When it comes to driving website traffic, local business has typically gravitated more readily toward buying traffic, primarily using PPC (pay per click) advertising, over tapping into social media and learning how to harness social media marketing.

The tendency for local business to favor PPC over Social Media is understandable. Local business operators look for quick results, and usually don’t have the bandwidth to focus their efforts on mastering online marketing. They tend to have limited marketing budgets and often favor the “do-it-yourself” online marketing approach rather than spend precious budget on outsourcing their electronic marketing to a qualified professional or online marketing company.

At first glance, social marketing looks promising to the “do-it-yourself” local business owner. Social media marketing seems to be all the rage, and the outlay of dollars to conduct social marketing campaigns can be minimal. But actually generating successful results with social media is elusive and local businesses quickly discover how time consuming social marketing can be. Frequently, with nothing to show for the countless hours invested.

Hence, the favor toward PPC. Buying paid traffic has generally worked reliably enough. Traditionally, the ability to achieve page one placement for PPC advertising in the search engines (Google Adwords), has been reasonablly attainable for many local businesses in most local and regional markets. However, this trend may be starting to shift. PPC competition, even for local business, has become much stiffer. The prospect of beating the competition at PPC advertising by paying higher and higher bid rates continues to push PPC into a more expensive proposition for local business.

The shift to social media from paid search starting to accelerate for local business

Typically, local businesses have been more comfortable with the fast and scalable results from paid search. The biggest frustration with social media has been the time.

Social media focuses on building relationships and interacting with your market which can be very time consuming. This is difficult for businesses to grasp since they have been used to more immediate and scalable results with paid search.

However, a recent survey conducted by Roost finds local businesses beginning to prefer social media marketing over paid search. 

This study reveals that more than 71 percent of the small businesses surveyed believe social media is more effective than paid search. And only 15 percent of those surveyed continue to hang on to paid search as their most effective means of online marketing.

Which social media platforms do local businesses rank as the most popular?

Of the respondents surveyed, 84 percent of local businesses find Facebook to be the most effective marketing channel. LinkedIn was ranked second with 8 percent followed by Twitter at 7 percent. And only 0.5 percent of the local businesses surveyed did not find social marketing effective at all.

Econimics and cost savings seems to be the key driver behind the rising trend toward social marketing for local business. Roughly 45 percent of businesses surveyed claim they use social media because it “saves money. Local businesses also suggest they actually enjoy using social media as a “fun way to interact with people”. And a third reason with 44 percent of the votes is that social media helps keep the local business ”top of mind” with consumers.

If you have a local business and you’re not leveraging social media marketing, you should start to think about how to get started.  Social media works and it’s not a passing fad, it’s not going away. Most important, social media is becoming the consumer choice for interacting with local businesses and brands.

Yes, social media takes time and has its challenges, but it’s effective if you learn how to do it right. And as social marketing continues to evolve and mature, it may make the most sense for your business to leverage the help of a social marketing professional.

Are you tapping into the social media marketing opportunity?

• Easy to manage with a content management system.
• Search Engine Friendly means you can improve your website’s ability to rank higher in the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
• Interactive – unlike a static website, a local business blog encourages a two-way conversation with your reader, audience, and market that builds a sense of community from your website.

How Does A Local Business Blog Help My Social Media Strategy?

Maybe you think that blogs have been around for awhile and don’t draw the same attention that they used to. Perhaps with so much recent focus and attention on social media with Twitter and Facebook all the rage, people feel that the business blog has fallen out of the spotlight to some degree. You couldn’t me more wrong.

Not that social media isn’t critical to your local business marketing strategy, the fact of the matter is that your local business blog should be the foundation of your social media strategy.

Chris Brogan, Founder, New Marketing Labs. “No matter what, the very first piece of social media real estate I’d start with is a blog.”

To prevail in today’s competitive online environment for local and small business, you need to leverage a multifaceted  combination local search marketing, video marketing, social media marketing and mobile marketing. But it all rests on the underlying foundation of a properly designed and optimized local business blog.

Once we help our clients understand the power and advantage of a local business blog, one of the first questions that comes up is “If I already have a web site for my business, do I need to start over with a blog?”

To begin with, many of our local business clients are currently struggling with their website. That’s one of the reasons they come to us in the first place. When it comes to solving website SEO problems, increasing targeted traffic, fixing website structure and navigation issues, creating better community and stickiness, and providing a more user-friendly content management system to facilitate a fresh supply of ongoing content, there’s no contest that a local business blog provides the ideal solution.

