Small Business Embraces Local Email Marketing, Direct Mail Declines
Small Businesses Increase Local Email Marketing with Better Metrics
Borell published a new study, Direct Mail Falls, E-mail Soars stating that as more consumers are moving to the internet for their purchase and decision making, the mainstays of direct mail marketing continue to post steep declines.Right after the declines in newspaper and yellow page advertising, the most metric based of print advertising has finally caught up with the change in marketing technology.
While the doom and gloom on the decline of direct mail is not surprising. The findings that small businesses are turning more toward email marketing for local marketing has staggering growth levels.
Borrell is predicting that email will continue to distance itself from other online advertising formats over the next five years, growing to $15.7 billion and remaining the preferred channel among many marketers. In particular, most of the growth in email marketing will be local, the report forecasts.
“We’re expecting local e-mail advertising to grow from $848 million in 2008, to $2 billion in 2013, as more small businesses abandon direct mail couponing and promotional orders and turn to a more measurable and less costly medium, e-mail.”
Borrell’s Keys to Local Email Marketing
“Managing large e-mail marketing campaigns require database marketing expertise, a savvy sales force, adequate e-mail management software, familiarity with the rules and regulations and a lot of patience.”
Local email marketing should be a more attractive marketing channel because of its low cost and easier to see metrics and ease of testing. All three make for a better marketing channel than what direct mail could offer a small business serving a local market.
Adwords Basics for Small Business PPC
Here’s a great introductory video from Google’s team that explains the basics of Adwords in under 10 minutes. One of the easiest ways to understand how adwords can work for your small business to getting qualified traffic to your website.
What are your biggest stumbling blocks in getting a return on your ad spend?
Small Business Market Research: Break In This Niche!
Last week, Michelle MacPhearson did an amazing steal this niche video that caught me totally off guard. Not because it was amazing content delivered for free but because I had run the same market research for the growing taller niche just weeks earlier for a Clickbank affiliate offer and never moved forward with that data.
This week, I was running some market research for a small business in the MMA (mixed martial arts) niche using the same strategies of finding profitable easy to dominate keywords that can rank quickly. This time, I recorded the information to make it easy to pass on to the business owner and on this blog.
Finding Keywords In Your Niche:
Market Research to Gauge Organic Marketing Competition
Treat Your Website Like The Business It Is: Just One Thing?
Lee Odden’s just wrote a great post on SEO for PR firms. I wanted to address something related to his post that I hear on a small business level from entrepreneurs who want to know the magic key to unlocking more sales.
They’d ask:
If I could only do one thing to make my website better what should I do?
Followed up by ‘How fast before I see results?’
First off, there is no magic key to unlocking a website to getting a business more sales, customers or visibility. What there is, is the ability to make a small change that will lead to the biggest change in results.
So whats the 80/20 for improving a website to help the business goals?
The number one thing a website can do for a business is get in front of the right people –your ideal customers.
There was an amazing copywriter, who recently passed, Gary Halibert who asked if all things being equal and we were both in the restaurant business what one advantage would you want to help you succeed?
Some might say the best food, or in our case the best features on our website, others said a great dining atmosphere, for a website a jazzed up design. Instead, Gary said the only advantage he would want is a starving crowd.
Where is your business’ starving crowd? What keywords are they using on Google to fill their hunger?
That would be the one thing to do. Get in front of the hungry web searchers who are looking for your kind of business!
If you could have just one thing to help your business what would it be? It would be on the top of the results page for the keywords that my ideal customer is looking for and watch how much sales increase.
The one thing I would do is be a top result for my buyer’s keywords.
If I was on the first page of the search engines for a hungry keyword, I could get untold more sales than the small businesses listed on the third, fourth or even second pages because I have the buyer’s attention right away and most never look past the 4th listing.
So the one thing I would do is Market Research for Organic Search Results for the business’ market. Make your website’s goal to reflect the best keywords your market is looking for and be the first thing they see.
Keep in mind you want hungry qualified people who are not just your overall market but your real detailed description of your ideal individual in that market. If you’re a small locally owned business, chances are most of your market is within a certain mile radius of your office. Make sure that area is part of your profile’s critera. For example, if you’re a chiropractor, don’t be looking at coming up for your general market of back pain but instead back pain relief in your town would be much more like the hungry searchers who are in your real market.
