by tradesmeninsights | Oct 12, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Professional tradesmen, whether you’re an electrician, plumber or locksmith, are finally realizing that social media can play an important part in their new business effort. Here’s one example compliments of Marc LeVine from RiaEnjolie.
Locksmiths Use Social Media to Unlock Their Business Potential
Many people do not realize that professional locksmiths do much more than just resolve lockouts and make spare keys. In fact, they generally offer a wide range of services that include selling and installing electronic security systems, intercoms and even window bars and gates. Locksmiths are also responsible for many of the break-ins and robberies that never take place as a result of their theft-proofing devices and crime deterring advice. They can also be credited for helping the police identify successful burglars by way of the recordings on their customer’s CCTV surveillance equipment.
Every city and town has, at least, a few locksmiths on hand to serve the local populace. After all, if you suddenly get locked out of your home, you want a service you can call on 24 hours a day and not one that takes 24 hours to arrive at your door.
With the “Yellow Page” phone books on the way out, it is increasingly important for locksmiths to be easily searched for and found on the Web. This means that they must have a professional looking website with strong search engine optimization (SEO) characteristics. The locksmith’s website must offer prospective customers comprehensive and concisely written content explaining everything they might need to know about a business’ products, menu of services, operating hours and contact information.
Just having a website may not be enough to draw attention to a small, local business. Locksmiths and others are beginning to realize that traditional advertising methods are quite expensive and not as effective as they once were.
Many small businesses continue to run ads in weekly papers and Pennysavers, without ever calculating any return on investment (ROI). Several continue to rerun their ads week after week despite only receiving a few and often no customer inquiries at all. What a terrible waste of time and money for so many hard working people. They often feel compelled to advertise exactly the same way they and their parents always have prior to the age of the Internet. Most have never taken any quality time to consider less costly and often more effective alternatives to newspaper, direct mail, radio and CATV ads like Social Media.
This Locksmith May Have Found the Key for Success
Fidelity Locksmith Services has been serving the people of Los Angeles, California since 1975. Their customers include the general public, as well as many well known Hollywood celebrities that are often in need of much more sophisticated and expensive security systems for their magnificent homes and estates. Having a clientele of this type has enough PR value in its own right, but what good is it if these higher profile associations are not pitched and promoted.
During a rash of Hollywood celebrity burglaries in the fall of 2009, Fidelity Locksmith launched a special deadbolt giveaway program aimed at preventing a repeat of the rash of burglaries that plagued the rich and famous of Hollywood Hills.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re Hollywood royalty or a regular guy like me, living through a break-in is life changing. The lost sense of security that comes following a burglary is often even more devastating than the actual property loss,” said Roy Sivan, Fidelity Locksmith’s Chief of Celebrity Services. “We’re offering celebrities free deadbolts to let them know Fidelity understands what they’re going through and to encourage the public to think about beefing up their home security. No doubt such a high profile program gained the attention of those in traditional and social media.
While the celebrity deadbolt giveaway program was certainly attention getting, the company’s well documented advertising and marketing philosophy may even be more noteworthy. Fidelity Locksmith Services is not at all ashamed to share that it uses Social Media as an inexpensive way to reach their target audience. Through this cost savings approach they say they are more easily able to offer the consumer much better pricing than many of their industry competitors.
Indeed, Fidelity Locksmiths has an active social (media) life on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, where they have created some very funny and memorable short commercials to capture their audience’s imagination along with their business.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXzT5APbUnw&feature=mfu_channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0U2sYOmq4&feature=mfu_channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmIMChrzIW0&feature=player_embedded
Finding the Right Blend of Marketing is a Cost Saver and Revenue Maker
While not every small company like Fidelity Locksmith operates in a Hollywood type of business environment, every business can embrace the same level of creativity to leverage whatever it is that their own community has to offer. If you can’t leverage the New York Yankees, you can always run promotions with your local minor league team. What you have available to work with (in your community) is much less important than what kind of marketing programs you – yourself – can create to inspire your target audience. Most importantly, doesn’t it really all come down to how well you execute your planning; attract and engage your audience; and convert them to paying customers?
Don’t forget to measure and analyze your activities and results, accordingly. This is so critical to a small business’ success. If your traditional marketing activities have been lackluster over the past six months, you can fairly well predict what they will bring you – if unchanged – throughout the remainder of your annual business cycle. At what cost to your business are such unnecessary shortcomings and why continue to finance them? Social Media is much less expensive (often Free) and often much more effective.
Try a modest combination of Social Media and traditional media to grow your business. Start with your main goals. Write them down and stick a note on your wall to refocus you each morning. Those goals are closely linked – to be easily found on the Web and to make a good first impression.
Accomplish these goals by creating a professional looking website reinforced with fundamentally sound Search Engine Optimization practices. With these goals accomplished, support your website with some basic URL promotional activities (make sure your business URL is all over the place) and engage your target audience at grassroots level on Facebook and, perhaps, Twitter for only a couple of hours each day. The results of this minimal activity just may surprise you.
by tradesmeninsights | Mar 10, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
Manufacturers are missing the boat if they are not incorporating videos into their Web sites. According to Forrester Research, videos properly submitted are 53 times more likely to generate first page Google rankings. You heard me right, 53 times more likely. Other advantages are that results appear in days because Google is pushing video to the top. This is a great opportunity for B-to-B marketers.