But what if the local business already has a website? And it’s not a blog.

Do I Build a Separate Local Business Blog for my Business, or Do I Start Over with a Blog as my Primary Website?

To incorporate a blog for your local business, here’s a a good rule of thumb we suggest you follow. If you already have a website and it’s working for you, there’s no reason to blow that up and start over with a blog.

Most local businesses will fall into one of two categories.

1. Your current website is working for you, and you would cause more harm than benefit by blowing up your website just to move to a blog.
2. Your current website isn’t working for you, and you have little to lose by starting over with a blog

Let’s clarify what we mean by “your current website is working for you” …

• You already have a domain with some age on it (at least 6 months or more)
• You’re indexed and ranking well in the search engines for your primary keyword and at least a few more secondary keywords.
• Most important, you’ve already established a number of off-page backlinks pointing to your website.
• You are seeing consistent traffic coming in, at least 1,000 unique visitors per month or higher.

Now don’t get hung up on precise numbers, thresholds and cutoff points. These aren’t meant to be hard-fast rules. Rather, these are guidelines to help you make a good decision.

In the case where your current website is working for you, then we recommend you create a local business blog as an addition to your online presence, either as a separate site (on a separate domain or subdomain), or integrated into your current website (plugged into your current website’s navigation with a similar look and feel).

On the other hand, if you already have a website up and running for your local business, but it’s not really working for you yet, then you really don’t have that much to lose by scrapping your existing website and starting over.

Let’s be clear what we mean by “your current website is not working for you” …

• You haven’t achieved much if any ranking in the search engines for your main keywords.
• You’re not seeing any measurable traffic coming in.
• You don’t have many off-page backlinks established for your website.
• It’s not necessarily about all the time you may already have invested in your current website. In many cases, your current investment in content, images, and graphics for your current website can be re-purposed and leveraged as pages, posts, graphics and content for a local business blog if your choice is to make this move. Much of this work can often be re-usable.

The next question that follows is “when you say make my primary website a local business blog, why the push to move to a single website?”

Fair enough, and good question. Here’s the thinking …

As a small business, you have enough challenge keeping up with one website, let alone two sites (a primary static website and a separate blog).

If possible, we think you will want to simplify your life, not add additional effort and overhead to your plate. If you can operate with a single website platform that gets the job done, that will be easier then supporting and maintaining two websites.

Does A Local Business Blog Have The Website Functionality I Need?

Keep in mind that a blog as your primary website is fully capable of providing most or all of the functionality of a traditional static website on top of the blog functionality and blog advantage. And a local business blog will very likely be easier to manage and support than a static website.

In addition, we’ve demonstrated in enough cases that for the cost and effort to whip a non-performing static website into shape to resolve issues with SEO, navigation, on-page and off-page linking, content management overhead, traffic generation and look and feel, the customer would be better off going with a blog. The local business blog will often provide a better solution for less money.

The one exception is a scaled up eCommerce site. If you’re selling a large catalog of products from your website, you’ll need a capable shopping cart to handle the number of SKUs (thousand+ products or more). Lighter weight shopping carts are practical and effective on a blogging platform (in the range of 500 product SKUs or less). But for more scaled up solutions, it’s best to go with a dedicated website that integrates a full featured shopping cart solution.

Bottom line, you should find a way to leverage a blog for your local business. You have a choice whether you make a local business blog your primary website or you compliment your existing traditional website with a separate blog. To improve your search marketing strategy with a local business blog, you can make either solution work equally well for your local business.

More and more consumers rely on their mobile phones and mobile smart devices to stay connected online everywhere they go. The shift from being tethered to the home or office desktop PC to the mobile phone or mobile smart device is dramatically changing the way many of your prospects and customers will discover and engage with your local business online.

It seems like everywhere you turn today, whether you’re in a restaurant, walking down the sidewalk, waiting in line … people are glued to their mobile phones, either surfing the net, friending someone on Facebook, or text messaging away.

More often than you realize, people are using their mobile devices to search for a local brick and mortar business.

But there’s a problem …

Have you ever searched for info on your phone, found a website, and had to struggle with a website that simply wasn’t designed to display on a mobile device? Most websites are designed today for more display real estate on full-sized desktop monitors and for faster Internet connections with higher bandwidth pipes.

On a mobile device, these websites are painfully slow to download pages bogged down with bandwidth-sucking graphics and images. And they simply don’t rendor or navigate properly on the limited display sizes found on mobile phones and smart phone devices.

