Help with Facebook & Social Targeting

Where is one of the largest chunks of time spent online during a typical person's day...on Facebook.  It accounts for 20% of our time online.

ReachLocal recently did a study on 500 businesses and we found that 75% of them are actively using Facebook to market their business.  There are many free resources on social media but many companies need to take the next step to aggressively target these users.  This is especially true now that Facebook limits the amount of post that people see from brands.

Below are three ways we are helping our advertisers with social marketing.

1. Drive Calls
   • Facebook has MANY options to help drive engagements.  Our software is here to help learn how to get more of those to happen.  See some of those ways here.
2. Increase Site Visits
   • The flow of traffic between social media, and your website, is key to growing the site's relevance online.  One of the many components of SEO ranking is that your websites is well connected to all of the social media sites.  We help to make sure that this pipeline is healthy and growing.
3. Grow Engagement with Your Business 
• Social media is meant to be social. Local businesses need to engage their followers and fans.

If you are interested in learning more about ReachLocal and Facebook, feel free to visit our Solutions Page.  You can also email or call me to discuss options.

The Digital Marketing Health Check can give you insight on how well you are positioned. 

Directory Listings Are Vital To Healthy Digital Footprint

Directory listings are vital to a health digital footprint...

There are MANY directories online and your business is most likely listed in most of them but how accurate are those listings? 100% of the businesses we polled found errors on their listings.

What does this mean...it means that your name, phone number or address are wrong or not showing.  This is going to be a problem when people are trying to find you and a bigger problem for Google to rank you.  Google won't rank inaccurate listings highly.

Below are three tips to improve your rankings:

1. Claim Listings
   • Go to all the major directories and claim your listing.  Go to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, CitySearch and Superpages.
2. Maps & Apps
   • Pull you business up on your phone to make sure Google Maps and Apple Maps can find your business easily.  If it doesn't...correct it NOW
3. Update Listing
• Fill out your listings with pictures, profile info and coupons.  The more attractive it looks, the more responses you will get from it.

To read more...visit Are You Making These 3 Mistakes With Your Local Listings? 

The Digital Marketing Health Check can give you insight on how many errors are currently showing for your business.  Visit here.

5 Interesting New Social Media Features

The digital world is fast pace and always changing.  Below are a few key updates that everyone should be up to speed on.  The biggest news is focused on the verified badges on Facebook.  Make sure to go in and claim yours.

1. Twitter Polls
   • A new way to engage fans on your Twitter account
   • Read more on their blog.
2. Twitter Hearts
   • Followers will now heart (like) the content they are engaging with...not a big deal but something to be up to speed on so you are in the know.
3. Facebook Verified Badges
   • ***This one is important to local businesses***
   • Businesses can verify the authenticity and credibility of their page.
   • This can also help local ranking of your page
   • Go here to see how to verify your listing.
4. Facebook Reactions
   • Soon you'll be able to do more than just LIKE a post.  New reactions will enable you to love, laugh or cry at a post.
   • Watch this video if you are interested to see the future.
5. Pinterest Place Pins
   • This is good news for restaurants, bars, hotels and other like business.
   • This feature allows you to build a location based Pinterest board.

Final thought...make sure you verify your local business on Facebook!

Win Back Your Site Visitors

Small businesses spend a lot of resources to get new traffic to their site.  They also typically spend a good amount on updating the website to convert that new traffic.

Here is a surprise to most business owners, your site only converts 3% of that first time traffic.

Now we know the stat...time to look at your site.  You should have some tracking of the site traffic so log into your analytics and see how much new traffic you are getting.  In the case below, one of my clients in the HVAC world, they got

435 new sessions in the last 30 days.  This would mean that 421 people left the website without interacting with the client.