Benjamin Wayne in a recent post, Search Engine Success: Getting Video SEO Right, outlines what needs to be done in order to get that first page placement. The key is submitting videos and pages in parallel and successfully indexing for each individual search engine.
Search engines can’t find video content on their own, so you need to get your submissions right in order to capitalize on this. Because the video search engine is complex, Benjamin offers these questions to your video platform provider:
- Will you index both the permalink pages as well as the videos?
- Will the links point back to my site?
- How often will feeds be updated?
- In which search engines will the results appear?
- How do I track click-throughs?
If you do this right, you can get great results in a relatively short period of time. If you’re going to do it, you may as well do it right.
by tradesmeninsights | Apr 27, 2009 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
A lot of people don’t know or understand enough about the dynamics of SEO. They either choose to ignore it or become targets of SEO companies that start guaranteeing results. Remember the old saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” “There is no free lunch.” You get the idea.
These companies use techniques called “black hat” which in the short term could raise your traffic, but in the long term it could get you banned from search engines and then who would really lose? It’s important to remember that no SEO company controls rankings on competitive search key words.
I read a post recently by Janet Meiners, Five tips for avoiding deceptive SEO companies, in which she outlines both questionable and downright deceptive tactics. Here’s a summary of what she wrote:
- Putting too many key words on your site. It’s called key word stuffing and they repeat words/phrases. This is an ineffective practice that does nothing more than confuse everybody including the spider.
- Overuse of bolded text or too many links. It looks terrible and doesn’t build trust with people.
- Hidden Links. These are hidden in code or in the footer and may not even be related to your site.
- Complicated link schemes. Google can detect unnatural link patterns. Some people build programs that link automatically that are full of spam content.
- Multiple domains with virtually the same content but different key words. Content is deliberately duplicated across domain names in an attempt to manipulate search engine results.
There are no short cuts. The best rule of thumb is to make your site a good experience for your visitors. This means good original content or other elements that want to make people want to link to you. And as in looking at any service provider, do your home work, get references and if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
by tradesmeninsights | Apr 17, 2009 | Marketing Tips
In the B-to-B marketing world, most companies have specialties or niche markets that they serve.
In our case, most of our clients target the professional tradesman which makes our task a bit easier than others. To reach, for an example, Electrical Contractors or Electricians, there are very specific key words that would drive them to your site like IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers), side-cutters or power bender.
Key words and SEO have long been associated with web sites. But blogs are actually more SEO friendly and much easier to update from information from your analytics.
Twitter isn’t there yet, it’s only a matter of time and search will be one of its most important elements.
Consistently using key words that your target audience would use to find your company will generate significant online traffic.
Companies make the mistake of assuming that once the initial search for those key words and phrases are done, they won’t have to go through that again. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Key words and SEO have to be a part of a continual process of monitoring and updating.
Tools like Google search allows you to type in key words and phrases to see what kind of activity levels there are. Especially in this economy where everything is being measured, SEO/organic search engine marketing has proven itself to be a good ROI.
Here are 4 tips to consider when developing your key words:
- Understand your audience. Since you’re in the business of making stuff, i.e. for Electrical Contractors, you should know their slang and buzz words. You should also know what’s going on in the industry. Don’t focus on marketing terms, focus on what the contractor would be typing into Google to solve his problem.
- Keep it simple. Because you’re talking to a specific audience (electrical contractors), you don’t need 1000 key words. The rule of thumb for key words is to have one key phrase per page. Having 6 or 8 only confuses the search engines so they’re not able to determine the focus of the page.
- Evaluate your competition. There are few companies that don’t have some sort of competitors. Look at their site and blogs if they have them. See what key words/phrases they’re using.
- Treat key word searches as an ongoing process. At least once a quarter, take a good hard look at the metrics and make tweaks where necessary.
What tips can you share to help improve your SEO performance?
by tradesmeninsights | Apr 17, 2009 | Marketing Tips
I don’t know about you, but when one of the times my wife and I have a disagreement, it is usually when we’re going somewhere new in the car, and of course I think I know where I’m going. When getting lost, my thoughts are to keep driving and eventually we’ll run into where we wanted to go. Fortunately, GPS navigation and tools like MapQuest have made my life more easy.
The same hold true for social media. You can drive (A) around aimlessly or (B) you can put a plan together.
Please opt for B. Social media and SEO work well together, but you have to have a plan to maximize your return. Lee Odden wrote a post recently for the blog Mashable, Social media & SEO: 5 essential steps to success, that gives a good summary of what you had to do to capitalize on it.
Here are some highlights of his 5 steps to success as I see it affecting the professional tradesmen market:
- Define your audience. If you’re going after tradesmen, you had better know how they spend their time, understand their preferences and behavior profile. As you get more sophisticated, you can use social media monitoring software that identifies key words, conversations and influencers.
- Define your objective. Social media is not direct marketing. SEO in the social media is to influence discovery of social communities or content by way of research. Indirectly, social content can boost links to web site content improving traffic.
- Make a game plan. In a SEO and social media effort, you need to focus on content and interaction since it’s content that people look for and want to share.
- Define yout tactics. The tactical mix for social media marketing should be focused on where the tradesmen spend their time. What kind of communities are they a part of? Remember, the goal is to start a long-term relationship, not a one nighter.
- Measure goals. Between web analytics and social media tools, you will have more than enough ways to track and help you improve your results.