Pretty irritating, don’t you think?

The answer is to enable your site for mobile devices.

But don’t panic, this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to completely remake your site. After all, you don’t want to abandon your existing website that may be doing just fine displaying on full-sized desktop computers.

Wouldn’t it be great if your website would automatically display in its full glory on a full-sized desktop monitor or display? But when you access the website from a mobile device, the website is automatically formatted and optimized to display on the smaller portable mobile phones and smart devices.

Well, at NewCorridor, all of our hosted websites for our customers are designed to do just that. See the example to the left. That’s a snapshot of the NewCorridor.com website you’re viewing right now, demonstrating how it will look when you access the site from a mobile device.

In fact, if you’re viewing from a desktop PC, try accessing our site from your mobile phone or smart mobile device. Simply navigate in your smart phone’s browser to newcorridor.com and have a look.

As you can see, on a mobile device the display format is much simpler. We optimize out the sidebars, complicated menu navigation, expensive bandwidth-intensive graphics, and render the site in the simplest, easy-to-navigate format suitable for almost every mobile device. Simple and effective, you only have to worry about managing a single site, and our smart mobile technology automatically takes care of the rest. Now that’s the way it should work, don’t you agree?

Another equally effective approach is to start with a smaller set of mobile-enabled landing pages for your website.

We can create dedicated landing pages designed to display perfectly on mobile phones and mobile smart devices.

For example, see the mobile landing page for our site to the left. If you want to take a look on your mobile device, you can navigate directly to this page at newcorridor.com/mlp/mobile .

These landing pages can include properly formatted and sized header graphics and banners, as well as opt-in forms for capturing names and email addresses.

Mobile landing pages that are optimized for easy access and proper display on mobile devices allow you to interact with your prospects and customers when they’re on the go.

When you enable your mobile landing pages to capture names and email addresses, then you can send your prospects more detailed information later on when they are viewing your site from their laptop, iPad, or home computer.

So no excuses. With mobile enabled websites and mobile landing pages, now you can be sure that your website is easily accessible from full-sized desktop computers and displays, as well as the rapidly expanding population of mobile phones and mobile smart devices.

If you’d like to find out more, click on the following link to learn more about mobile enabled websites and mobile landing pages for your local or small business.

Here are several pointers that small businesses can easily follow to take their mobile marketing and cell phone advertising plans to the next level:

1. Games and Contests

Communicating to your market by text message is proving to be highly effective for small and local business. Conducting a contest by text message (often referred to as “Text-to-Win”) has proven to be very successful marketing strategy with small business owners. Here’s how this works. Essentially a variation of a prize drawing, the object is to get people to text a message via their cell phone to a designated SMS (Short Message Service) code. By doing this, the prospect enters your contest or drawing for a chance to win a prize. Here’s the magic. Once they send the text message to your service, they effectively opt-in and you now have their cellular phone number so that you can continue to marketing to them via text message campaigns.

Prize drawings deliver such outstanding results for a variety of reasons. These campaigns are rapid and tend to generate confirmations almost instantly. A good prize drawing mobile campaign can also generate good buzz, shoppers will spread the word. And you are creating a new prospect database (or list) simultaneously as you go.

It’s important that you provide an enticing prize so you can draw people in. You don’t necessarily have to give away the farm. Often you can create appeal with a low cost offer like a “free dinner” at your restaurant, or a “free facial or massage” at your day spa. Keep in mind, even if you offer a more expensive give-away, you will attract hundreds or possibly thousands of prospects who want to enter for a chance to win the prize. However, with only one individual prize winner, this still results in a very economical marketing campaign. And you retain a powerful list of people in your list that you can continue to target with your mobile marketing campaigns.

2. Mobile Lists are Social

Text message lists are an easy way to establish client interaction along with developing your following. As you develop your brand and reputation in your market, people will join your list in order to keep up with specials, offers, promotions and news about events that you have on the calendar. These lists take on a social nature similar to a club, such as a VIP members club. This is as easy as prospects and customers opting-in in order to get regular text notifications on their cell phone regarding new products, in-store sales along with cellular coupon codes intended for in-store redemption. This is permission marketing to your targeted market at its best.

If you’re a local brick and mortar business, mobile lists are a fantastic way to stay in touch with all your purchasers and be sure everybody is up to date regarding what is going on in your company.