What can be done to get more people to come back to the site?  Below are three steps to increase latent conversions:

1. Retargeting / Remarketing
   • We've all seen banner ads online and we know that some follow us around.  This is an important steps to re-engage people with your brand as they surf online.
   • Retargeting finds users that have been to your site and gives them a reason to come back.  As we talked about last week, you need acompelling offer to get them to come back.
   • Need Help:  Solution - ReachRetargeting
2. Online Reviews
   • Reviews can keep, or kill, a relationship with a potential customer
   • Search your business on Google and see what reviews people are seeing now.
   • Need Help: Solution - ReachCast
3. Social Media Presence
• Are you set up to interact with new customers on social media?
• Social media has many benefits and one of the main ones is to engage new customers with info and offers.  Active social media helps show new potential customers that you are engaged with your clients.
• Need Help: Solution - ReachSEO

Each of these areas are critical to helping get back the lost traffic.  Don't just rely on a new website or fancy splash page to convert because even the best sites only convert 15% of new traffic.  If you do not currently have a strategy to target this lost audience, reach out to Eric Laylon.  You can also visit the website below for more information.

Create an offer that works:

Call To Action - Promo - Offer - Special - Coupon - Sale 

These are all words to describe what we, in the marketing world, love to tell clients to push in their advertising to get interactions.  Where we fail our clients is to help them understand what makes a good offer that drives more leads and sales.

Below are three bullet points to help get the creative juices flowing

Solution for a pain/problem:

• Every company starts with an idea to provide a solution that fills a need.  You then have to find people that have that pain or need, i.e. customers.  Once you've found them...you need them to find you.
• You must point out, in your marketing, that you fulfill that pain for them as well as why they should pick you over the competition in the marketplace.
• Ideas:
• Go to your competitors reviews pages (Yelp/Google Reviews) and see what people are complaining about..then offer a solution to fix that issue.
• Set up Google Alerts to have industry articles sent to you.
• Get out behind the desk and talk with your clients as they come into the store or go out and meet directly with customers.

Hit their deepest desire

• Get to know your audience by drilling down into what drives them emotionally.  Emotions sell and people purchase from this base level reaction.
• Your marketing should pull emotional reactions from your potential client base.  Those reactions can be fear or desire...fear of lose is a potent motivator.
• Ideas:
• Monitor social media.  Make sure your social media is hooked up to your customers so you can see what gets them interested
• Meet with long term clients to see why they use your service or buy your product.
• Look at your features and benefits of your products and introduce that to your new clients.

Provide a guarantee

• Everyone believes in their product or service so put that to the test.  Provide a guarantee that will highlight your confidence.
• Look at what your competitors are doing and take it to the next level.  EVERYONE does a free estimate...so what!!  You want to stand out and be different.
• Ideas:
• Free month
• Free delivery
• Waive installation fee

In conclusion, change it up.  Look for new ways to drive your message home.  If you do not currently have a strategy to target your audience, reach out to Eric Laylon.  You can also visit the website below for more information.

How Does Social Affect Your SEO Efforts?

Many local businesses know that Social is important to managing your online brand but few know how it helps/hurts your website's organic placement.  Google has been tight lipped about the direct correlation between your efforts on social media and your ranking.  What we do know is that Facebook/Twitter/YouTube are great ways to drive traffic to your main website and Google loves seeing that your site is being "talked" about.

ReachLocal has been helping clients with SEO for some time now.  During that time, we've come to see the below areas are key reasons why you should be active in your social properties:

Link Building

•  Google wants links pointing at your site so having your social media pages directing traffic to your site is going to be an important step to speaking Google's language.

Website Authority

• Authority is how valuable Google sees your site.  The more people visiting and staying on your website, the higher the authority and better the ranking.
• Social traffic tends to have high time on site so this helps in building good authority in Google's eyes.

Social Chatter

• What better way to show the search engines that you matter then to have a lot of people talking about you.  Social chatter is when people are talking about you on Facebook or sharing your infographics or Tweeting your info out to their followers.

Are you curious how healthy your social media and website are?  Feel free to have your check up done by visiting Digital Marketing Health Check.  This tool will enable you see where your brand stands.

Improving Your Social Brand

We've talked to many local Philadelphia businesses about the importance of Social on your organic SEO.  Many small local businesses need assistance with digital marketing here in Philly and I want to outline some key areas to focus on when developing your Social Media. 

