I recently was talking to a prospect about his business. I love talking to folks about their businesses because I get learn about their successes and their failures. This prospect is a financial planner so we talked about how he found new customers and he admitted that he had no organized way to gather, store and nurture new leads. (I was not surprised because many business owners don’t have a system). So I asked him how he found new customers. His response “By luck”.

Now in my mind this was crazy but he went on to explain that his business had thrived for years with this tactic and until recently he had not thought about changing it. We talked further and I suggested he may want to consider creating an automated lead gen system that finds, stores and nurtures clients until they are ready to buy. Here is my non technical criteria for creating a system

1. Easily implemented across the entire sales process. Sales has many steps and any system created needs to integrate and be easily implemented in every step of the process. Actually any system must seamless integrate and not imped the sales process.
2. Automated. Any system must allow for the following steps to be done and must be completely automated including

Find new leads. - The system automatically find new leads once it’s created using your existing advertising methods

Store - All leads and lead data needs to be stored in an easily accessible way.

Nurture - Sales and Marketing is a process. The process starts by gathering leads but those leads have to be nurtured basically your system needs to automatically communicate with your leads and move them down the buying cycle.

1. Easily added on to whatever you’re doing now - the system you create must easily integrate into your existing systems, so there is no (or little) disruption in your business.

I just recently got the Twitter bug (http://www.twitter.com/dwightmiller) and I’ve had many people ask how Twitter works and what’s it’s purpose. To help explain Twitter, I found this video and in my next post I’ll tell you if I’ve found any use for it in business.

Again, I am using these videos to help me understand these new social networking sites. Last post was social networking, today social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is a way to organize the websites you love. From a business perspective if you customers bookmark your sites, your site gets rewarded with more external links and your page rank increases. In a few days I’ll talk about strategies for encouraing your clients to bookmark your site but in the mean time discover social bookmarking.

I am preparing a speeh about social networking in a few weeks and I wanted to start writing about social networks. This video does a good job of explaining how social networks work.

Google recently announced a beta program that allows advertisers to buy ads on television networks. Google will allow advertisers to upload 15, 30, 45 and 60 minute advertisements. The Google platform allows advertisers to closely connect TV advertising to the Internet and measure the results. As you know, I am a firm believer in only buy advertising that can be measured and this new Google beta mets that goal.

According to the Google website the program works the same as adwords, you basically pick networks and dayparts, set a budget and maximum CPM, upload the video and track you ads. As usual it’s simple, easy and easily trackable. You can finally track advertising results and ROI.

The benefits are obvious, you can track and measure your advertising results, Google says it is attached to various setup boxes so advertising results are measured. In the TV business, there is something called “make goods” where you repeat the ad to get the demo promised. There is also givebacks, where you give back money, the Google system helps reduce or eliminate this challenge.

The last benefit is the benefit you get using the Google platform, once you launch your ad, you can see performace of you advertising message and tune it to get better results.

If you are looking to advertise on TV, consider the Google network. If you want to know how it works, Call Today

I’ve been working on a client’s PPC campaign and just got off the phone with this client. Basically I had an argument with the client about his campaign and why it’s not working. The client insists (despite concrete evidence to the contrary) on landing prospect on the main page of his website forcing the prospect to search all around looking for what they want. More often than not what they want isn’t even obviously available on his site, so the prospect flounders around until he quits (We can prove it by looking at his bounce rate)

My argument is that this is stupid (I guess you can tell I’m still steamed). When a prospect see a PPC ad and they click on the ad, they want to see the same message on the site. The process is called message to market match, in other words, when the prospect clicks on an ad, they land on a page that continues the sales message alluded to in the ad.

My client insists this is hogwash (his words), my client wants to have the prospect see everything he had to offer. I say he is wrong and have decided to design a landing page (for FREE) to prove my point.

BUt this isn’t my thinking the effectiveness of landing pages has been proven over and over again compared to landing a prospect on your home page.

