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The Best Marketing Platform for (Very) Small Businesses

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If you could pick only one  —

If you could pick only one type of marketing to spend time and money on, what would it be?
search engine optimization In a survey of small businesses last November by MerchantCircle, the 2,555 respondents overwhelmingly chose search engine marketing as the one channel they would use if they were to put all of their marketing dollars in to one basket. Organic search engine optimization (SEO) was selected by 32.9% of the small business owners. Other choices were traditional (19.7%), social media (16%), paid search (9.8%), mobile (3.7%) and none of these (17.9%).

80% of the respondents were very small businesses with fewer than 5 employees.

How about you? What would you choose, and why? Tell us in a comment below.

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Why Hiring a Professional Marketer is Good for Small Businesses

/ copywriting, marketing, Rank Magic, web design / 1 Comment

One of our strategic partners, Eagle Soars Consulting, has written a good piece explaining why investing in a professional marketer/designer is good for your business. The points they make aren’t restricted to the quality of work you can expect, though of course such work is almost always far superior to what non-marketing small business owners can produce. They also point out that the ROI is better when you hire a professional.
Some of the advantages of hiring a professional marketer or web designer or copywriter are

  • Why investing in a professional marketer is good for your small business.They bring objectivity and aren’t blinded to customer needs by being too close to the operation of the business.
  • You can offload the creative burden to them, reducing the strain on you and/or your employees’ time and attention. That allows you to continue to focus on what you do best: running your business.
  • A professional can produce effective marketing copy. That’s far more than simply grammatically correct text  — it’s a compelling customer-focused story that motivates readers to want to do business with you and only you.
  • Professionals help with managing deadlines, and aren’t distracted by business emergencies you may be exposed to. In the constant battle between what’s important and what’s urgent, the professional you hire can focus on the important marketing issues and free you up to handle the urgent issues in your business.
  • When you add up the true cost of doing it yourself  — salaries, overhead, lost productivity, distractions, and so forth  — using outside professionals is almost always less expensive.

The article by Eagle Soars Consulting is focused on marketing consulting, copywriting and web design. But it also applies to search engine optimization. Sure, our blog of more than seven years provides tons of information that (given the time and inclination) can be implemented by you, a small business owner. But our experience and that of our clients is that the folks at Eagle Soars Consulting are quite right. It’s easier, better  — and cheaper  — to invest in professional help.

If you need professional help, please consider Rank Magic and our strategic partners.

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Why SEO Is Not Enough

/ marketing, page content

We’ve written in the past about how a powerful SEO campaign is not sufficient to boost your sales and profitability. We broached the subject three years ago, but there’s more to say at this point. Too many people think that if they just do a good job of optimizing their site for prominent search visibility, the battle’s won.
Not true.
Years ago many small businesses suffered from the Field of Dreams delusion: “If you build it (a website) they will come (customers)”. It was a rude awakening when they discovered a great website can still be invisible on the web. Clearly, they needed search engine optimization so people searching for what they sold, whether a product or a service, could find them easily.
Improving sales graphAlas, driving lots of visitors to your website isn’t enough either. The web site has to close the deal and make the sale. That’s an entirely different process from SEO. It doesn’t help your bottom line if SEO gets you great rankings in the search engines and those rankings drive lots of visitors to your site who don’t become customers. If your visitors can’t find what they want to buy, all the preceding effort to design a website and optimize it is thrown away. If the website is confusing, if it reads awkwardly, if it has spelling or grammatical errors that make people think you don’t pay attention to details, or even if the website doesn’t have an effective progression from entering the site to closing the sale  — any of those problems can render all the other work on the website useless.
A good article by the folks at Level343 says

To be blunt: SEO alone will not sell your product. It doesn’t matter if you have 2 million visitors if no one wants to buy your custom-made banana peel high heels for $300. It can’t make your product look interesting. It can’t make your prices worth paying. It can’t make the shipping costs look attractive, your services needed or your site usable.

As a bottom line to their article, they said it well.

SEO brings traffic; it does not, necessarily, bring sales. Creating content that is buyer-value focused does. Creating calls to action that really mean something (buy now just means spend money) brings sales. SEO brings traffic so the sales are possible.
You don’t have to join the businesses suffering from too much traffic and not enough sales. Adjust your focus to included value-added content!

For professional help in optimizing your website so it brings in motivated customers and convinces them to buy from you, contact us at Rank Magic.

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Why Doesn’t Your Newsletter Get Read?

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You do have an email newsletter, right?

Sending out a periodic email newsletter can help draw customers and prospects in to important pages on your website or to relevant blog posts. But how many read them?
How many recipients open your email newsletters?Very often statistics from your email newsletter host will show that a relatively small percentage of readers actually click on any links to your website or blog. In fact, you’re likely to find that lots of recipients don’t even open your newsletter. (Some may view it in preview mode and unless they click on something that doesn’t count as an open. But still, a low open rate indicates a problem.)
Mistina Picciano of Market It WriteMistina Picciano of MarketItWrite offers 8 tips to make sure people read your newsletter. If you have a low open rate, focus on her tip #2: Use subjects that say “read me”. A compelling subject line to your email will get people to open them. That’s a subject we at Rank Magic discovered late in the game. For years our monthly newsletters had a subject line something like Rank Magic SEO Newsletter for April. Does that make you want to stop and read it? I didn’t think so. Last month’s newsletter hinted at some of the content inside with this subject line: Disappearing Rankings | SEO Myths | Google on Article & Social Media Marketing. A bit better, but not as compelling as it could have been. A better subject line might have been Why Did My Rankings Disappear? or perhaps Don’t Believe These Dangerous SEO Myths!.

Better newsletter subjects is something we need to work on, and chances are it’s something you need to work on, too.

 

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Basic Tips on Web Analytics

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Website AnalyticsWe all have them, but too few of us use them. Web Analytics, site logs, web site statistics … whatever you call them, they’re usually provided free of charge by our web hosting company. And if not, you can easily add free Google Analytics to your web site.
Why bother? Some of this stuff might be hard to understand. Sometimes it results in information overload. Some of the reasons people don’t use their web analytics are:

  • It’s too confusing
  • Information overload
  • What am I supposed to do with all this data?
  • Won’t all this tracking be expensive?

To address the last concern first, many web analytics packages are free. And if you focus on the really important items, it’s not so tough after all. Adam Singer wrote a primer on six things to focus on in your web site analytics. Here’s a quick list, but check out Adam’s article for the real meat on this.

  1. Unique Visitors – how many new people come to your site on a daily/weekly/monthly basis?
  2. Traffic Sources – where do those visitors come from?
  3. Referring Keywords – if they came from search engines, what did they search for the most?
  4. Top Content – what are your most visited pages?
  5. Location – where do visitors come from geographically? If you’re a local business, that may be more important than if you have an eCommerce web site.
  6. Campaign Tracking – which of your marketing initiatives are paying off in terms of web site visitors?