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It used to be that placing an ad in the Yellow Pages was the surest way to attract local buyers. Over the course of the last decade, however, those thick printed directories have been almost completely replaced in most parts of North America.

In 2017, buyers don’t flip through thin sheets of paper to find businesses in their neighborhoods. Instead, they turn to their smartphones and tablets to find what they need because Google offers them more choices, up-to-date contact information, and even unbiased reviews from other buyers.

This change in technology has provided a big boost to lots of savvy marketers. And, it has allowed them to save quite a bit of money – it’s a lot cheaper to find customers using Google than it ever was to place a full-page ad in a print directory. But, if your business hasn’t adjusted, then you might be missing out.

Here are a few steps you can take today to get more customers from your local area…

Make the Most of Local Search Engine Optimization

Ever wonder how Google figures out which businesses match up to customers in a certain area? It mainly determines location by scanning a website for geographic keywords. Having city, state, and province names (as examples) on your website can help search engine spiders to figure out where you’re located. Additionally, things like street names, ZIP Codes, and neighborhood identifiers can be helpful in the same way.

Go Beyond Geographic Keywords

As important as it is to have geographic keywords in your website, there are other tools you can use to pull local customers into your business. Maps, driving directions, and local landmarks are all useful. In addition to giving Google more data about your geographic location, they can help you turn search visits into new revenue. That’s because photos of your location, along with updated phone numbers and contact details, make it easier for someone who is thinking about visiting your office or store to find you in the real world.

Have a Mobile-Ready Website

It’s no coincidence that print directories began to decline in importance just as smartphones found their way into millions of pockets. Lots of buyers are making spur of the moment decisions from anywhere, relying on Google to show them the closest restaurants, dry cleaners, and other local businesses. To take advantage, it’s important that your website be mobile-friendly. Otherwise, those customers are going to take their time and money to a competitor.

Boost Your Reputation With Buyers

Customers looking for local companies to work with aren’t necessarily going to find your website. That’s because they may explore third-party review sites (like Yelp) to look for recommendations first. For that reason, it’s important that your business have profiles on these types of portals, that your information be up-to-date, and that buyers can see lots of positive reviews about your business. Encourage your best customers to say good things about you online and you’ll have an easier time standing out in your local market.

You probably have hundreds or thousands of local buyers who are ready to work with your business, but only if they can find you on Google. So, if you haven’t already replaced the Yellow Pages with a good online marketing strategy, now is a great time to set up a meeting with our creative team to see how we can help.

Executing a profitable internet marketing campaign can involve a lot of tedious and exhausting details. It’s no wonder, then, that so many business owners ask us about the value of advanced customer relationship management (CRM) systems like HubSpot and Infusionsoft.

Hardly a week goes by when we aren’t asked whether one of these platforms (or perhaps a lesser-known competitor) is worth the investment of time and money. Unfortunately, there’s hardly ever a clear-cut answer to this question. Although advanced CRM’s work differently, and offer some unique functionality, no solution is perfect for every situation.

To understand whether you need an advanced CRM like HubSpot in your business, you should be aware of what they can and can’t do in a broad sense. So today, we want to focus on for things you should know before you make a decision…

#1 An Advanced CRM Can Help You Organize Your Online Marketing Activities

One major challenge facing small business owners these days is keeping track of all the different activities needed to move an online marketing plan forward. There are different tools and platforms for blogging, SEO, and email, not to mention several different social apps and websites. an advanced CRM can help you manage and organize these different systems so you can stick with a coherent plan.

#2 An Advanced CRM Can Put Information at Your Fingertips

It’s hard enough just to use all the different tools and platforms we've just mentioned. Keeping track of your progress with them is even tougher. With software like HubSpot, you can put all kinds of detailed and interactive reports right at your fingertips. That way, you won’t just be able to stay on top of your marketing channels, but you also get a sense of what sorts of results you’re achieving on a day-to-day basis.