• Platform
• There are many choices to engage your customers on Social Media.  You have Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and much more coming out each month.
• Make sure you know your demographics and marry your brand to the right one(s).  That might include not going into the medium, as a whole, but I would guess this is rare.  Most everyone is tied into Social Media at some point so it is important to be where your clients are surfing.  You must pick the right one(s) and get to work.
• Engage
• Once you've determined the path, it's important to connect with your customers...and do so regularly.
• Offer help
• Give advice
• Join conversations
• Thank people for joining
• All of these things will show that you are here for your clients
• Creativity
• There are numerous examples of creativity on Social Media.  Here are a few examples to get your creative juices flowing:
• Nikon
• BWM
• Budweiser
• Balance
• You should never use Social Media as a way to sell, sell, sell and sell some more.  It's all about having balance in your approach.  You should lean more on offering free advice and then sprinkle in your paid services.  I like using the good ol' 80/20 rule. 

Have you been struggling in these areas?  Do you need help to drive a better brand?  That is where we help take your efforts to the next level.  ReachLocal's Social Media program, called ReachCast, is designed for small to medium sized businesses to launch off on what they are currently doing to achieve their next goal.  See more by visiting the image below...

ReachCast

3 Tips To Spring Forward In 2015

As we get into the spring season, it is important to make sure that your digital marketing plans are set up to help you convert more business.  Below are three important tips for any small business to be successful here in 2015.  Spring time in Philadelphia is a wonderful time for business to engage with their clients and to ramp up their marketing efforts.

TIP #1 - Mobile or Responsive Design Website:

•     Google announced that on April 21st, that their ranking algorithm is going to factor mobile design.   This means that on mobile searches, if your website is not mobile friendly or responsive design, it will get punished.  Most small to medium sized businesses know that they need a mobile site but may not have moved to update their existing design.  Below is an example of one of my clients that we moved to responsive design.  You can see the before and after in the screen shot.

• From the outside in, there might not look to be much of a change, but look at how the site responds to mobile visits.  You can see below the before and after of mobile visits. For those that visited the old site on their mobile phone, they were having a terrible user experience.  Now that they have updated the site, it is seen better by users and Google will not penalize the site in mobile rankings.

Tip #2 - Localized Mobile Marketing

• Once you have a site that is updated for mobile users, the next step is to make sure that you are getting traffic to it.  It is important to understand that the search engines want small to medium sized local businesses here in Philadelphia to invest in mobile marketing.  The site is not going to show up for every term and ads on the search engines will enable your site to target local users.
• Below is an example of a mobile search ad.  Ad placement is bid on and the highest bidder wins.  Bids on mobile searches are much more aggressive due to the limited space.  There are only two spots so make sure to allocate higher maximum bids on mobile searches.  If you are not sure how to do this, higher someone that knows.

TIP #3 - Track Return On Mobile Investment

• Now that you've spent the money to update the site and allocated resources to the search engines, it is vital that you monitor how well you are converting these marketing dollars into revenue.  
• Tracking conversions is something that websites, like the one above, can help you with.  When we develop sites, at ReachLocal, we incorporate a tracking software that shows us the calls that are generated from the site.  We can track it down to how the person got to the site.  If someone searches on Google, we can see if that person clicked on an ad and called the business.  We can also see if the lead came from a social site, a directory site or from the organic position.
• Below is a sample of what the tracking looks like.  As the business user monitors the leads, they are able to push those leads into contact, to a lead and finally into a new clients.  As they move them through the decision making process we can see how much revenue is generated.

To learn more about digital and mobile marketing, feel free to call Eric at 610-664-4595 or email him at elaylon@reachlocal.com

3 Reasons For/Against Using Software For Your SEM

If you are reading this article it means that, most likely, you are manning your own Google search engine marketing or you want to step into this world. You've wondered if you are getting everything you expected.  You've questioned the ROI of the wonderful world of Google Adwords.  There are many moving pieces to Google marketing and that's not even taking into account Yahoo and Bing.

Below are three reasons for outsourcing to a software platform.  We'll also look at three reasons to not go with a consultant to manage your digital marketing.