When you market to your mobile list, this process will definitely continue to keep these people returning to your business for more!

And marketing to your mobile list is much simpler and often less work than publishing full newsletters, or well thought out blog posts on a continuous basis. Remember, text messages are only 160 characters. Short and simple works best! How difficult is it to come up with a two sentence announcement, message, or special promotion several times a week? For example, a simple message like “come see the latest dresses we just got in, first 10 people in the store this afternoon receive a 10% discount”. You get the idea!

3. Mobile Based Text Polls and Voting

There’s no better way to qualify your target market than to simply ask them questions. Find out what their needs are, what are they looking for. What do they like, dislike. What’s the top problem they’re trying to solve. What’s their biggest issue, etc? Rather than guess the wants and needs of your target market, just ask them.

The easiest way to provide customers with products and services they want is simply ASK them what they really want.

Do you need suggestions or perhaps ideas on your new product lines from your shoppers or maybe the general public on the whole? Textual content voting could possibly be your solution mainly because it means that you can engage with customers and find invaluable feedback on products and services or maybe the store experience.

Did you know that cell phone promotion makes it possible for you to easily and efficiently conduct text message voting? Consumers carry their mobile phones with them virtually 24 hours 7 days per week. You would be surprised the response you’ll see when you send out a quick poll or question for voting.

And when you craft an effective poll, you’re allowing your customers to provide their thoughts and recommendations on products and services they want to purchase. Enabling a means for your customers to actually vote on particular components of your small business, you will actually generate more trust and confidence that will take you a long way.

Also remember, people love to offer their opinion. With a well-crafted poll, you’ll draw new prospects to your mobile list that you can market to on an ongoing basis. Polls and voting by text message are another form of opt-in that enables permission based marketing.

These are a few of the best mobile marketing strategies that you can put to work today for your business. If you’d like to find out more about harnessing the power of mobile marketing for your small or local business, contact NewCorridor today!

Smart mobile phones are readily available throughout the market place and have become an excellent platform for mobile phone marketing. And just how prevalent are smart phone devices? Nielson predicts that 1 in 2 Americans will have smartphones by Christmas 2011. And if the numbers don’t have you salivating, even more attractive to small and local business is the economical (easy on the budget) and efficient (save time and energy) aspect of mobile marketing.

If you haven’t noticed, today’s modern consumer doesn’t leave home without their mobile phone (sorry American Express). The smartphone places all the convenience of the Internet and the home PC right at your finger tips everywhere you go. People no longer need to be tethered to their home computer to be able to search for and purchase their favorite items from stores.

This new mobile consumer is free to carry out all sorts of transactions while on the go. Which naturally creates a new way to market using text based messaging to reach consumers on their mobile phones. Mobile marketing makes use of mobile e-mail marketing and advertising, mobile phone text messaging, mobile phone as well as Internet web sites, location specific promotion along with mobile advertising.

The future advertising trend is definitely going to be mobile phone promotion. The massive amount and sheer size regarding sales volume will be tremendous and is rapidly approaching parity with e-commerce.

Our modern society has clearly grown a lot more mobile. Most people carry a cellular phone today and for many (think generational)  the preferable means of contact is simply by way of a text message. This is the precise tactic now being implemented by local business using mobile marketing.

The primary targets associated with mobile promotion include:

• Smartphone apps or other interactive gadgets that are speeding up ideas and conversations.
• Customer care for almost everything.
• Convenient video cameras for end users as well as standardization regarding products and more sharing platforms for social interaction.
• Q-Codes, short codes for discounts and freebies through real time mobile coupons.
• Soon even your health care provider will offer services through mobile devices making it easy to schedule and touch base for critical care needs.

Many more local and small businesses are beginning to choose the mobile channel to provide information about their specific services, for example via mobile text messaging. Your targeted prospects and customers can conveniently receive messages regarding the hottest tv show or movie, or release of new clothing styles. These are all announced via a simple sales message to let folks know about a particular product, service, promotion, or available release date.

The volume of traffic your web page receives by way of mobile phones is now being tracked by the major search engines in order to start ranking these mobile ready sites. If you’re a small or local business, you need to pay attention to mobile phone marketing.

If you’re interested in finding out more about mobile marketing and mobile advertising for your local or small business, visit these links:

1. A mobile marketing demo right from your smartphone (and a FREE gift you don’t want to miss)
2. No thanks, I’ll skip the demo (or I don’t have a smartphone yet), just give me the FREE mobile marketing gift

And the social web only amplifies the “information at your finger tips” for consumers that turn to peer reviews on social review sites like yelp.com as a supposedly more “trustworthy” source for feedback about local businesses in their area.

