The Green Apple Blog

More and more businesses are continuing to improve their digital footprint by expanding their online marketing and development solutions. For many companies, the focus on widespread marketing can often overshadow the importance of local marketing. Depending on the type of business, localized marketing is becoming more important than ever for independent retailers, restaurants and others. Luckily, there are some great alterations a marketing and business team can make to improve localized marketing strategies.

In the last few years, the takeoff of check in services has been crucial to many companies. These check-in services such as Foursquare have been more crucial to those businesses looking to promote on a local level than anyone else. With these services, businesses are able to offer up benefits and discounts for checking in at their location. When customers check in, it has a twofold effect. First, it keeps customers coming back to receive discounts and second, it allows people throughout social media rings to see their friends checking in at your establishment, working in a sort of viral marketing type way.

In social media, it’s important to gear your profile towards your customers. With a company looking to build local marketing, remember to use platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to spread a localized campaign first, and then go wide if necessary.

Along with check in services, it is important to stay on top of the overall digital marketing landscape. Just like national companies, small businesses and restaurants often struggle building their names because of a lack of web features and information. No matter the size of the company, it’s more important than ever to maintain a solid online profile.

Extending from just an online profile, building a mobile platform has become crucial as well. Most websites that have mobile versions climb the search rankings easier. It also helps get correct information and directions out to people on the go.

So now you’ve focused on building a localized social media and web campaign. When building a website and looking to improve local based marketing, it’s important to gear your website to your customer base. This means that the information and content should be targeted towards the area where your businesses is located or attempting to break into. Another great tip for improving a localized profile is to keep your companies address within view throughout online profiles. With this technique, visitors will be aware where your company is located and ease of access to your services.

Many businesses that are looking to improve localized marketing are often in a tough position when it comes to improving their advertising and reach. Small restaurants and stores are sometimes lacking in a professional who can properly improve marketing efforts. Luckily, there are some outbound options that can be taken to help improve a company’s local marketing profile. For example, an independent store in the state of Florida could look at Jacksonville, Tampa and Orlando SEO or development platform to improve their footprint. This can be a big help for marketing, as well taking some of the stress and load off of the everyday employees of the business who could be ill prepared.

With smaller companies and regional businesses, having a local marketing plan can often be essential to success over time. With the ease of access on the internet today, an improved digital footprint can help improve localized marketing, with the possibility of both quality and convenience.

In our previous post Larry and Jeff decided to apply their own internet marketing techniques to generate new business. After running a campaign for 3 weeks, what was the result? This is Jeff’s analysis. I consider myself foremost a web designer and programmer, not a Google pay per click guru. So this is my learning process.

 What does all this mean?

Our Ads Were Shown 330,000 Times
An impression (Impr.) is when an ad is served. So you can see we had 330,000 impressions. Where did these 300k impressions appear? Either on the right hand side of a Google search or on their content network (which consists of other websites that have google ads).

129 People Visited Our Website
We received 129 clicks to the various web pages. These would count as leads.

2 People Filled Out Forms
We received 2 forms filled out. One person never contacted us in return after following up.

1 Proposal Was Written
The lead went dead and cold. We ended up wasting too much time.

After 3 weeks and $115 we stopped the campaign.

Lessons Learned

Cost Per Click
To keep our costs down we served ads in Florida and a few select major cities across the nation. By doing this our cost per click (Avg CPC) was a very reasonable $.90. So basically every time someone came to our site is costs $.90.

Most of the clicks came from the Google Content Network. In laymans terms that means other websites serving up Google Ads. A very small percentage of clicks came directly from ads displayed on the Google search results page.

Keywords
Our keyword selection covered the gamut of terms you would expect. Remember, many of our clicks were from other sites in the content network - so keywords wouldn’t apply here. Just context. For the clicks that did come from search terms here is a sampling:

google ad words (5 visits)
internet marketing firms (1 visit)
search engine marketing (1 visit)

From the content network we had 87 visits of the 129.

Click Through Rate (CTR)
Our CTR was very low .04%. This is how often people saw the ad and clicked through to our site. From what I understand, click through rates vary greatly by industry; however, from the limited info I gathered this is low.

What’s next for us?
As we described in our previous post, almost all of our work is generated by word of mouth and client referall. The intriguing part for me is if we can get this working, it will be a very clean and calculated way of generating business. I’m moving on to monthly web site maintenance and I’m now focusing directly on website design and redesign.

More to come!

According to Opus Research, about 60% of all SMBs do no online marketing. The ironic thing is many small business consider their website as important as other forms of advertising even though they do not actively drive traffic there.

Opus research writes “as a practical matter, Web sites without some other marketing element (e.g., SEM/SEO) aren’t particularly effective in reaching audiences.”

So what’s holding you back? Time and effort, perhaps? Hire a company like Create Web Studios to do an initial Search Engine Marketing campaign for you. The costs to getting in are very low when paired against print, broadcast, and radio.