Three Reasons For:

• Time
•  This is a business persons most valuable resource.  Time management is paramount when running a business, department or your marketing.  Everyone needs to be able to budget their time in a way that they get the most out of their day.  The goal is to get as much done is as little time possible so you can go home and spend the rest of your valuable time with your family.
• 1 hour
• This is the amount of time you should allow each day to manage your online search engine marketing.
• There are lots of moving pieces to check.
• Bids
• Ads
• Landing pages
• Conversions
• Competition
• Click Thru Rates
• Etc.
• How much is your time worth?
• If you are a local Philadelphia small business person that makes $100k a year, then on average that hour is worth $48.
• With that in mind, you should be checking it each day and once on the weekend.  Search engine campaigns can run 24/7.
• Each month, that adds up to almost $1,200 of time.  This is on top of what you are spending for the marketing.
• Using software, like ReachLocal, will enable you to use that time to build your company and give you back 24 hours each month.
• Expertise
• Most small to medium sized businesses in the Philadelphia area are experts in their line of service and they dabble in finance, marketing, HR and legal.
• For instance, I am an expert in search engine marketing but not in 401ks and business law.  This is why I outsource to the experts in those areas.
• Software can help streamline and manage the components of Google Adwords so you can look at the big picture.
• Software will track and monitor what keyword, at what price, is driving the right type of conversion.
• Then when you work with a digital marketing consultant, they can game plan with you to determine the areas of success and areas of weakness in the campaigns.
• Scope
• When running digital and mobile marketing, there are a number of platforms that you need to be active on.
• Google
• Yahoo 
• Bing
• Each platform has a desk top and mobile program that needs to be managed and tracked.
• With a software program like ReachLocal, you can seamlessly run you ads on each area and make sure that you are moving budget to the areas that are successful.
• One of the biggest mistakes I see local Philly businesses make is not taking advantage of traffic from Yahoo and Bing.
• Google accounts for  67%, and this number is falling as Yahoo and Bing make strategic partnerships to increase their market share.
• Can you afford to not go after 33% of your potential new customers?  Your competition is most likely hoping you do not.

Three Reasons Against:

• Budget
• If you are a small one person operation and/or have annual revenues under $250k a year, I typically recommend that you run a Google only campaign yourself.
• Typically we recommend that you plan for 5% of your revenue to go toward your marketing budget.  With a monthly budget of $12,500 for all marketing, this means that $6250 toward digital marketing.  We always suggest that you have half of your marketing in traditional forms of advertising and half in online marketing.
• If you are investing $500 a month toward digital marketing a month, you need all of those funds to compete against the big boys.  One of the main reasons small businesses fail at search engine marketing is that they don't invest enough and they don't monitor that investment.
• Keywords
• If you are a locksmith, there are only so many ways to say that you are a locksmith.
• Most of the clients, that we work with, have many profit centers and many ways to have potential clients look for them.
• Example:
• Retirement Community
• I work with a number of retirement and assisted living facilities.  Each has a number of profit centers and we have keywords and text ads for all of them.
• Retirement living
• Assisted Living
• Personal Care
• Dementia Assistance
• In Home Care
• Etc.
• It would be near impossible for a local retirement community to manage each of these ad groups and text ads.
• Hands On
• If you are someone that loves technology and has a passion for numbers, then outsourcing PPC to a consultant doesn't make sense.  Running Google Adwords can be a lot of fun, if you have the time to crunch numbers and monitor it every day.
• I've worked with some clients that want to be able to manage the minutia.  When it comes to software running PPC campaigns, this is typically not how software works.  The software is doing that for you so you can achieve maximum return.

In conclusion, it's important to weigh each side of the equation. Always balance the pluses and minuses so that you can make an informed decision.

Feel free to email me with any additional questions.

Eric Laylon
Senior Internet Marketing Consultant
610-667-4595

Mobile Marketing 2015 - What To Know

• Website
• As mobile usage has jumped, in the last few years, your website NEEDS to be mobile friendly and better yet, responsive design.
• If you are not familiar with responsive design, it's when your website fits the screen of the device that is connecting to it.  Google is benefiting sites that are responsive design because of the better user experience.  
• ReachLocal has been developing mobile & responsive design sites for over a year now.  See examples here.