Compounded by the shift to “mobile everywhere” as we take the Internet with us everywhere we go on our mobile devices.

This should be a marketing boon for local businesses that learn how to tap into the viral nature of the social web. And, for the most part, it most definitely is! We see the profound marketing benefits everyday as we help our local business clients learn how to leverage social media marketing.

So far so good, right? So what’s the downside?

Well, it’s that same instant exposure and ability that social media affords millions of regular folks to voice their opinion that obviously works just as easily for the positive as well as the negative. It’s just as easy for one of your happy customers to say something nice about your business on one of the social review sites as it is for one of your “not so satisfied” customers to say something negative, or worse, downright mean and nasty!

Sure, we’d like all of our customers to be “raving fans”, but in the real world, we know that 100% customer satisfaction isn’t going to happen.

I think most business owners understand that an unhappy customer here and there is unavoidable. And then we do our best to improve our businesses and learn from the incident. After all, no business is perfect, and without honest customer feedback, both the positive and the negative, we can’t truly understand our customers’ problems and make the necessary adjustments to improve the customer experience.

It’s just that many small business owners are out of their comfort zone when it comes to the dynamics of instant public visibility on the Internet today. What happened to the good old days when the problem between me and my customer was much more private, and I had a better chance of containing the problem without having to air my dirty laundry in front of the whole world?

There’re a few aspects about the Internet and social media that are also at play. Most definitely, the instantaneous communication and the expansive global reach online definitely amplifies everyone’s voice. And this creates a much higher volume of noise to contend with overall.

But also, there is a sense of anonymity on the Internet. People seem to be a little bolder about voicing their opinions with the ability to hide behind behind their online social profiles and cyber personas. And the reinforcement that can come from the group dynamic inherint in many social networking environments can spur people on.

Perhaps people tend to be somewhat less less confrontational  and better mannered face to face, but an unhappy customer may feel more easily prone to leave a scathing email or post an unflattering review online.

Remember one very important thing. Businesses everywhere appreciate the power of a referal. Word of mouth advertising is one of the best ways to acquire new customers. No question, there’s nothing better than a happy and satisfying customer who recommends your business to someone they know. The bottom line, social marketing is simply an extension of referal marketing. Which of course is based on the premise that if you deliver good products, good value and a quality service, people will naturally spread the word.

Of course, if you offer a crummy product, delivery lousy service and poor value, you can’t expect anyone to spread a positive word about your business. Obviously, right? If you have a problem in this area, go fix it.  Look, if you actually deserve the criticism and complaints your customers are hurling in your direction, that will have to be your first step to remedy a reputation problem online . Sorry, I have to even bring this up!

I’m going to assume you deliver a quality product with great service, and you already strive hard to do the very best you can for your customer. That goes without saying. Agree?

So when you do encounter the negative reviews and negative feedback online, what’s the best way to deal with it?

First of all, don’t panick. Sooner or later, every business will encounter less than flattering exposure in the social networking environments online. Don’t let this scare you off.

In the next installment, I’ll cover some clear stategies and techniques to manage your online business reputation. And we’ll take a look at some of the do’s and don’ts of handling negative customer reviews that you may encounter online through the social networking and social review websites.

In practice, you want to do both.

Attract your target market to come to you …

One of the common methods of driving your market to you is with SEO or Search Engine Optimization. With SEO you optimize your website to emphasize various search terms and keyword phrases that define or describe your target market and hope that the search engines will index and rank your pages for these keyword phrases. For local business, you want these to be the search terms that individuals in your target market will key in when they are looking for information about the products you sell and the services you offer.

It’s more challenging than most realize, but when you practice SEO effectively, the search engines will drive targeted traffic to your website.

Attract your target market to you by going to where your market hangs out …

Somewhat the opposite of waiting for your market to come to come to you, an increasingly effective and widespread method is to proactively reach out and go to your market. Find out where your market hangs out online and engage directly with people in your market at these locations.

Ultimately, if you participate and add value to the conversation with your target market in these online hang-outs, the interested and curious will follow you home, back to your website to find out more about you, your products, what you do, and what you’re all about.

This is the essence of social marketing. Examples of places online where your target market hangs-out include discussion groups and forums. To find discussion groups and forums for your target market, simply do a search from Google.

