Phantom CTO » small business website

Small Business Market Research: Break In This Niche!

vanessa — Sat, 16 May 2009 04:38:09 +0000

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?

vanessa — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:58:05 +0000

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.

Websites That Work Are Geared To Buyers, Not You.

vanessa — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:49:44 +0000

Tech Truth: No one cares about your business. Your website, as a business channel, matters when it solves your markets’ specific problems and needs.

When you’re looking for ways to make the most out of your website the first place you go is not to your designer. It’s your marketing arm who can tell you in detail about your buyers and client profiles. It’s the go to person is the person in your company or the part of you that can paint the picture of your best customers and what makes them tick. That’s where you start when you want your website to be a way to seriously grow your business. If you don’t know that much about your typical or ideal customer, answer these questions and you’re on your way.

The buyer profiles are made up of the answers to questions like:

What are your buyers looking for?
What do they do, what responsibilities do they face every day?
How do they find and process information and value that fit their needs?
What are their concerns and worries?
How do they like to be engaged and reached?

The reason why a buyer profile or buyer persona is the starting point for having a business website that matters is that a plan to make everyone happy makes no one happy. Into business terms, it means that if your website is meant to make bigger business improvements in sales, new clients, visibility and beat out competitors and you don’t have a strategy that breaks up that success into paths and roles, you won’t be successful.

Move Away From A One Size Fits All and Into the Divide and Conquer Business Website

A great example of a company that turned around their website into a business growth channel is RightNow Technologies. David Meerman Scott posted a great write up on what they did to create buyer personas, build their website and marketing around those and the results that came pouring in quickly. Results like quadrupled conversions inside three months.

Web Presence as Small Business Equalizer

vanessa — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 03:30:27 +0000

Solutions Stars Video has some great video clips about the value of being online. Guy Kawasaki adds that any business who’d like clients in more than a 5 mile radius from your store should have a blog. Or at least a site.

Web Presence Can Tip the Balance of Market Access to Progressive Companies

Having a web presence can show what you’re about to your market is the great flattener of reaching out to your ideal market. No longer is it large companies that have the resources to stand out and grab the attention of their market but small companies can speak equally as loud and draw in customers from their market by showing what they stand for and what they are passionate about.

Here’s our general strategy. Lets just be real and authentic and show customers our personality.

We tell our employees: use your best judgement and be yourself. –Tony Hsieh

Maybe your small business should just have a blog, maybe as a business owner you should be on Twitter. Really, there’s no way to tell if that’s the right web presence for you but the barrier to entry has been demolished by these kinds of web tools. The bigger question is if resources are not limiting you from showing what you’re really about to your market by having a web presence, what excuse will you let yourself believe?