One of the most common marketing mistakes is not focusing your business on the needs of your prospects and customers.  Take an honest look at your website, your Yellow Pages advertising, magazine ads, etc.  Do you talk about your business or your customer?  As a basic rule, if more than three-quarters of your ad relates to benefits for your Customer or Client, your execution is good.  If most of your advertising concerns your business, your services, your features, your information (location, hours, etc.), then you are failing to be relevant to your Customer.  

Some of the greatest copywriters in the last 70 years have said this in many different ways, but it’s the same basic idea — focus on the sizzle and not the steak.  Focus on benefits, not features.  

People really want to know what’s the upside for them, especially when they are online searching for a solution to their problem.  Do your business a great service and focus on your Customer.  It will help your marketing tremendously.

If it’s too “close to home” to dissect your own marketing efforts, take a look through your Yellow Pages.  Are most of the ads describing the companies (location, hours, honors & accolades, their products or services), etc.?  I think you will find that nearly 100% of the ads you read are focused on the business and not on what the business can do for you, the potential customer.  

It has been said that Internet marketing is a lot like direct marketing; it is “me to you” communication.  This is true whether your website is focused on a B2B (business-to-business) model, B2C (business-to-consumer) model, or strictly informational with no commercial agenda.  It is very direct, personal communication.  Therefore, think in terms of your prpsective customer or client; in everything you create, imagine you are them.  What would you want to know?  

Now think in terms of your own copy (the content in your website or advertising).  After every line of copy, ask, “So what?” as it relates to your customer.  If you can pass the “so what” test at every line, you have something relevant to say to that prospect.

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You own a small business, just like me. You own a brick & mortar business. I have over a decade of personal, hands-on experience with that; I have paid rent, payroll, payroll taxes, sales tax, worried about inventory and sell-through… I get it. Your margins are getting thinner and sales are getting smaller. You have been looking at every expense item in your business and you have probably run out of things to cut. The next thing to cut will be you, or the business itself. What you need are more customers. More customers will solve your problem, won’t it?

I’d like to ask you to think about advertising your business in the Yellow Pages. I’m not suggesting you think about it as a viable means of advertising — I’m asking you, consider the advertising that you’re doing, whether it be the Yellow Pages or any of the other “old school” methods for advertising your business. Consider how that ad works for you. Consider how that ad MUST work for you in order for it to do its job of bringing more customers into your store or restaurant, or getting more prospects to call you. Someone needs to get the idea to open the phone book, page to your category, peruse the ads, find YOU, see something in your display ad to make them take action and call. NO ONE works that hard anymore to seek you out. That advertising costs thousands of dollars a year. How many of your new customers came from the Yellow Pages last year? Do you even have any metrics (data) to know where your new business came from? Humbly, I suggest the best thing you can do is eliminate that display ad; create a regular, simple listing and pay for an extra line for your website address.

Now please consider your website. I’m going to be very direct and honest with you — if you are running your website like most small business owners, it’s failing to add anything to your business. Many small business owners operate their website as though it were a Yellow Pages ad; it’s there. Your customers won’t randomly find you on the Internet. They won’t just happen to think about your business and type it in. Even if your potential customers go to a search engine and type in your TYPE of business, they probably won’t find you unless you have 1) optimized your pages properly and 2) created specific methods to increase the presence and visibility of your website to the search engines. You see, not only your customers need to know who you are, but Google, Yahoo and MSN does as well. If they don’t know you exist, they can’t deliver your site to people who need your product or service.

Done properly, a website can be a VERY effective method of adding customers to your business. It can be modified very quickly to adapt to trends. Through your website, you can feature sales, talk to your customers and find new clients. A website can be any size you want it to be. You can even sell some of your products on your website and reach beyond your local market.

Consider your website name. If your business is about plumbing, and you don’t have “plumbing” in your .com name, does Google know what your site is about? Do the pages of your site talk about the various aspects of your business? Oftentimes, you’ll see a local business have a three-page site — a Contact page, About Us, and then a HUGE page about everything it is they do. Why? Because they “got a deal” from a web designer for a three-page site that was cheap and easy to implement. This is a terrible strategy in terms of search engines. Segment your pages into one topic per page. Make sure the metatags on each page match the topic. You can Google a discussion about metatags, but essentially, metatags are the code Google looks at for clues on what the page is about. YOU determine what the metatags are. Oftentimes, web designers don’t put anything in the metatags because you have paid for “web design” not “SEO.” That’s one reason why you got such a “deal” on the price. (Kinetics Web Pro only creates SEO-friendly sites, so every page has metatags.)

Metatags are easy to find. Just go to your website, and then in your browser, go to “View Source.” Search for the TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags. If you don’t have anything there, or you can’t even find those words in your code, then your page is not optimized for search engines in the most basic way.

Metatags are the simplest way to optimize a website for search engines, but really, it goes to the very structure of the site. Think in terms of an outline with 1) 2) 3) and sub-sections of a) b) and c) — search engines think the same way. They like to see orderly, planned websites that function logically. Your site should be the same way.

We hope this has been helpful to your business.

If you don’t have time to do this work yourself, we can help. Contact us today.

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