For example, let’s say you have a sporting goods store and you’d like to promote your fishing, bait and tackle products online. It’s a reasonable marketing assumption that interested bass or trout fishing enthusiasts would be a good target for your fishing products and supplies that you sell online.

So let’s see if we can can target bass fishing or trout fishing. To find places online where bass or trout fishing enthusiasts might hang out, try searching for bass fishing forums or trout fishing forums.

Here’s the top first-page listing that comes up in Google for bass fishing forums.
Bass Fishing Forums – Index at BassResource.com.

BTW, look at all of those forum categories and discussions related to bass fishing. What a great source of sub-niche and market related keyword categories and search terms, don’t you think? Be sure to add discussion forums to your keyword research goldmine.

Once you find a suitable forum or discussion group, you want to start participating in the conversation. Look for interesting subjects and threads, preferably something about which you’re familiar or have some knowledge. You’ll likely find people asking lots of different questions, looking for a solution to a problem. Try answering some of these questions and offer advice. Remember to always add value.

And never SPAM a forum discussion with blatant promotion …

It’s annoying and considered bad forum etiquette to blatantly promote yourself, your business or your products. In fact, if you practice spamming forums with your blatant marketing and promotion, the forum administrator will likely disable your account and ban you from the forum.

Besides, visitors and participants in most forums don’t respond to blatant marketing SPAM anyway. So just don’t do it!

So how do you leverage these forums to market your business and attract interested prospects back to your website? On most discussion forums, you need to register and create an account to participate. Typically, you are permitted to include a descriptive bio about yourself and your business as well as links back to your website. Yes, you’re allowed to discreetly promote yourself or your business from your forum account profile.

If you are adding value in the forum discussions, other forum participants will naturally view your account profile to find out more about you. Where they’ll find the breadcrumbs that lead back to your website. In a busy forum it can be impressive how well this works as a traffic source.

You can also create a post signature in most forums. A signature is displayed at the end of your post and in many forums, you’re permitted to display a small self-promoting bl0ck of information that can include a link back to your website (with anchor tag link text that you provide), as long as you keep it tasteful and discreet.

One piece of advice. Don’t show up as a brand new member at a forum and start blasting away. Proceed slowly, start participating in the discussions, get your feet wet and spend some time to interact and discover the tone and feel of the group. Wait at least 30 days before you setup a signature and start adding a little promotion appended to your posts and comments.

In fact, the use and abuse of signatures by brand new forum members is viewed as a pretty reliable forum SPAM indicator, which can easily get your forum account disabled. Many forums don’t give you the permission to setup and include a signature until you’ve made some number of posts and the forum moderators can determine that you are there to add value.

Example of a forum post signature - Bass Fishing Forum

While social networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have been the all the rage more recently, forums and discussion groups have provided popular forms of online community interaction for years and years. When you think about it, forums have been about social networking from the beginning. And you’ll find that the latest versions of forum software are beginning to resemble social networking platforms with account profiles that include “friends lists”, “RSS blog feeds”, “Group membership”, and more.

Social Media and Social Networking sites are a natural hang out for people in your target market …

Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn offer a tremendous opportunity to connect with others that have similar interests. Often these areas of interest align perfectly with consumer and business markets. The fact is, we’re naturally interested in discussing and sharing information about the products we like, the problems we have and the products and/or services that might offer solutions, the businesses that we’re in, industry trends and issues, etc.

Frankly, the groups and networks of people that congregate online in formation around thousands of different markets is endless. And whether you are consuming or marketing, the social networking platforms are abundant with opportunities to make these connections.

Connecting with your market on Facebook

For example, the approach on Facebook has similarities to marketing on forums and discussion groups. On Facebook, you can attract your own network of interested contacts and followers from your account profile or business page (even better for business marketing).

Your discussion and interaction actually takes place right from account profile or business page wall. And you can tap into the powerful advantage of viral marketing on Facebook as your followers within your immediate network share your message with their networks of friends, contacts and followers.

The Facebook platform provides the ability to publish and promote links back to your website, and even capture names and build a list for follow-up marketing.

You can also find and join thousands of groups established around specific areas of interests (i.e. markets). Or you can form your own group on Facebook. As with forums and discussion groups, the same rules apply. Don’t SPAM and blatantly promote your business by clobbering everyone over the head with your constant marketing message. Do always add value to the conversation and people will naturally follow you back to your Facebook account profile or page to find out more about you.

