Is it Time to get on Board the Facebook Train?

Facebook Places (just announced) is a direct competitor to Google Places.   Any small business that wants to take advantage of people shopping, and looking for places & services with their Smartphones should consider developing their Facebook presence.

What is Facebook Places?

Facebook Places is a mobile product that  can be accessed through Facebook’s most recent iPhone app or via on other phones by accessing touch.facebook.com.  If a Facebook Place is already created, a business can claim its Facebook Place and merge their existing Facebook Fan Page with Facebook’s Place page. Facebook Places is similar to Google Places because information about the business is created and available.  The extra spin is that Facebook allows Facebook users to “check in” themselves and any of their Facebook  friends.  Check out Facebook’s video below to get a better understanding of Facebook Places:

Why should I care?
Remember that Facebook is the #1 application used on iPhones and Droids.  When people check into a Facebook Place, they are broadcasting that business to their Facebook network and any network of a friend they may have also checked in.  Right now if  10% of FB users use Facebook Places , that’s 50 Million people!  Over 100 Million people a month using Google Maps on mobile phones to find local businesses, Facebook Places may instantly have 50% of the value of Google Places.

I am not yet recommending investing in Facebook Places for all businesses. But if you are a restaurant or a business where people meet their friends,  Facebook Places could become as useful as Google Places, Review sites (ex. Yelp or UrbanSpoon) and Twitter combined.

For some large consumer brands such as Coca-Cola and Starbucks, their Facebook Fan page is becoming more important than their own websites.  Kraft Foods’ Oreo is the No. 3 brand page on Facebook with an 8.7 million fan base growing at a clip of 71,000 a day.

At a minimum I would recommend that you search Facebook to determine if they have created a Facebook Place for you business.  If Facebook has not I would create one.  This is a small effort for any small business, that could be the next big thing in promoting your business.  As always if you need help give me a call or send me an email.

This is a big topic and Part I of a series of Posts about Facebook Places I look to develop.  If you want more information now, here is a list of useful Facebook Places Articles.

I have been working with Rib City Grill in American Fork and have established a great starting point for taking advantage of Google Tags.  The key is that when you search for “Restaurants American Fork” Rib City Grill is on that list (Click here to understand how to get on the Box 7).  If that is established then Google Tags can be leveraged very effectively.

Good Reviews & a Coupon - How can Customers not find out more

By being on the Box 7 list on the first page of Google searches, a business has a great deal of free exposure to potential customers.  The next step is having the customer first (or only) look at your information on Google Places.  Before Google Tags, having multiple, great reviews was the only key differentiator.  Now with Google Tags, you can differentiate by being the only one (at least right now) with a coupon or promotion.

If a customer is viewing Google Maps, Google Tags are also highlighted and right now with few businesses taking advantage of this new offer from Google you really stand out.  Check out some of the views of  how Google is highlighting Rib City Grill’s use of Google Tags.

The last view can potentially expand your reach and notice beyond the local map.  In a sea of red pins, customers will start to look for those lonely Yellow Tags with scissors indicating a coupon that saves them money.  And Remember that all these views are also on Google’s applications on smartphones.

Customers will be looking for those Yellow Scissor Tags

Take advantage of this new Advertising tool quickly and get ahead of your competitors that are either not in the know, or are slow to move.  But there is a process here.  They are:

1. Take control of your Local Business Identity
2. Maximize your presence and get on the Box 7 on Google
3. Get positive reviews of your business
4. Start advertising with Google Tags

I can help you with this effort

It seems that in the past few weeks, Google is again integrating Yelp reviews into Google places.  Not only that, but Yelp reviews are the first reviews Google lists for businesses that have Yelp reviews (indicated by www.yelp.com/biz/name of business ). Yelp reviews are before reviews placed on Google (indicated by maps.google.com) or any other review service such as Citysearch, or yellowpages.

So if you have been getting good reviews rejoice.  If Yelp has not been your friend, start pointing your happy customers to review your business on Yelp

Yelp is back in the Saddle with Google Places

Get one - Use it like a Customer

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I saved $150 on Sunday (covering the cost of my Droid)  using my Smartphone in the purchase of a new washer and dryer. My wife and I started our search  at our local retailers. We wanted to make a decision right away. We learned about models and availability from the stores and sales people,  I used my Droid  to find other stores close by and had the same product, in stock at a much lower price.

