7 Questions All Small Businesses Should Be Asking

1.) How do the search results look for my company name?

Why it matters: You may be ranking well for your main keywords, but are you ranking well for your company name? Your president’s name? Many customers will type your company name into Google and learn as much as they can before doing business with you. Reputation management is more important now than ever; one angry customer with an authoritative blog can do a lot of damage.

Recommendations:

1. At least monthly, type your company name into Google and Bing. Weekly would be better, and do it daily if your company has a lot of visibility.
2. Also type in the name of your company president and any other visible, public-facing employees.
3. Set up Google Alerts, Yahoo Alerts, and/or Bing Alerts for your company name.

2.) Have I put all my marketing eggs in one basket, or am I getting traffic/sales/revenue from a variety of sources?

Why it matters: Relying on one source of traffic, customers, or whatever is dangerous. Go back and read this story of a small business owner who had to layoff staff because Google traffic dropped 50%-70%. It’s imperative to have a variety of sources that send you traffic/customers.

Recommendations:

1. If you don’t already use PPC advertising, be smart enough about it to know how to in case the need arises.
2. Use appropriate social media sites to develop an audience of followers/friends/etc.
3. Don’t assume that SEO alone will always send you enough customers/traffic. Diversify.

3.) Have I claimed my local business listings?

Why it matters: Because stats suggest that consumers are increasingly using the web to find local businesses. And because local business listings are an easy way to potentially put your name in front of locals when they’re searching online. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and several other local sites/directories offer free listings for small/local businesses.

Recommendations:

1. Claim your free business listings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. And don’t forget about the major local directories like Yelp, Citysearch, InsiderPages, etc. You can learn more about all these in my Local Search Marketing Guide.
2. Wherever it’s possible, build out your profile with as much business information as you can: business hours, payments accepted, parking details, directions, and so forth. Add photos and/or videos if possible.
3. Consider attending a local search marketing workshop like GetListed Local University. The next one is in Denver on October 21, and if you use this registration code, it only costs $89. Can’t beat that.

4.) How do my reviews look on Google Maps? Yahoo? Bing? Yelp?

Why it matters: Consumers rely on reviews and ratings when making purchasing decisions. A Nielsen study last year suggested that 90% of us trust recommendations from people we know, and 70% trust recommendations posted online by total strangers (i.e., online reviews).

Recommendations:

1. As with No. 1 above, make a habit to check your reviews on popular sites at least once a month. The more reviews your business gets, the more often you should monitor this.
2. Don’t panic if you get a negative review; they can actually be good for business. The occasional negative review makes your overall “review profile” more trustworthy because it’s hard to believe that any business always provides 5-star service.

3. If possible, respond politely and professionally to anyone leaving a negative review. Google Places recently added this capability, and businesses that have claimed their Yelp profile can also communicate with reviewers. (See that reputation management article I linked to earlier for tips on how to respond to negative reviews.)

5.) Am I using social media wisely?

Why it matters: Social media is only getting more popular, and with all segments of society. Nielsen says 75% of online consumers around the world visit social media sites/blogs, and 22% of all time online is spent on social media sites. The average visitor spends 66% more time on social media sites than they did a year ago. Done right, social media is a great way to connect with consumers.

Recommendations:

1. If nothing else, at least claim your social media site profiles and hold them until you’re ready to use them. KnowEm is a great tool for securing your company name/accounts across multiple social networking sites.
2. If you’re not sure which social networks are right for you, ask your customers which ones they use. Seriously. Just ask.
3. Look for authoritative blogs in your industry. Start reading them. When you have something intelligent to say, leave comments. Don’t ever underestimate the power of a smart blog comment.
4. If you want your blog or web site to be liked by social media crowds, be sure to take steps to make it social media-friendly and do your best to create content that gets noticed by social media users.

6.) Am I focusing on metrics that matter?

Why it matters: Because it’s easy to get wrapped up in numbers that don’t matter. It’s nice to have a lot of Twitter followers or Facebook fans. It’s great to have a ton of RSS subscribers, but sometimes those numbers just don’t matter. Sure, the attention is nice. But, as Lee Odden once said, it’s “tough to pay the bills with a wallet full of famous.” The metrics that matter are the ones that drive your bottom line: leads, conversions, revenue, profits, etc.