Below is an example of several bass fishing groups you can join on Facebook. In fact, the search for bass fishing groups returned over 500 different groups! Do you think you might be able tap into a bass fishing market on Facebook?

Several bass fishing groups on Facebook

These are just a few examples of “figuring out where your market hangs out online” and learning how to proactively take your marketing efforts to these locations rather than waiting passively for your market to come to your website.

Hopefully, this sets off a few light-bulbs for you!

At NewCorridor, social marketing is a critical element in the marketing strategies we implement for our local business clients. Contact us today to find out more about Main Street Marketing Power and learn how you can leverage social marketing to track down where your target market hangs out online!

The viral result of a successful video marketing campaign for a small business can be the catalyst behind a flood of targeted traffic, and a rush of fresh leads that results in new customers. This is one of the key reasons that video marketing plays such a critical component in our Main Street Marketing Power strategy that we deliver for our clients.

One of the best ways to improve your video marketing is to observe and learn from other businesses. I always keep an eye out for effective video campaigns. If I find an interesting video going viral, then I dig a bit beneath the covers to see if there’s a small business marketing strategy behind the video that I can learn from.

The fact of the matter, online marketers are producing great video in such numbers today, you can find good examples of video going viral each and every day.

For example, this week, the “Simon’s Cat in the Box” video shown below sailed past the 2 millionth view on YouTube in just 2 short weeks. If you’re not familiar with the Simon’s Cat comic strip, you’ll enjoy learning more about this business.

Simon Toliver, the creative talent behind “Simon’s Cat” produces a clever animated comic strip about his curious and mischievous cat that has captured the imagination of millions of people all over the globe. He’s based in the UK and in a few short years, he’s grown and developed what looks to be an impressive business.

Enjoy the latest Simon’s Cat animated video …

If you want to have a look at a terrific case study on how to tie all the marketing elements together end-to-end, study an effective example like “Simon’s Cat”. This business promotes a delightful comic strip product with a well conceived, smoothly integrated marketing strategy that includes:

• A distinctive and consistent brand.
• An attractive and easy to use website at http://www.simonscat.com (simple and clean with a brand personality that jumps out at you).
• An online store with appealing, thematically related Simon’s Cat products including calendars, greeting cards, Simon’s Cat books (collections of the comic strip), coffee mugs, etc.
• Video Marketing through YouTube. Notice how the animated cartoons comprise the product as well as the give-away content for the video campaigns. The viral nature of these animated cartoon videos drive the traffic and customers to the actual revenue producing products including the “Simon’s Cat” books and related merchandising items mentioned in the previous bullet.
• Social Marketing campaigns that tie in Twitter and Facebook with the YouTube channel (social marketing on YouTube as well).

The following statistics straight off of YouTube give you more insight into the powerful momentum behind the recently released video. This is the latest in a series of eight videos produced over the last two years.

Keep in mind that many of the viewers that consume the Simon’s Cat videos today are already fans eagerly waiting and ready to pounce (sorry, the bad pun is not meant to make you groan) on the next animated cartoon installment. But the viral phenomenon is still responsible for the strong momentum. In fact, this becomes an ideal combination … a strong viral activity as well as an existing broad base of familiar consumers/customers.

As the following numbers demonstrate, the video reached over 1 million views in a matter of days. With a steady, climbing trend upward. Previous videos in the portfolio have reached upper limits of 16 million views climbing steadily over a period of two years or so. We can expect this latest video to perform in a similar manner over time.

You can also gain some insight from the YouTube analytics data about referral traffic and views that include the Simon’s Cat website, Facebook, Mobile devices, YouTube search, etc. And the demographics and geo-location data is always insightful.

If you’d like to learn a little more about the man behind the business and how the cartoon and videos are produced, enjoy the following interview with Simon Tofield.

In spite of the clear and obvious creative talent, it would appear that Simon Toliver is also a down to earth, rather like-able chap as well. It’s always nice to see entrepreneurs that remain appreciative and grateful for their successful achievements.

The “Simon’s Cat” business demonstrates many of the effective marketing techniques that can work so well today for small business. Study this example and see if you can leverage some of the ideas in your marketing strategy for your small or local business!

If you’ve started to take the Internet for granted, stop and ponder for a moment …

The Internet is the most amazing and magnificent achievement or our time. It has forever changed the way we communicate, interact with eachother and conduct our business. The revolutionary way in which the Internet connects billions of people all over the globe has transformed our culture and our society. There is certainly no turning back now.