So why should you care? In the old days before my Droid I would have purchased my washer and dryer at the second place we went to.   They would have the  product in a few days, but they were selling it slightly above the price I saw in Consumer Report. If I were a retail salesman who saw a customer openly tapping away on his Droid, I would have liked to know what information came up on that smartphone to drive the customer away. I am happy; I saved money and got the washer sooner, but that salesman was not so glad, he lost a sale!

The good news is that if you have been developing your local business web presence (As I have been suggesting), all that effort will be reflected in the information customers will find when they are surfing the internet on their smartphone. And when they are doing that research at a competitive store they may  leave your competitor and come to you.

Each year since 2008 has been touted as the “Year of Mobility” and it has not come, I am thinking that 2010 may finally be “THE YEAR” , but whether or not, it is definitely the year that retailers need to understand how 32% (65 Million) of cell phone customers are starting to use their Smart phones in the US.

Every retailer needs to get a smart phone and use it like a customer. Retail store owners need to be aware of what is showing up on potential customers’ iPhones, Blackberrys or Droids. Your competition is being channeled through smartphones. The worst part is when potential customers are routed to your competition right in front of you by these evil phones. On the other hand, if you see your customer bringing up information on their smart phone, and you know what they’re seeing  about your local competition , you have an opportunity to develop your strategy to sell against this situation.  This is another situation where a failure to understand the changing technology landscape can hurt your business, while knowledge of the technology can give you a leg up.

This is the first of a series of posts regarding the impact of Smartphones to the small business.  Stay tuned for discussions on:

• How to shop with a Smartphone
• What applications customers are using on Smart Phones
• How to discover what Smartphones are providing about your products and services
• Smartphones and restaurants
• Using Foursquare and Gowalla for fun and profit
• Strategies to take advantage of customers using smartphones

What is your experienced with customers with Smartphones? Have you been effective in dealing with the situation?

Google’s control is highlighted by the latest change of your Local Business Listing – The addition of “Nearby Places you might like”. This feature could have both positive and negative effects on your business.

Google’s Nearby Places could give your established customers the idea to go to a competitor, or you could be the competitor and steal their customer.

Top 7 list for Google Search "Upholstery Carlsbad, CA"

So what has Google done? In the middle of your Local Business Listing Google has placed a section that list other business that may be of interest to someone who is looking at your business. As an example I am going to look at Upholstery in Carlsbad.

Round 1 – Fanco’s Upholstery gets the attention

In the example, Francos Upholstery is the top of the list of Google local places for the search Upholstery near Carlsbad, CA.  Learn more about how to get on the top of Google Places here.

It is on the top so most people will click on it to find out more… It is clear Franco’s owners are  taking an active participation in embellishing their local business listing, they have a review and have created a coupon

Where would you click next?

But look what is below that – My favorite Upholstery store, La Costa Upholstery, with 15 reviews and a 5 star rating. My guess is most people will click on La Costa Upholstery at this point.

Round 2 – La Costa Upholstery steals attention

So now let’s look at La Costa Upholstery’s situation with the roles reversed. La Costa Upholstery does not have a coupon (They need to work on that), but if you look at the competitors in Nearby places (including Franco’s Upholstery) you would not click on any of them (Maybe We-R-Fabrics).

Would you click away from La Costa Upholstery?

So Google addition of Nearby places should help La Costa Upholstery and hurt Franco’s Upholstery.

So what does Google say about Nearby Places?

Here is Google’s description of what they are doing in Nearby Places in a local business listing:

You’ll notice that we do not limit these suggestions to places sharing any specific characteristic; instead, we use a broad set of signals to come up with what are hopefully the most interesting suggestions. We’re still working on refining these signals, so bear with us if your serendipitous discovery of a new place is even more unexpected than you’d anticipated.

The reality is that  most of the businesses listed in this section of your Google Places are going to be competitors to your business. Like all things on the internet, Google Places is going to continue to change, so you need to keep vigilant of those changes and benefit from those changes and make your competitors suffer.

What is a Local Business to do?

Given that you are not in control, what can you do?  The answer is to push the Nearby Places section as far down your page as possible. This means adding content, pictures, video and REVIEWS.  Here is the complete Local Business listing for La Costa Upholstery.  You have to read a lot of very positive info about La Costa Upholstery before you see the competition in Nearby Places.

Push the competition down the page

Round 3 – La Costa Upholstery keeps attention and get the phone call from the customer.