#3 Advanced CRM’s Can Boost SEO, Sales, and Lead Generation

Advanced CRM systems allow you to structure and refine your campaigns easily. Because you have blogs, emails, social posts, and other tools all working in coordination, it’s easier to stay in touch with prospects and turn them into leads or actual customers. By following a coordinated approach, you can not only get a bigger payoff from SEO, social media marketing, and other channels, but you’ll be much more profitable overall.

#4 No Software System Can Do the Hard Work of Marketing for You

There is an important caveat to the three benefits we’ve given you with regards to advanced CRM’s – you have to actually use them before they’ll pay off. That means taking the time to learn the software, and then plugging in new content, posting to your social accounts, and checking out the results. No matter how sophisticated a platform is, it can’t do everything for you. Advanced CRM’s make it easier to organize your marketing, but they can’t replace the time and effort that’s needed from a committed business owner or Internet marketing professional.

The bottom line looks like this: an advanced  CRM like HubSpot can help you if you take the time to learn its features and then put them into use in your campaigns. However, if you’re just looking for a magic solution that will help you get real results from very little effort, it’s just going to be a waste of money.

To learn more about how advanced CRM’s and other online marketing tools might fit into your business plan, contact our team today to schedule a free consultation!

As part of our web design and internet marketing process, we often evaluate the competitors our clients will have to face. We perform a competition-analysis to see who they’ll be up against, and whether they have any reason to worry.

The challenging part about this part of the job is coming across a company that is so firmly entrenched online that it can take months or years for our clients to catch up. The best scenario is when the situation has is reversed, and we know none of the other business owners out there are going to be able to duplicate our work without starting massive campaigns on their own.

In some cases, a competitive edge can be so big that a business won’t even try to compete on line. Today, we want to show you exactly what it takes to scare your online competitors away…

Streamline Your Responsive Website

In order to dominate online, you have to have a modern website. That means a responsive layout with mobile compatibility. It also means streamlining your menus and user interface so visitors can find the information they need very quickly. Do that and your website will be more helpful than anyone else’s.

Use Your Blog Regularly

Nearly every business website includes a blog, but most marketers don’t actually use them. But because Google treats every new post as a fresh page of search-friendly content, blogging once a week or more gives you a massive search visibility advantage over the competition.

Target Your Search Terms for Niche Markets 

A classic mistake in search engine optimization is to target big, generic search phrases. That makes it easy for your competitors to get around you by focusing on smaller groups. Decide who your buyers are, in which geographic areas you want to target. That’s a great way to shut out the competition.

Refine Your Google AdWords Campaigns

The best way to beat a competitor in online advertising is to simply be more efficient. You don’t have to spend more on Google AdWords, for instance, if you have high Quality Scores. But, if your campaigns already feature search terms with 9/10 or 10/10 scores, it’s hard for the competition to match you in visibility… much less search advertising profits.

Generate Buzz on Your Social Accounts

It’s not how many social followers you have, it’s how tuned in they are to your marketing messages. Nobody cares if you have 10,000 fake followers, but if every one of your posts gets many likes and shares, you’re going to get a lot of social exposure. Compose messages that get buyers talking and you’ll be doing something most other business owners can’t.

Build up a Strong Online Reputation

A good online reputation is an enormous advantage in today’s digital marketing world. That’s because buyers are likely to Google your company and products before they make a purchase decision. Rack up more great reviews than the competition and you’ll win customers they can’t.

Grow Your Email Subscriber List

When you have a healthy and growing email subscriber list, you have an instant and almost free way to reach thousands of targeted prospects at a time. Even better, you get a chance to contact them directly without having them hear from your competitors in the first place.

When you have most or all of the items on this list covered, you don’t leave the competition any room to step in and steal your customers or grab attention from your prospects. If that sounds like the kind of position you want to be in, we hope you’ll take a minute to call or email our team today so we can begin a customized plan for your website.

Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are a great way for people to go online and try to find answers. Not only can you ask around to friends and colleagues, but often you can reach experts and even celebrities, some of whom might be willing to pitch in and shed some light on your dilemma.

