 |
| Yellow Pages Days are Going! |
There’s always a feeling among small business owners that “if I pay more, I’ll get more.” Certainly in the days when your marketing budget was used for Yellow Pages and newspaper advertising that was probably true. The businesses that could afford to spend more had the larger, more colorful ads in the Yellow Pages and the largest and most prominent ads in the newspapers.
You can still pay more than your competitors for those large ads, but your savvy competitors might be able to make up the ground and get better marketing visibility using the Internet. Sure, you can also spend lots of money for Internet advertising — pay-per-click and banner ads and email campaigns. But those savvy businesses that use social media tools like blogging, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter might do much better with a tiny fraction of your advertising spend. How do they do it? They consistently try and they’re willing to experiment to find what works for their businesses.
I experiment with various types of social media as part of my ongoing research into what works for various types of businesses. I have a number of blogs and Facebook pages, some my own and some I manage for clients, and I use YouTube with those blogs. All of these tools are either free or nearly free, so I can afford to try something, see if it works, and then try something else if necessary. That’s what I recommend for your business!
Try some aspect of social media — perhaps a Facebook page or a YouTube account. See if it works for your business. Ask your customers what types of social media they visit. Would they visit your Facebook page? Do they have a Twitter account? Use this customer information to improve your social media experiment, and then try again.
Here’s an example of something that does work. About six months ago I started a Google Blogger blog called Wharton Texas Proud to highlight some of the many good things happening in our small Texas town. By contributing regularly and by enlisting others in the Community to contribute, we’ve grown to over 17,000 page views and at least 3,500 page views a month. The Wharton Texas Proud Facebook page also gets lots of traffic and attention, and this is in a town of only 9,000 people. Because the blog and the Facebook page are directed to the general public, they work very well and continue to grow in popularity.
However, if your customers are primarily businesses, I don’t think the Facebook page will work well for you. People don’t “Like” and visit Facebook pages owned by businesses that they’d never buy from. I also have a Facebook page for IX Brand SEO and it only has eight fans. (Please visit and “Like” the IX Brand page) There’s a very limited market for search engine optimization (SEO) and Internet marketing services, and those business owners and managers, in the market, are not using Facebook to locate those (SEO) services, no matter how great the services are for small businesses. Blogging, as I’m doing now works much better for this B2B business.
Which of the social media tools will work well for your business? I guarantee that at least some of them will work very well! So jump in and start experimenting and find yourself the ideal combination of social media tools to work for your business. You’ll find that you’ll become one of the savvy businesses that beats your heavy-spending competition for a fraction of their marketing spend.
Get started Now! Call me at 979-531-8300 if you need help getting started.
Please pass the word about IX Brand SEO Services by clicking on the social media buttons below.
Related articles
- Don’t Focus on Google Rankings! (houstontexasseo.com)
- Great Content is the Foundation of SEO – Search Engine Optimization – Wharton TX (houstontexasseo.com)
- Facebook pages: Create a business profile for your company on the social media site (marketing.yell.com)