What are your first impressions of “Nearby places you may like?” Tell us if you you share our concern by leaving a comment below.

Make Google your friend - Steal Mcdonald's business

Email Marketing First!

Building a relationship with your customers, so they come to know, like and trust you is the best way to keep them returning to your business. Today social media is all the rage for keeping in touch with your customers. If you are not Blogging, Twittering or posting on Facebook you feel like you are missing the boat.

But don’t forget Email Marketing. Emails are a cost effective way to keep you at the top of customer minds when they are thinking about buying the products or services you offer.

If you have not been collecting emails of your customers, start today. You will be surprised how quickly you can build a large list of customer emails. So how do you collect email addresses?

#1 Way – Ask for them
Just like Internet Reviews, you need to ask for emails from your customers. Many businesses get stuck on the first step, collecting customer email addresses. You need to slip it into the normal business transaction that occurs and give your customers a reason to provide you their email. Reasons to ask for email addresses can be as simple as:

• To send them information, invoices, etc
• To remind customers of appointment
• To inform a customer when service is complete
• To inform customers of your next sale
• To sign up for loyalty programs
• To know about upcoming events

Other Ways of collecting email addresses….
Comment and Survey Cards can be one of the easiest way to collect email addresses from your customers. Along with emails this can provide valuable information about your customers.

Automated email marketing on your website. Many email marketing services provide tools that integrate with your website. The key is you need to provide your prospective customer with a reason to give you their email. The best reason is create information that your customer would be interested in and only provide it after they have submitted a request.

Email Marketing – A Simple Solution To Changing Your Customer’s Buying Habits

Combined with an absolutely irresistible offer, Email marketing can be one of the easiest and fastest ways to get customers to change their buying habits, and entice them to shop with you. Once they are your customer, you need to keep them shopping with you by building a relationship with them so they come to know, like and trust you, or they’ll go to the next business that makes them a great offer.

Once you have attracted those new customers, make sure you do everything you can to enroll them into some sort of VIP program or frequent buyers club. Send them regular ‘Client Only’ offers and special deals to keep them loyal, and you’ll increase your sales while making your relationship stronger.

Direct Email Marketing Process

You can create a highly automated follow up system that constantly reminds your customers about you, and keeps you at the top of their minds when they are thinking about buying any of the products or services you offer. Email Marketing should be part of your overall marketing plan. With the proper email tools & services it takes very little time & money to get a robust, monthly, mass email marketing program implemented.

A proper Email program will increase your customer retention rates, and you will see your profits soar.

It’s Your Turn: How do you get customer emails?  What’s am I missing here?  Please leave your comments below.

What are Others Doing?

Here is a brief overview of the what you will discover in this 33 page report titled 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report :

• How much time marketers invest with social media activities
• The top benefits of social media and how time invested impacts results
• The most used social media tools
• Marketers future social media plans

For my part Social Marketing is one of many tools that will delivery your Small Business Advantage. Contact me so that I can provide you a Free Analysis of your present (or get started) Internet Presence.

Tune up your Advantage

The first step of any Internet effort is understanding where you stack up. Let me provide you an analysis of your Internet Presence. If you are considering starting or have been using Social Media already my FREE analysis can set you in the right direction or give you a second opinion.

The “Tune-Up” includes:

• Review of your website and the social media elements currently being leveraged on the site.
• Review of current local online marketing efforts (where is the site listed today? e.g. Google maps, etc.)
• Review of current social media efforts (what sites are being leveraged, and how.)
• 30-minute phone consultation to address your social media goals/concerns.
• Written summary of findings and recommendations to improve current efforts

Take the first step and let me help you generate awareness and traffic for your store cost effectively.

Call ( 760.420.8734 ) or email me today

The New Marketing Buzz Words We Need to Understand, Incorporate into Our Vocabularies, and USE to Do More Business

Every so often technology introduces something that changes the way we do business and the way we live our lives. We are currently in the midst of an explosion of ideas, models, and methods of doing business.  I want to expose some of these new techniques to you.  You might be familiar with some of these terms while others will be completely foreign to you. However, most of the concepts are deep seeded in some form of traditional marketing with a new high tech interpretation.

