to your hosted email solution. Once you try the free version, you may wish to purchase the Google Apps for Business at $50 a year per user to gain the benefits of more applications, more storage and more support. The following is the comparison chart:

Google Apps Comparison

For many of my clients, Google Apps is the best option to ensure they have a branded email address while still enjoying the simplicity of Gmail.

Have you considered using Google Apps for your email solution for your business? If you use them, let me know your experiences!

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Google Apps – Should You Replace Your Hosted Email? is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

This is post six in a series of posts on Inbound Marketing, focusing on social media marketing and developing your social media outposts to help attract your target audience and build brand recognition for your small business.

Inbound Marketing - Social Media Pillar

Social media has evolved into a key marketing channel for small businesses wanting to gain visibility, drive traffic to your website and generate new leads. The next step in your inbound marketing effort is to:

• Identify which social networking sites will work best for your business, and
• Create optimized social media outposts to ensure your brand can be found.

Understanding which social networking sites are right for your business and how to take advantage of them to generate leads is usually a challenge for many small businesses. There are too many social networking sites to choose from to cover them all. It is far better to do a great job on a few relevant platforms than spread yourself too thin across too many.

Determine which social networking sites are the best for your business by choosing those that provide the most direct access to your target audience and the most value for your particular business. In addition, your social media marketing strategy includes not only the where you will engage with your audience but also what you will do to provide value on each social network.

The best way to illustrate successful social media marketing is to use a couple of examples:

• A restaurant may choose a Facebook Page and Twitter as a starting point. The Facebook Page for a local business with a physical address becomes a Facebook Places Page allowing customers to check in and post reviews. The establishment can interact with their customers with fun posts on food, asking questions and getting customers to participate in the discussion. The restaurant may promote daily specials, new entrees or other items of interest to both Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Once Facebook and Twitter gain momentum, the restaurant can now claim its business listing on Yelp, UrbanSpoon, Google Places and other local directories where people may search for restaurants. These sites also make it easy for customers to provide reviews. Finally, once you have a established these outposts, explore adding Gowalla or Foursquare for location based marketing and Groupon or Living Social to offer the occasional deal to attract new clientele.
• Social media marketing for a service business will be one that focuses on providing useful content to build your expert reputation. The blog is the critical social media hub where you provide original content that is of interest to your target audience. Twitter and LinkedIn accounts plus a Facebook Page will help you build related but different networks where you can share useful information, engage in conversations and follow what is happening in your industry more effectively. Depending on your business, a YouTube channel may be a benefit for adding multimedia content. Unlike the interaction the restaurant is trying to get from their customers, the service business is looking to primarily educate and inform, thereby building trust with their followers. Before you start posting, however, review each platform for the unique needs of each of your audiences.

Why create and optimize your social media outposts?

When you create your presence on relevant social networking sites and optimize them for your major keywords, you:

• Increase your business’s web footprint, helping people find you more easily.
• Reach more people with your content, increasing your reputation as an expert.
• Establish a more consistent brand with more visibility, increasing brand recognition.

As part of your inbound marketing strategy, your social media outposts such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn create important communities that encourage conversations and build trust for your brand. This makes your content more visible to your target, more readily found through social search and increases your chances of prospects spreading your content further throughout their own social networks.

Which social media outposts will you be using as part of your inbound marketing strategy?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Social Media Marketing – Create Outposts to Drive Inbound Traffic is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

This is post five in a series on Inbound Marketing. This post covers search engine optimization, an essential element to ensure that your content can be found by those looking for your products and services.

Search engine optimization plays a critical part in the success of your inbound marketing efforts by increasing the effectiveness of the other three pillars – content marketing, social media marketing and public relations – to drive targeted traffic to your website. All of these content strategies need to be optimized in order to work towards the common goal of inbound marketing:

• Attract visitors
• Keep them coming back
• Convert visitors into leads
• Nurture leads to build relationships and hopefully, turn them into customers.

A very timely infographic by Brafton News entitled “Why Content for SEO” provides numerous statistics on the value of writing quality content on search engine optimization. Search engines are changing the way they present and rank information to users, making the results much more personalized and localized to each individual user.

As pointed out, “investing in original, quality content creation is essential to SEO success in the current search climate“. Therefore, let’s not play games with search engines and provide them what they want, written in a way that helps them index and rank your content more effectively.