This is a great thing, at least most of the time. Unfortunately, it occasionally leads desperate marketers to go around offering "assistance" that's little more than a pitch for their product. No matter what your issue is, their answer is to buy whatever they're selling and hope that solves it.

Tempting as it might be to blanket sites like Twitter with subtle hints to buy your products, that's not a good long-term strategy – even if what you offer could actually fix the issue at hand. That's because people go online looking for answers, not commercials. Here are a few ways to be genuinely helpful on social media sites while still getting your marketing message out there:

Explain the problem first. A lot of people don't know why they're experiencing the troubles they are. If you can help explain what happened to lead to the situation, start there.

Refer to outside sources. Don't ask them to take your word for it, backup your device with documentation on other websites. When people can see that you know what you're talking about, they're more apt to follow your recommendations.

Mention your product or service, but also why you're mentioning it. If the best possible thing someone could do to fix their problem is buy from you, go ahead and say so, but also tell them exactly why. Not only will this make you seem less slimy, but it might be indexed by the search engines and found by others with a similar situation – leading to future sales for you.

So, you’ve chosen some search keywords, set your bids, written some sizzling ads, and even gotten your targeted landing pages together. Your pay-per-click campaign is all ready to go… so how long should you wait to update it?

This can be a really important question, since most online advertising isn’t as profitable as it could be from the start. In fact, successful marketers have been known to double, or even triple, the results from an effective campaign by tweaking different elements like the wording of their ads, or the placement of a “buy now” button on a landing page.

You can’t know what to test, however, until you’ve seen how your current ad, keyword, and visitor combinations work together. So how do you decide when it’s time to freshen things up?

We think a good rule of thumb for updating your PPC is once a month, or every 10,000 impressions, whichever comes first. That way, you don’t overreact to any temporary blip, and you give developing trends enough time to prove they’re statistically significant.

Like any good rule of thumb, however, this one has a couple of exceptions:

When your PPC campaign is bleeding money. If it seems like you’re blowing through your Internet advertising budget and not seeing any results, or even any kind of activity that looks like it might lead to results later, then you might need to re-envision your campaign from the ground up. Are you sure you’re appealing to the right audience, that you have competitive products and prices, and that your offer stacks up well against the competition?

When you have really low quality scores for important keywords. Having low quality scores means you’re going to pay far, far more than you need to for each and every click. That, in turn, kills the efficiency and profitability of your campaigns. It’s okay to live with low quality scores for the first week or so of your new ads while you build up a bit of account history, but after that, they could be a sign that you need to pause and reassess.

When it’s a brand-new campaign. Brand-new campaigns are a unique challenge. On the one hand, you want to give them time to develop and perform, but you also want to grow them and evolve them as you study search patterns and your competitors. If nothing seems to be going exceptionally wrong, let your new ads run and see what happens; but if you spot an obvious problem or issue, don’t let it fester while you collect analytic data.

Knowing when to tamper with your pay-per-click campaigns is just as important as knowing how. Ignore the advice here and you could find yourself constantly switching from one idea or tactic to another, never really finding out which ones work. Or worse yet, you could keep spending money on a losing campaign month after month. To avoid both problems, it’s important to have a strategy for regular review and testing, so give our rules of thumb a little bit of thought.

By now, you’ve probably heard dozens of times that email is affordable, consistent, and effective. It’s arguably the best way to reach out to existing customers and prospects, especially when you want to generate quick sales.

But, the unspoken hurdle to email marketing success is developing and growing your list of subscribers. That involves taking steps to add names and email addresses to your database, but also ensuring your existing contacts don’t opt out of further messages. Here are a few tips you can use to accomplish both…

Put Your Signup Form in the Right Places

If you want people to register for your email newsletter, you should make it easy for them to sign up. Add small but visible forms to your home page, landing pages, and other high-traffic areas of your website. If possible, also include some of the benefits a viewer will get for signing up (see below). 

Promote Your Newsletter on Social Media

If you’re using social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to attract potential customers, as so many marketers are, then you should promote your email newsletter on your profiles. You can give fans and followers the option of registering, of course, but also let them know about all the great content that’s being shared each week or so. You might be surprised at how many will decide they don’t want to miss out.