“Going with the Flow Marketing“ or the other name I like is “Intuitive Marketing”. This is the more natural way of marketing. For years we have been talking about Contrarian Marketing or swimming upstream. That’ s daring to be different, standing out in the crowd,  or just disagreeing with conventional thinking. That still works but something has changed.  There is a new term we are starting to use, “that’s intuitive.” What that means is “Does it make sense? Is it logical? Is that the way it should work?”

We started saying intuitive when it comes to websites. We want to be able to navigate a website easily. We don’t want a detailed list of instructions on how to maneuver a website. If it requires that, we are gone.  Now this concept has spread to just about everything else we do. It has to make sense.

This applies to the way we use the internet to search for the things we want. We have another new or at least modified term called, “Inbound Marketing”. That just means that we establish a system that fosters customers looking for us as opposed to us reaching out to customers to sell them. The difference between outbound and inbound marketing is the difference between running an ad in the local paper and hoping someone comes into the store. That is “Outbound Marketing” as opposed to creating a “landing page” which is just one page out of your website that is dedicated to a word, phrase, or concept that your perspective clients might be looking for.

“Why do we need landing pages? Don’t we just want all of our traffic to go through our home page?”

That would be nice but it also doesn’t go with the natural flow of things–it’s not “intuitive”. Here is a simple example. Say you own a men’s store and also sell merchandise on the web. (Selling on-line just makes what I am about to say even more powerful.)  You sell casual and dress shirts, pants, blazers, suits, belts, all accessories, etc. You, as a store owner, want your customer to enter your website through the home page, see all of the things that you sell, and have them click onto the page for dress shirts.

There are a couple of problems here. If I am searching for dress shirts, what do you think the chances are for your home page coming up in the top 10 to 20 spots? Slim at best on a “natural search”.(That is any type of search other  than a sponsored link, a.k.a. a “pay for click” campaign where we pay Google or whoever a fee  to have a small add  on various searches.)

OK, so you don’t want to create a separate landing page and you might not need it IF you have a page on your website that just talks about Dress Shirts.  It could be the intro or title page to the dress shirt section. So if you were to “beef up” (add more applicable content that someone might just be searching for), you will have increased your chances of someone finding you, naturally.

Isn’t that the same as advertising?  Perhaps it is advertising but in a very different way.  All you are doing is removing the barriers and streamlining the possibilities for someone who is looking for what you sell to find you. It’s natural and intuitive because you are only appealing to people who have an interest in what you sell. You are not interrupting them, or trying to convert them into buying something else.  You are just making the prospect’s journey easier while putting your business in the most favorable light. When you think about, it’s really a form of “Pinpoint Marketing” (a way of reaching just specific groups or individual customers). It is really the same thing with a different twist or application.

Going along with this more logical or intuitive way of looking (searching) for things, consider this. Using the same menswear example about someone searching for dress shirts, think about all of the ways we could refine a search for dress shirts. How about French cuff dress shirts, monogrammed dress shirts, spread collars, button downed, silk, cotton. Polyester, all white, two tone, and what about all of the different dress shirt vendors? There are a multitude of possibilities for creating simple landing pages that could help someone find what they want and what you sell. You are making it easier for the customer to buy from you.

These pages don’t take long to create. 15 to 20 minute maximum if you have the right software to use or your website was created by someone who has set up the ability to add simple pages. Think of the possibilities. We can start to have websites with hundreds of simple pages.  Sound crazy? It’s happening every day. It’s just a new way of thinking and looking at the world of on-line marketing…Inbound Marketing.

For example small applications (Networking 2.0) for iphones translate Google Business Listing & Google Maps and translate that information on the fly to direct a user to the top BBQ listing along a freeway and then the user is directed to their restaurant choice.

Where to Eat? Finding restaurants using GPS

There are two take home messages from an application like this. First you need to continually work on being on the top 10 box of Google maps.  In this example the iphone application starts with a list of the top ten BBQ restaurants that the odds are great that the user will select from.  The second point is that the Top 10 lists are not perfect as the #8 choice is not even a restaurant.  This shows that developing this information is still in its infancy and you, as a smart restaurateur, can quickly get on this list, as it may not be very competitive.

The other finer point is that as a restaurateur, if you really want to work on this aspect of your advertising you need to make sure that you are categorizing your business around the list of options in the GPS software.  In this application the list looks like this:

Restaurant Categories

I have not researched if most of the applications use the same catagories, but I would bet that the developers of these applications are not trying to change the world on the data side, but like most databased applications are looking to use standard data-sets, that Google and other large search engines supply.