Before you start optimizing your content, develop your keyword list. How would your prospects and customers search for your products and services? Come up with a list of the top (as in less than 10) keyword phrases that you absolutely want to rank high in the search engines and focus on using those appropriately on your site, especially on your pages. For your blog posts, you most likely will have a longer list of keywords that you want to use for blog categories.

Quality content written to focus on specific keywords has several benefits:

• You are more likely to create targeted content that meets the needs of your audience;
• You will write more clearly, enabling your audience to understand what you are writing about;
• You will enable the search engines to better index your content specifically for how you want to be found.

Let’s review how to optimize your WordPress blog.

• Make your permalinks pretty to ensure that your keywords are utilized in the URL. Although this is a simple setting in WordPress, I’ve seen “online marketing experts” blogs set at the default: http://yourdomain.com/?p=123 rather than take advantage of  http://yourdomain.com/optimize-your-wordpress-blog/. Which do you think is better?
• Install a search engine optimization plugin to your website to help you with the key areas that you need to address – i.e. the SEO title, meta description and use of keywords within the content itself. I recommend WordPress SEO by Yoast. In addition, try out Scribe SEO by Copyblogger Media (which I use) or InboundWriter (which I’m testing on this post).
• Be sure to use your keywords properly throughout your content to enhance your efforts. Include them not only in your SEO title tag, but also as anchor text for links, both internal and external, to help the search engines determine the best terms to use when ranking that particular page.
• Create and encourage inbound links by commenting on other blogs and linking out to other expert posts from within your content. Make sure your content gets the widest distribution by posting it on your Facebook Page, tweeting it out to your Twitter followers and posting it on LinkedIn and Google+.

For small businesses, the above tips to optimize your content are a good start. More details can be found in The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog by Yoast (who developed the WordPress SEO plugin).

If you haven’t included search engine optimization in your online marketing efforts because you thought it was too difficult, now is the time to invest. There are some fabulous tools that can help you with the process, enabling you to win the inbound marketing battle.

What questions do you have on SEO that I can answer? Also, share your SEO resources that you find useful with all of us.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

SEO: Essential for Effective Inbound Marketing is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

We interrupt our Inbound Marketing Series to provide a brief recap of the Facebook updates coming to personal profiles and Pages. In my opinion, these changes provide a cleaner look and more control of your content. 

Personal profile updates:

The New Facebook Timeline

• Timeline – will replace your current personal profile layout. Expect it to roll out over the month of October. I installed the Timeline on my personal profile using the instructions in the post: How To Get Your New Facebook Profile In Just 5 Minutes. I love the new cover photo (the real big one) where you can showcase something in your life that is important. I also like the clean look and ease with which I can get to information (such as pages I’ve liked sorted by year that I liked them) without a lot of clicking around.
• Subscribe – allows you to follow people’s timelines without having to friend them, similar to Google+ and Twitter. Whether you allow people to subscribe to your post feed is entirely up to you. If you do allow people to subscribe, they only see those posts that you share publicly. Your friends are already subscribed to your feed.
• Updated privacy settings – choose what people see post by post. Go into your privacy settings and take a look at all the changes. Facebook has done a nice job of describing them clearly.
• Improved friend lists -Smart Lists create themselves and stay up-to-date based on profile info your friends have in common with you. You can update them as well to make them more accurate. Close Friends, Acquaintances and Restricted lists – See everything posted by close friends. See important posts from those in your Acquaintances list. The restricted list is a kinder, gentler way to ignore people without unfriending them. People on this list only see what you share publicly (like someone subscribed to your feed, not as a friend).

Facebook Business Page Updates:

• Pages can secure a user name with fewer than 25 fans. However, pages that use “local business and places” still need the 25 fans.
• Friend Activity navigation link on your Facebook page allows you to see what your friends are saying about the Page.
• Send an update to fans using Facebook messages is no longer available. They want you to post to the wall so it goes into the news feed.
• Non fans can post on your page wall to encourage more engagement.
• Discussions and review tabs will be removed at the end of October.
• Custom tabs on your page must support SSL as of October 1. Static HTML iFrame Tabs Facebook Applicationhas already handled this for you! However, if not, you might want to read this article: How to Prepare for Facebook’s Secure Hosting HTTPS Requirement
• The final disappearance of FBML is June 1, 2012. If you have a custom Facebook tab in FBML, start planning now to replace it before the deadline.

Questions? Post them to the Masterful Marketing Facebook page and I’ll be happy to answer them.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Recap of Facebook Updates is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.