Watch the following video, The State of The Internet, from Jesse Thomas. The numbers and statistics are already almost a year out of date, but staggering nonetheless. Marvel at just how pervasive the Internet has become in the digital age.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

I particularly find astounding …

• 90 Trillion emails sent on the Internet in 2009. We have difficulty comprehending numbers this large. That’s around 247 Billion emails sent per day.
• Unfortunately, 200 Billion emails sent each day are SPAM. That’s almost 80% of email sent is SPAM. A sobering and dissapointing reflection on human behavior if you ask me.
• 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide. The number is actually 1.96 billion today. Almost 30% of the world’s population is on the Internet (see Internet World Stats)
• 240 million websites on the Internet as of December 2009. And 123 Million blogs. Over half of the websites on the Internet are now blogs (we understand the power of blogs).
• 84% of social network sites with more women than men. Gotta love that one!
• Facebook serves 260 billion page views per month. And the number is even more today. That’s 6 million page views per minute, and an incredible 37.4 trillion page views per year. If you have any appreciation for the infrastructure required, you’re not surprised by the 30,000 servers (and growing) that Facebook needs to support the traffic volume.
• How about 400 million people on Facebook. The number is actually north of 500 million today. That’s a little over 25% of the people on the Internet are also on Facebook. Astounding!
• YouTube serves over 1 Billion videos per day. The average Internet user watches 182 videos per month. 82% of Internet users in the US view videos online. Are people watching videos?

I think you’ll agree, the numbers are astounding. Local businesses, pay attention here. You’re marketing depends on it.

Almost everyone struggles with driving enough traffic to their website. And quite often, my small business clients have already come to the conclusion that they need help with SEO to drive that traffic before we even meet.

So it’s not surprising that companies promoting SEO services to businesses large and small abound everywhere. Driving website traffic is a challenge and an elusive problem to solve. There is clearly a demand for good SEO consultants that actually know what they’re doing.

Unfortunately, I would say that finding a capable and reputable SEO consultant may be as difficult as figuring out how to do SEO yourself. At least that’s what the many clients I’ve worked with over the years tell me. The frustration with SEO is palpable!

All the challenges, struggles and issues with SEO aside, let me share this bit of truth …

 While my local business clients often believe the solution to their problem is simply more traffic, what they really expect to accomplish with more traffic to their website is more leads, more customers, more sales, and more profits.

SEO may help drive more traffic to a website, but without putting attention and focus on website conversion, all the traffic in the world isn’t going to help your local business achieve the results you’re really after.

The preoccupation with only focusing on more traffic is based on the false assumption or misunderstanding that once you jump the number of visitors showing up to your website, the rest will somehow automatically fall into place. We all wish it were this easy, but unfortunately, it just doesn’t work this way.

For many SEO professionals, it may be sufficient to limit the results and solution to “a measurable increase in traffic to the client’s website”, and set expectations accordingly. Then a simple report generated from the website logs showing an increase in traffic is sufficient to validate “solution accomplished“. The SEO consultant has met the deliverables and can expect payment for services rendered.

In my SEO practice, simply driving more traffic has not been sufficient to solve the local business client’s dilemma. To actually drive more leads, customers, sales and profits, invariably I need to step in and help with optimizing the website’s ability to convert traffic.

The truth of the matter, solving the “conversion” problem can actually be more challenging than solving the “traffic” problem. And in the end, a complete solution must integrate traffic and conversions end-to-end.

For this reason, I’ve shifted my SEO practice somewhat over the years. Yes, I still offer pure SEO services to clients that have a need to just focus on SEO and driving traffic. In general, these businesses already have a website that converts traffic to customers reasonably well. In other situations, I’ve already helped the client with conversions, and they simply need me back to help with more traffic.

But for the majority of my local business clients, SEO by itself is simply not enough. The solution needs to be a more comprehensive and complete online marketing strategy that …

• begins with the critical and “all-important” keyword research
• includes onpage and offpage SEO for the website
• combined with cutting edge traffic driving techniques including video and social media marketing
• integrates the traffic solutions with an effective and measurable conversion system including well-tuned landing pages, prospect database, and email follow-up campaigns

When we put the right end-to-end online marketing solutions together for our local business clients, then the increase in targeted traffic that we can drive to the website will result in better leads, more customers and increased sales and profits.

And that’s what our “Main Street Marketing Power” solutions are all about!

Now, aren’t those the kinds of results you’d like to achieve for your local business?