The prospect is looking for something specific, remember the client typed in a specific search string “womens shoes in philly”, when they click on your ad, they don’t want to have to find the womens shoes, they TOLD YOU WHAT THEY WHERE LOOKING FOR.

So, when running PPC, land your prospect on a page that helps them find what they want. If your like my client and don’t beleive that this increases conversion then at minimum test to see what works best.

Dedicated to your success

Dwight

BTW - If you want to learn more or talk about your campaign call me

I recently read an article about Google’s new project Knol but when you go to knol.com, the site sells what looks like rug cleaners in German but from what I can tell the product is similar to wiki. Basically user generated content thats not moderated. While thats all good, I’m pondering the future of search.

As Google, starts to implement universal search, the relevancy of serch will change nd more and more people will rely less on plain jane search and more on other types of search.

As it stands now, more people are using wiki’s instead of generic search, when people use search engines they are using more local search (in other words, users are using search engines like Google to find local products) but even that could change as users rely on user review sites like Yelp.

So, while I think generic search will diminish, I also believe that specific search will flourish. So as you look to rely on the Internet for marketing, the process of SEO and SEM my change. Start to think more about how to encourage your customers to leave great reviews on review sites like Yelp.com. Check to see what your customers are saying about your business or service. Develop procedures to encourage online reviews. That way you can take advantage of new search strategies. Search is Dead, Long live search.

a recently was talking to one of my small business clients who was completely pissed off for pay per click marketing. he was frustrated because every month Google and Yahoo was charging his his credit card but he wasn’t seen any measurable success. And at dinner he said to me,” in a marketing and Pay Per Click marketing doesn’t work for my business and it’s a complete waste of money, I’m going back to the old way”.

So, as an experiment I offered to look at his local Internet marketing campaign primarily so I could understand the problem, because he wasn’t going back to pay per click marketing.

here’s what I found, my friend is a local contractor, his marketing goal is to generate leads for free estimates. So we looked at his campaign, the biggest problem was the campaign was to broad. in other words he had not clearly defined his universal selling proposition, his niche, is customer, or any of the other metrics that make Internet marketing work for small business.

You see the problem wasn’t that pay per click and Internet marketing didn’t work, the problem is that my friend’s business doesn’t have a clearly defined mission, doesn’t have a clearly defined niche, anyone that has a need for contractor is his client, so his marketing suffers because he’s competing in with every other contractor in the world.

if you’re going to use the Internet and media as a marketing tool you have to clearly understand how it works in the way it works is by creating a tightly defined niche for your business. It’s not the Internet marketing doesn’t work it’s your business that’s not clearly defined that to generally define that lacks focus and doesn’t give you the advantage of targeting a specific type of customer.

So before you go complaining about how your search marketing isn’t working, before you start complaining that you’re paying Google hundreds or thousands of dollars for little or no results, take a look at your business, take a look at how your marketing is defined and then use the power of the Internet to develop a clearly defined niche.

Use the power of the Internet to see what people are searching for and creating a niche or series of niches in your business and then watch your Internet marketing soar.

Dedicated to your success.

If you want to leverage Local Internet Marketing for your small business and looking to sharpen or create your universal selling proposition and clearly define your niche, Call me we can help

What do you know about your customer, are you really listening to what they want. Check out this video. The lesson in my view is that just because you know the demographics of your customer, that is no longer enought. If your relationship with your customer is based on data and you are listening to what your customer wants, your customer will leave and when enough customers leave YOU ARE OUT OF BUSINESS. Check out this video.

We can help you build a system for listening to your client, click here

More of a question than a comment like many people I have been watching googles move to Universal search. For those not keep tracking a Google search today is very different from less than a year ago. Now if you search Google for “St Lucia vacation”, you get a results page that includes not just websites, but blogs, news weather and videos.

So what is the impact on normal SEO strategies. Does tweaking Meta-tages, html, site mirroring, doorways and all that junk still get page rank. Or with Uni-search has Google made thos strategies obsolete. I’ve been reviewing my SEO techniques and wondering if anyone else is considering how to get organic results in a uni-search world.

Appreciate any thoughts