Recommendations:

1. Make sure you have analytics setup on your site in the first place.
2. Put down your Google ranking reports and spend more time in your analytics data. Make sure you know how many leads/sales/revenues you’re driving from all of your efforts — SEO, PPC, social media, etc.

7.) Am I earning trust with everything I do online?

Why it matters: Because trust is the number one factor in your business’s long-term success. None of us like to do business with companies we don’t trust. But we’re all willing to spend a couple extra dollars with companies that we trust. Amazon doesn’t always have the lowest prices online, but they do have our trust. If people don’t trust you, they won’t do business with you.

Recommendations:

1. Just one thing. Now that you’re done here, read this article: Why Trust Matters & How To Earn It. I asked three dozen of the smartest, most trustworthy marketers I know to talk about trust and they absolutely nailed it.

Your turn: What other questions should small business owners be asking about their online marketing tactics, strategies, and results?

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

7 Questions Small Businesses Should Be Asking

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Christian Haas / Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

1.) “Unless you’re Paris Hilton, no video is guaranteed to go viral. A guide for creating a successful viral campaign is as effective as a tutorial on how to win the lottery. OK, you’ll learn the basics like ‘you don’t win if you don’t play,’ but that’s about it. Viral work is, for the most part, unpredictable.”

2.) “One theme [of viral marketing] will likely recur: originality. Originality that draws on popular culture or is so brilliant that it becomes popular culture.”

3.) “Advertisers need to break through not by pushing yet another ad, but by giving people something they actually would want to watch, interact with and share. That often involves approaching advertising differently, taking risks and not doing things that are proven to work. Best practices are, by definition, the antithesis of innovation.”

Lynn Power / ArnoldNYC

4.) “Don’t try to manufacture coolness or try to be hip; consumers can see through that. Just be true to who you are, understand your DNA and make it relevant to people today.”

5.) “It’s essential to have a point of view that puts a stake in the ground and breaks through the clutter.”

Craig Allen & Jason Kreher / Wieden & Kennedy

6.) “If you look at the higest-rated videos on YouTube, they’re not sad dramas, they’re men getting hit with inflatable balls or animals falling off things. Younger generations love humor, which is why advertising is using increasing quantities of it to sell things. People like it. It works.”

Linus Karlsson & Paul Malmstrom / Mother New York

7.) “[Companies] can’t just keep talking and saying the same old things. They need to listen, interact, and be somewhat interesting, just like any person who wants to be taken seriously.”

8.) “Originality and unexpectedness are superpowers. Surprisingly, very few brands use them as such. They’re hard to master and far away from a science or anything you can test. That’s probably why you don’t see more truly original and unexpected communication today.”

9.) “The brain wants to have fun. If you keep thinking about that every day, you’re always going to be interesting and relevant. The brain hates boring and expected.”

- end -

* You’ve never heard these before, unless you happened to read the current (July 2010) issue of Delta Airlines’ Sky magazine. It had several advertising/marketing-related pieces, including a series of interviews from which I pulled the quotes above. I don’t think I’ve ever read an in-flight magazine as closely as this one. (To read the interviews, click the link above, then click the “Browse” tab on the left and choose Page 60 – “The Mad, Mad World of Advertising.”)

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

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Guy owns an auto repair shop. Goes to Costco and fills a cart with huge masses of food and drink. Logs on to Reddit.com and posts an article inviting everyone to come to his repair shop for a barbecue/party. Here’s a screenshot from the original story/offer:

He posted some photos of the food he bought, his repair shop, tied it into a Facebook event so that people can spread the event around to their friends, and best of all … offered a “free dent/ding removal per person” during the party — free samples are huge and a great way to earn new customers.

The obvious question is, Does Reddit have enough users in the Santa Clara area to have made this worth the guy’s time/effort? Even if not, he’s created goodwill in a social media community that will likely reward him to some degree with links and future buzz.

All that for a case full of food and an afternoon doing some free dent repair. Not too shabby if you ask me.

(found via Samir Balwani on Twitter – thx!)

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Creative Small Business Marketing, Episode 6

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Apologies for the image being so small; it’s how the survey was presented. If that’s a bit hard to read, it shows that 36% of respondents listed social media in their plans for business growth in 2010, compared to 24% in 2009. More small biz owners listed “create or improve your company’s web site” or “increase communication with existing or potential customers” as planned tactics for 2010, but both of those were down slightly from a year ago.