• Google / Yahoo / Bing
• The area we have seen the biggest jump in marketing dollars is search engine marketing on mobile phones.
• Mobile marketing on the search engines is targeted, local and simple.
• It is getting more expensive. As more small business get out of traditional and into digital. upwards of $31 billion was spent on mobile marketing this year!
• At least 40% of your search marketing budget should be directed at mobile.
• Display
•  Display ads on mobile come in a verity of different drivers.
• Social
• In App
• Banners
• This is just like any other push marketing.  Much like radio, tv and print, it is important to get the message out of your service and/or product.  Push ads can be a great way to build your brand and educate the public.
• Each area has pluses and minuses so it's important to consult with yourmarketing rep to determine which is the right avenue.
• SMS
• SMS, or text message, marketing is going to be an area that enables you to push messages through text to customers.
• Much like you collect emails, for email marketing, phone numbers being collected for SMS marketing.
• There are many things to make sure you do if you go this route.
• It has to be opt in
• It has to be local
• It has to be short and interactive

Google Gets Callouts

• Text Ad
• Google is forever changing and testing different strategies for both organic and paid listings.  The most recent change is that Google has added an additional line of copy for advertisers to provide a callout line.
• They show when the ad appears in the top 3 spots on the search page.
• See example below.

• Why
• This additional line allows us to highlight a product or service that the advertiser would like to promote.
• It is flexible and we can tailor it to specials or seasonal events.
• The callouts are also mobile friendly so we can have searchers see it on the phone or table search result.
• Benefit
•  Those advertisers that get them added will make the ad larger and it will take up more real estate.
• How
• To have Google Callouts enabled for your campaign, or to get a campaign started, email or call me to discuss.

Keeping Up With Google My Business

What To Know:

Google recently changed their algorithm and one of the major areas that it effected was in the Google map listings.  This area, which is now called Google My Business, has gone through a lot of changes over the years.  The screen shot below is an example of these listings. With Google's newest update, it has pushed these listings down the result page.  It is vitally important to update and manage this listing to ensure that it will show in the search results.Below are some simple steps to follow: Make sure it is formatted properly. I found with a client, that use to be on top of his listing, that Google had cleared out all of his info. Be sure to proactively search yourself.  If you are not actively managing it, Google can clear it out and reset it. Review ALL of your local listings.  Be sure to look at your listings on Yelp, Yahoo, Bing and other areas to ensure that they are all correctly updated. Set up your service map.  This is going tell Google, and your potential clients, where you are willing to go to meet or conduct business. BIG TAKE AWAY - Check your listing at least once a month.  If you need help, call a professional or if you can't find one, email me.

5 Common SEO Mistakes

Welcome to our April edition of From the Desk of Team Laylon!  As we move into what will hopefully be a break from our extremely challenging winter, we are going to focus on growing your online business.  Soon the flowers will be in full bloom and with that in mind we'd like to help you grow your digital marketing presence by looking at SEO.

 
 

5 Common SEO Mistakes

SEO is, and has always been, an important part of having a solid digital strategy.  We will be looking at some common mistakes to avoid.

We have been assisting local small to medium sized businesses with developing smart and responsive websites.  Our Edge sites are conversion friendly and help to manage and monitor the leads from your marketing. The next step is to make sure that they are driving visits.  This can be done many ways but the two main are Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.

When focusing on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) it is vital that you have a website that is a good starting point.  You would never build a house on a cracked foundation and the same is true with websites.  Below are a few important things to make sure aren't doing wrong out of the gate.

