Local Businesses and the love of coupons meets Web 2.0

So if you ask any successful local business owner where they spend marketing dollars you are bound to hear that they currently use or have used one of the Money Mailer, Coupon Pak or other business coupon mailers in their area.  Why are coupons so great?  Because almost everyone that is offered a discount on a service, product or food they usually use, will go buy more!

So what do Coupon Mailers and Web 2.0 have in common?  Simple, I like to save online and in stores!  Coupon sites like FatWallet and CouponCabin are still popular with online shoppers because you can insert coupon codes, get special savings, or just feel like you did:).  Local Businesses need to pay attention to what has worked in the past and apply it to the future.  By adding coupon offers to your site (printable, usable etc.) you can track the effectiveness of your site, remind customers to frequent your site (and you can sell them more stuff) AND encourage customers to join your mailing list etc. for the special savings.

Creating a coupon can be as easy as providing a link, inserting code or the ol’ copy and paste. Sites like OneMinuteCoupon.com offer free coupon building tools to make it easy for anyone with website access to add a coupon to your business.   Using the ancient practices of coupon mailers and yellow pages you can now help your business meet Web 2.0, by adding coupons to your local business marketing toolbelt. 

The other important piece to the coupon offerings is that coupon usage increases with income (at least it does online).  In June of last year, PriceRunner did a survey of it’s users and guess what: Coupon Usage Increased with Income.  To really make your small business succeed you need customers that have money.  Online coupons are used by people with money and the assumption is that those same people will look for local deals as well.  With the push to go local, go green and save the world, why not appeal to online coupon users, with money, and entice them to shop with you?  Just a suggestion.

Pizza is just one example of successful online marketing

Local internet marketing can work and does work.  An example of this is Papa John’s pizza place.  The point in highlighting this article about $1 Billion in online pizza sales is that we as customers love simplicity and we have to buy certain products and use certain services LOCALLY.  The fact that a lot of pizza is selling online should open the minds of a business owner to say, I bet my local customers would love to do (insert your business or service here) online.

Ordering online, scheduling appointments online, asking questions online, it’s all possible.  Now the interesting piece to this article is that Papa John’s has invested over $15 million in web technology to make this ordering process work.  Here’s what that means to a small business owner, invest in your web presence and your customers will reward you.  Ask your mom to use your site and listen to her pain points, send it to your most loyal clients and ask them to share their insight.  Just because they don’t like or do like something doesn’t mean you have to do it but if there are any common themes, address them!

It’s free and easy to have family and friends use your site and their feedback is usually the closest example to a real customer.  Remove pain points, simplify your site, put your contact information everywhere and create your own billion dollars.

Website Marketing is all about Conversions, Conversions, Conversions

There were two great, and I mean great, conversion focused blog posts that went out today and they are focused on improving a small businesses online marketing conversion rates.  Alex Cleanthous at Search Engine Journal shared 7 proven strategies for improving conversion rate and made a very great numbers statement. 

As business owners it’s important to only spend marketing money when we know we are making it and more money back.  Branding, Direct, Pull and Push marketing all need to quantified to be of value and one of the great things about internet marketing is the ability to make small changes and see great results.  Thus the post above and the follow up by myself.

Alex points out that:

“For example, let’s say you are spending $1,000 per month on search engine optimization and $5,000 per month on paid advertising (making a total monthly online marketing investment of $6,000). You’re receiving 10,000 visitors per month to your website and you’re converting 1% of those visitors, generating $15,000 in revenue.”

“If you just increased your website’s conversion rate to 2%, you would be generating $30,000 in revenue for no additional advertising cost. And because your advertising costs have already been covered by the original $15,000 revenue, your profitability has just skyrocketed!”

The way this applies to a local business is highlighted by another post by David Reeve at DMNews.  He shared a 2006 study that showed how customers used the web to find local businesses and how they contacted those business owners.  Some highlights include How do customers use the website to contact the business:

68 percent use the phone number on a site to contact a vendor.

16 percent contact a vendor by the e-mail address on a site.

11 percent contact the vendor via a form on a site.

and the offline marketing follow up detail that 35 percent saved the phone number after visiting the site.  By implementing any of the suggestions above your conversion rate WILL increase and you don’t have to increase your marketing budget to do it.  If you’ve already implemented the above changes try moving the location of each “conversion” point and watch for increases.  Moving the phone number to a more prominent position could increase calls, customers and sales. 

Internet Marketing has to be about conversions and the two posts highlighted above share some great insight into how and why to improve conversions.  Enjoy and let me know how it works for you.

Managing your Reputation – Small Business Ideas

I’m a fan of information and opinion.  In fact, when it comes to search engine marketing most true learning experiences come from golden nuggets of information in interviews, blogs and articles.  Dr. Ralph Wilson, of WebMarketingToday has a fun way of getting interesting perspectives from people he interviews.  My suggestion to him is to upgrade his video camera, but some of the people he allows to share insights (and sell their own services) do share “golden nuggets” of information. 

Feeling overwhelmed with all the things to learn about SEO, PPC, SEM, Social Media, Blogging, Reputation Management and any other term you know you need to understand better, means you don’t apply it to your business.  As a small business owner, the key is to figure out how this information helps your business in your industry at this time.  Many SEOs talk in general terms which means they cover a lot of area without specifics.  That’s because optimization isn’t about doing the same thing for every site but identifying the best tool in your toolbelt of information to maximize your own site in your own industry.

Dr. Wilson’s interview about Reputation Management with Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim, offers some useful insight into some ideas that can easily be implemented by any small business.  Watch it, learn from it and figure out what 2 things in the interview can help your business this week.  Don’t overwhelm yourself with all the information out there, list 2 things you can do this week to help improve your own site in your own industry.  Then you’ll start to see results!

Small Business Tip – Online Fax Services are Great

Now I know I usually talk about internet marketing and that’s even the name of the blog but I’ve felt like I need to add a small business tips section to this blog because of the little things that I know and little details I wish I’d known about when I first started with business.

 Online fax services are AWESOME.  I don’t have a fax machine and never want a fax machine.  Gone are the days of needing one and they are usually so bulky it doesn’t make sense anyway.  Now comes online fax services.  I personally use Packetel’s $3.95/mo. unlimited incoming faxes service (Packetel Review).  Every business needs a fax number because we all run into the lame “please fax me” transactions.  I’ve loved every minute of getting pdf emails instead of a fax machine and my first small business tip is to use an online fax service.  (Google search: “online fax service” and you should find a few choices). 

I promise I’ll be back to local internet marketing by my next post:)