The survey asked a number of questions (as you’d expect) about the value of printed marketing tools … it’s what FedEx offers to business customers, after all. And, in fact, one of the questions asked what form of marketing is more effective: 61% said “traditional marketing and advertising” was more effective; the other 39% said “web-based marketing and advertising” was more effective.

That may not sound too promising, but it falls in line with some of the widely reported numbers that suggest no more than 50% of small businesses even have a web site.

If you want to look into these numbers some more, the news release is here and the study results can be downloaded here (in PDF format).

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Small Business Owners Adopting Social Media in 2010

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360SEE is an art/furniture gallery in Chicago. The owner’s dog, Homer, hangs out in the front window, plainly visible to passersby walking outside. Homer is little and pretty cute, and people tend to stop and shoot a picture of the French bulldog in the gallery window.

So, what did the gallery owner do?

He started taking photos of the passersby as they took photos of his dog, and then started posting his photos on a blog. It’s appropriately called Photos of People Taking Photos of My Dog.

This has been going on for about a year now. There are Facebook pages for both the gallery itself and for the photo blog. And the owner even put little signs in the gallery window that show the long URL of the dog’s photo blog. When you see photosofpeopletakingphotosofmydog.blogspot.com on a sign in the window, you can’t help but want to visit and learn more — doesn’t matter if you took a photo or not.

For much more about this, you have to read Adam Singer’s blog post, which points out the following:

By observing a social phenomenon that happened organically, 360SEE stumbled upon a creative way to indirectly gain more exposure for their art, furniture and design. It was completely unintentional as far as I can gather, but is a story worth retelling. They are building relationships, inspiring stories and even getting some press.

Agreed. Very clever, very creative form of marketing. I love this kind of stuff.

(thanks to Mike B for the tip)

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

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• revenue (i.e., numbers)
• profit (more numbers)
• visits/pageviews (again, numbers)
• fans, followers, subscribers (more numbers)
• etc.

But different numbers matter to different businesses. The key is to know which numbers matter to your business in your situation.

One of my clients is building a wonderful, authoritative blog in her industry – full of great advice about the products and services she offers. We keep an eye on a lot of numbers related to the blog, but I pay almost zero attention to RSS subscribers. Why? Because the target audience is your “average consumer,” and those folks just aren’t using RSS.

RSS Adoption Rates

In late 2008, Forrester Research issued a report called What’s Holding RSS Back?, and the numbers were pretty grim:

• consumer RSS adoption was only 11%
• of the other 89% who don’t use RSS, only 17% were interested in starting to use RSS

In response to that, Steve Rubel said:

“Feeds are way way too geeky for most and the benefit does not outweigh the learning curve. So I think RSS has peaked.”

I love RSS, but I agree. More recently, Michael Gray echoed the sentiment that RSS is something the tech crowd uses, and not many others.

“…you need to have realistic goals. If your subject matter doesn’t heavily intersect or overlap with things techno-weenie’s are interested in, your RSS subscribers will be low.”

Lisa Barone wrote a great article yesterday on Small Business Trends with tips for increasing blog subscribers, but for some small biz bloggers it’s just not gonna happen.

I have a “Shopping Mall Test” that I like to use: Picture yourself standing outside the entrance to your local shopping mall. If you asked the first 100 people that walked in the mall on any given day, how many would know what RSS is? (or insert any technology) For me, the answer is “not many.”

If Not RSS Subscribers, Then What?

1.) Email — While RSS is a mystery to so many Internet users, email isn’t. Be sure to offer email-based subscription options, too, and then promote the heck out of it on your blog. You need to almost constantly remind people that they can get email alert whenever you write a new post. (If you use Feedburner for your RSS feeds, it also offers an easy email subscription service; use that.)

(Slight tangent: I wrote more about the need for mailing lists and email subscriptions on Hyperlocal Blogger: Four Reasons Why Your Local Blog Needs a Mailing List.)

2.) Other social media — For my client, her target audience may not use RSS, but they most certainly use Facebook and, to a lesser degree, Twitter. Those are more important tools to us than RSS subscriptions.

3.) Money — Ultimately, the only numbers that really matter are revenue and profit. If your web site is making 3x or 5x more money now than it was a year ago, that’s what counts.

Your turn: Do you agree or disagree with my thoughts on RSS subscriptions and the numbers that really matter? Comments are open.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

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