Offer Discounts and Special Offers

One of the most reliable ways to attract email newsletter subscribers – not to mention boost the profitability of your website – is to offer discounts, coupon codes, and other specials within each message you send. That doesn’t just give buyers a reason to stay on your list, but also creates a sense of urgency when your newsletter arrives. They want to open it immediately to find out how they can save, so they start to look forward to your marketing.

Use a Reliable Email Service

It’s amazing, but they are still many businesses using email delivery services that don’t ensure all of their messages are getting through. Is it really worth it to save a few dollars a month if it means your subscribers never see your newsletter in the first place because it gets caught in their spam filter? Invest in the right kind of service (like MailChimp or Constant Contact) and work with a creative team who can help you to configure it correctly.

Keep Your Messages Short and Relevant

Remember, growing your email list is about adding new names and keeping the ones you already have. With that in mind, its a good idea to keep your newsletters short and relevant to your industry or audience. Also, try to stick to a regular publishing schedule. If your subscribers feel as if they are being bombarded by random offers at unpredictable times, they may decide to opt out and avoid the hassle of reading your unfocused messages.

If you need help with email marketing, or web design and Internet marketing in general, be sure to reach out to a member of our team today to set up a free consultation. We are here to help, and look forward to working with you!

Search engine optimization is both evolving and getting more competitive all the time. Not only are there hundreds of times as many websites online today as there were when Google first launched, but algorithm updates and artificial intelligence have changed the way search spiders crawl the web.

With all of that in mind, it’s not surprising that a lot of businesses need an update when it comes to their approach to search engine optimization. If you’d like to boost your search visibility in 2017 – and get more buyers coming to your website as a result – here are some steps you should think about taking today…

Re-Evaluate Your Keyword Strategy

Over the years, we have learned that a lot of marketers stick to the keywords they know out of sheer habit. That sometimes remains true even if their potential customers aren’t using the same search terms anymore, or if the competition for search rankings around those terms has gotten intense. The point is that you should re-evaluate your keyword strategy at least once a year to ensure you’re doing everything you can to attract buyers and bring them to your pages.

Clean Up Your Website

Through successive algorithm updates, Google has gotten aggressive in weeding out websites with broken links, scraped content, or out-of-date information. So, if you have any of these issues with your website, the odds are good that you’re either being filtered out of Google’s search results or are losing ground to competitors who are keeping their pages in better shape.

Upgrade Your Web Hosting

Premium web hosting is the new “secret weapon” in search engine optimization. For one thing, it allows websites to load more quickly and consistently. And for another, good web hosting allows for secure SSL connections, which were recently revealed to be a search signal within Google’s rankings. All in all, it almost always makes sense to upgrade your web hosting for a few dollars a day when you consider the added security, performance, and search visibility.

Make Mobile a Big Priority

Mobile web use has been growing rapidly and steadily for a few years, and Google’s emphasis on mobile compatibility has increased step-for-step. This is true to the point that the world’s largest search engine recently announced that positioning for desktop searches could be affected by mobile functionality. If you want to keep Google happy, along with the thousands of people who are likely to visit your website from an iPhone, android, or other mobile device this year, it’s time to invest in responsive web design.

Develop a Content Plan

It’s not enough to just have content on your website anymore – if you want Google to crawl your pages and send visitors your way, you need relevant, current, and insightful articles that invite comments and interaction. That’s not going to happen by accident, so you should develop a content plan that lets you plan ideas and updates for the months to come.

Ready to put your new search engine optimization knowledge into action? Call our creative team today so we can schedule a free website review and talk about the next set of steps you should follow.

Given that social media marketing has been around in earnest for a several years now, you would think there wouldn't be a lot of rules or guidelines to follow, and for the most part there aren't. But when it comes to getting the word out about your company on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, there is actually one ironclad principle to stick to: being boring, overly "corporate," or mundane is the kiss of death.