• Outdated Website
• If your website is older then 5 years, or hasn't been updated since 1999, it's time for a new one.  Everyone knows that technology is changing at a rapid pace.  Most likely the phone in your pocket is outdated.  If you have a website. that is even a couple years old, you are most likely missing out.
• Non Mobile Friendly
• The search engines will penalize you for many things and losing visitors is #1.  If your site isn't mobile friendly, then most likely half of the visitors are having bad experiences.  This is going to negatively effect your ranking in a big way.
• Faulty Meta Tags
• If you don't know what metadata or meta tags are, that's probably the first problem.  Learn more here.  Make sure that your website can speak to the search engines and it all starts here.
• Blog-less
• A blog is vital to a website.  This is the mouth piece to the search engines.  Through the blog you are telling the world what is going on with your business and you are letting the search engines know you are keeping up to date.
• Not Local
• The internet is getting more and more local.  It is important to have your website show you are local and that you service the local area.  Google is constantly changing is search page to deliver better local results and you need to target your website to grab these searchers.  You will want to claim all of your local listings and update them often.

Hopefully your website doesn't fall under any of these headings but if it does, we can help. Email or call, 610-557-4595 x112 for more information on Edge and ReachSEO. 

Full article can be viewed here

Determining Monthly Budgets For Digital Marketing

We know that the trend for marketing is moving online and we know that local small to medium sized businesses need to have a balanced approach for allocating their resources so how do they go about figuring out what is right for them?

We will cover a few topics on how to help figure out the right budget and the right allocation.  Below are the areas we will cover.

• What percentage of my business's gross revenues should I put into marketing?
• What percentage of my marketing budget should go toward traditional verses online?
• What type of mix should I have with my online advertising?
• How do I plan for seasonality?

HOW MUCH?

When running a local business having a plan and executing that plan is vital for your survival.  Local businesses are getting hit from all sides and have competitors at every turn.  Local small to medium sized Philadelphia businesses need to compete against other Philly SMBs, national chains, e-commerce companies and more.  With that in mind, it is very important to have a budget and stick with it. 

Lots of businesses shoot from the hip when determining their marketing but that will lead to a ballooning budget.  When looking at how much to spend, there are consultants that recommend 7-8% of your gross annual revenue.  I personally believe that this is a very aggressive number and usually advice my clients to be in the 5% area.  Throughout this blog we'll use an example of a $3 million a year business.

Revenue = $3 million
Annual Marketing Budget = $150,000
Monthly Marketing Budget = $12,500


Percentage Toward Online & Offline
Very soon the total advertising dollars of online marketing is going to exceed that of traditional marketing. Just last year in 2012, $39 billion was spent in online and $33 billion was spent on print advertising. 2013 is showing to have more of the same when it comes to spending online marketing dollars.  This coming year it has been shown that there is going to be an increase of 5% spent on marketing online.

The question for local Philly businesses is, how much should I put to digital advertising?  I recommend that clients typical allocate 50% of marketing to traditional and 50% toward online.  I make the case that traditional marketing is still important to driving the message out locally and it is still expensive.  As an example, it's about $850 for one spot on WMMR morning drive so to keep a consistent message it is going to take a healthy investment. When thinking about where to place your advertising dollars make sure to place it in the right place because you need a lot of frequency to accomplish top of mind awareness.

In our example of $3 million business, about $6,250 should be dedicated to online marketing and $6,250 toward offline advertising.

Marketing Mix
Now that we have a breakdown of how much, the next logical question is where do we invest?  To answer that we need to understand what is out there in terms of digital marketing.

There are some key areas that we group digital marketing into and below are the main areas:
Search Engines
Brand Building
Social Management
Email Marketing


Search Engines

• This breaks down into two major areas
  
• SEO (or search engine optimization)
•  When it comes to investment, this will take an initial payment and then usually a month maintenance fee.
• I usually advise my clients that building a quality site with a blog and updating both is the best investment of time.  If you do this upfront work, the monthly investment for SEO should be minimal. 
• Example...with our $3 million company I would recommend $500 a month on SEO
• SEM (or search engine marketing)
• Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engine have a marketing platform that allows for you to bid on keywords and pay for visits.
• With the changing algorithm at Google and the rest, it is important to keep placement on the search engines with a good strategy of buying keywords that get calls and emails.
• Each industry is different and the cost per keyword varies so budget should reflect the competitive nature of your industry.  You can go to Google to see how competitive your industry is by visiting their keyword tool
• Example...with our $3 million company we will say that they are a HVAC company that is in Philadelphia that wants to target AC keywords.  A locally targeting campaign could run up to $3000 a month.