Why? Because the men and women who typically use social media sites – no matter what age they are – are already savvy to all kinds of advertising. They've lived through Super Bowl spots, Internet pop-ups, stealth marketers, and enough variations on print, radio, and TV solicitations to stop the shopaholic in his or her tracks. We've even gone through spam. When they go on to social networking sites, it's primarily to see how friends and family been doing, or even to ask for advice and products, but not to be sold in a heavy-handed fashion.

That means you have to promote yourself, your business, and whatever you’re offering in an entertaining way, or at least one that can attract enough attention to compete with the dozens of other things that can be immediately clicked on. It's okay to talk about great savings, but you'll get a lot farther if you can wrap it in some kind of joke, photo collection, or fun story.

Does this mean you should sell out your marketing plans and just hope that people will reward your creativity with their attention and business? Absolutely not. What it means is that you're in the same boat as every other company on the face of the earth: dealing with a public that's tired of boring marketing messages and wants something more. You should still envision your offers in the same way, just be sure to wrap them in a package that's a little more entertaining.

For the past few decades, it's been getting harder and harder to convince people to buy if you have an uninteresting message. With social media, the only thing that's changed is that it's harder to run from that fact.

One of the hardest things about Internet marketing is that, even though it moves and changes at a rapid pace, progress never comes as quickly as most of us would like (and especially those of us in the business web design industry). And so, when we come across a rare opportunity to improve what we do instantly, it's important to jump on it.

With that in mind, we'd like to share one of our top tips for getting more from all the things you do online. It's so simple, but so effective, that it can make an enormous difference in a very short period of time:

Stop repeating the same mistakes you’ve been making in the past.

For most companies, following this one single piece of advice can prevent them from losing time and money that has been slipping away for months or years. To get a sense of what we mean, here are some common mistakes that businesses tend to make again and again:

•  Choosing the lowest-cost Internet marketing provider even though they have a poor track record, or can't offer the ROI that someone else can.
•  Emphasizing the look of their website over its functionality or the viability of a long-term Internet marketing plan.
• Placing too much importance on search engine optimization and not enough on the process of converting visitors into actual sales opportunities.
• Making inconsistent investments of time and/or money that lead to big gaps in the Internet marketing plan, or periods where nothing gets done.

Obviously, we could go on and on, but the point is that old habits are easy to slip back into – even if you know you're not getting the kinds of results you should be. But, if you're really serious about making things happen this year, it's time to shed the ideas and habits that didn't work in the first place.

If you're ready to get to the top with your Internet marketing this year, contact a member of the Kinetik team today and ask for a free consultation.

Going online, building a new small business website, or even just putting together an ambitious online marketing plan for the first time can all feel like opening a giant door to the world's customers. No matter what your limitations were before, you can now reach new buyers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, virtually anywhere on the globe.

In most cases, that's a really great thing.

And how could it not? Actually, opening the marketing floodgates can actually be a big hindrance to some smaller businesses because it can pull them away from their core focus. Here's the problem: no matter what you sell, there are probably dozens of other companies in the world that sell the same thing, or something similar… and the vast majority of them are online. So the people who buy from you now usually don't do so because they don't have any other choice, but because you offer something distinctly unique.

If you can find that unique quality, then you can take it and make it the core theme of your online marketing campaign. You can use it to explain why people are better off buying from you than they are for many of your competitors, and you can say clearly with conviction. But without any of those things, you're "just another vendor" trying to make a buck online. In that case, why should anyone choose you, when there might be someone closer, cheaper, or that they're more familiar with?

When it comes to marketing, online or off, you should think of your campaigns as scalpels, rather than shotguns. In other words, you shouldn't just be looking for "anyone with a few dollars to spend," as much as you should your perfect customer. If you can stick to that approach, and find these people gradually, then they'll reward you by buying again and again, not to mention sharing information about your business with their friends.

It's a very big world out there, filled with lots and lots of customers for what you sell. Just be sure to keep perspective and look for the ones that make the most sense – we can promise it will end up being better business for you, and a lot more fulfilling for them.