Brand Building
When it comes to push messaging online there are lots of ways to go about getting the message out.  Banner ads are a good way to get the brand image to the right people.  Banner ads have been revolutionized over the years.  Through cookie tracking you can now focus in on specific demographics and search behaviors.  No longer do you have to waste your advertising dollars on one-off newspaper websites or just on Comcast.

• Banner Ads
• Remarketing and Retargeting allow businesses to push their message to a very specific market of people.  You can target people that have been to your website as well as people that have been searching specifically for your product or service.
• This type of advertising is bought on cost per 1000.  That means that when a 1000 people see the banner ad the client is billed a fee.  That fee is determined on how valuable the website is and how much it is worth to the other companies bidding on it.
• High traffic websites like ESPN, CNN and others can charge up to $40 per CPM.  Smaller blogs and niche sites can be in the $1 to $3 CPM range.
• Example...our $3 million company can push messages during their core business season with a $1000 budget.

Social Management

Social management and marketing is a booming industry.  It is important to build your networks so that you can expand your online word of mouth, maintain a good reputation and do digital PR.  Customers are evaluating your business on  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google +.

• Social Marketing
• My personal experience with local Philadelphia businesses is that marketing on Facebook is not worth the investment.  For some businesses I'm sure it can work but I have not seen this with local SMBs in Philly.
• Social Management
• When it comes to building your network and managing your reputation, this takes a lot of time and knowledge, which most local businesses don't have the time for.  An investment in social, for the right business, can help make all the difference when buyers get into the decision making mindframe.
• Typically when you outsource social, that involves them building your followers, engaging your fans and managing your reputation.  Each week there needs to be post and content published to build your following.
• Example...a month budget for social can range from $500 to $1500 a month depending on your needs

Email Marketing
Email marketing is a key part of digital advertising.  It can be used to send coupons, inform about specials, education about events and much more.

• Development
• You will want to build a list of emails as consistently as possible.  Every new prospect, client, customer, friend or passerby should be in your email data base.  As you build your list it is important to develop a consistent communication cadence.  You don't want to over do it but you want to have some method to your madness.  
• Implementation
• I recommend Constant Contact to my clients as an email platform.  It is inexpensive and easy to use.  If you need more detailed looking email platforms, then you will need to outsource it and find someone to assist you.
• Example...a monthly investment should be around $100 to $500.  

Budget Breakdown (for our $3 million client)

Search - $3500 (SEM & SEO)
Branding - $1000
Social - $1000
Email - $100
Total Monthly - $5600

This leaves some additional funds (roughly $650 a month) to be invested throughout the year to website updating and one off marketing ventures.

Seasonality
Not every business has a static monthly investment that it makes toward marketing.  Typically companies have learned their seasonality and adjust their spending based on the ebbs and flows of their business.  As a business you will need to tailor your marketing to get the biggest bang for your investment and to do that you need to make a big decision.  Are you going to put a push in your off peak season or during your core season?

• Trend
• When it comes to seasonal marketing it is important to know the trends so you can make an informed decision about when to push your message.  To help with that, Google has a great tool...it's called Google Trends.  I know...really out of the box thinking on the name.  Below is a view of party rental keywords.  This is showing volume of searches on Google for three keywords.

• Planning
• With your marketing message make sure that you are turning up and turning down your frequency.  I recommend that during your off peak time that you pull back a little but still keep a strong presence on the Search Engines.  Then leading up to your peak time, push your message in all areas to ramp up your client acquisition.  Learn more about Seasonal Marketing.

Summary
In summary, have a plan and execute the plan.  Make sure you are being fiscally responsible and holding true to what your goals are.  Make sure the goals are clear and that you have a path is set forth.  When implementing your marketing, you will want to re-evaluate the performance and return on the investment every couple of months.  Do not set it and forget it.  Successful businesses are engaged with their marketing message and their marketing budget.

For more information or to set up your digital marketing plan, email Eric Laylon.  You can also visit www.EricLaylon.com.