While these new developments are great for personal News Feeds, the side effect for many brands using Facebook as a part of their digital marketing strategy is a diminished reach on Page posts. This goes beyond big-time brands like Nike and Apple — small businesses and organizations are also subject to changes, potentially compromising years of work generating Likes from loyal customers and supporters.

According to Facebook, these changes were spurred by ever-increasing numbers of Facebook users (including brands) and decreasing News Feed “space,” as the number of posts continues to rise but users’ time spent on the site does not. Translation: Everyone’s got something to say, but not everyone can be heard (unless you pay for an ad, but even then, visibility is questionable).

While avoiding “click-bait” and trendy memes can improve a post’s chance of being deemed worthy of the News Feed, we’ve learned that companies have little control in determining which users — and how many of them — see their posts on social media.

Facebook can be an effective way to engage customers, but we don’t know what the site’s next round of changes may bring. Avoid putting all your proverbial eggs in one basket and diversify your marketing plan to go beyond your Facebook Page. Develop a presence on Twitter, LinkedIn and even Instagram, and create a blog to keep customers and supporters in the loop with company news.

The great thing about digital marketing is that a lot of it can be done using free resources, with the only limitations being the time you have available to manage your efforts. Each Facebook post, tweet, blog post or share to LinkedIn puts up a digital “billboard” for your brand. While every follower may not see every post, the more of these billboards you put up, the more likely your content is to be seen.

Manage all of your digital marketing efforts in a single place by signing up for a free BubbleLife Connect site at bubblemedia4.wpengine.com.

Think of marketing like physical fitness for your business. To maintain an optimal physical fitness level, we’re supposed to exercise regularly. Your marketing should be efforts should be “exercised” in the same consistent manner.

Each blog post, social media update or marketing endeavor doesn’t have to be a long, in-depth process; the point is that each step will get your business seen by your target audience — customers, old and new.

By taking a little time in advance to plan your marketing projects, you can create a quality strategy to promote your business or organization. First, make sure your posts are interesting and relevant to your readers. Then, prepare your content to ensure it gets posted in a timely manner.

Beginning a new sale or promotion next week? Go ahead and schedule social media posts to share the information with your followers. On top of that, put together a blog post offering the details of your store’s promotion.

Don’t wait until the last minute and scramble to write a post when you happen to think about it. Instead, make a list of blog topics in advance — planning two for each month — then develop these ideas into articles for your blog. You’ll gain good online visibility for your business through these posts, but with just a couple of posts per month, you’ll retain the ability to stay on top of your marketing plan without feeling overwhelmed.

Don’t forget — just promoting your company on your blog or social media isn’t enough; you must also make sure you’re following up with any business leads that your efforts generate. If you don’t follow up on your leads, it doesn’t matter how stellar your marketing campaign is — you still won’t gain the customer! 

Remember, promoting your business doesn’t have to be a daunting task. Just as you maintain your health with physical fitness, maintain the health of your business by regularly exercising your marketing plan!

Instagram, a site that allows users to share photos with those who or subscribe to — or follow — their feed, can be a great marketing tool for businesses. In fact, most businesses, regardless of industry, can utilize their Instagram account to brand their company and connect with existing customers, while reaching out to new ones in the process.

As an easy-to-use platform for posting and interacting with other users, Instagram can be a simple yet valuable asset to a company’s online marketing efforts.

Consistently using Instagram to post photos that feature recent projects, services or products offered, and current sales or promotions keeps a business in front of potential customers, while allowing them to do more than tell their followers about their company. Instead, Instagram allows a business to show its customers what their company is like.

Instagram also provides a way for all companies to go beyond the typical press release or blog post and allows them to get creative with their marketing efforts. Businesses can move past surface level marketing and connect with followers on a more personal level by highlighting employees and customers or showing a behind-the-scenes look at daily operations.

In addition to connecting with potential business, each time a company posts to Instagram, they’ll be creating a visual business history that can be beneficial for future needs like a website or portfolio. 

As another avenue to promote your business to potential customers, explore Instagram for your company and start connecting with your followers!

Keep it short and sweet.
Probably the most important piece of advice for writing an article is to keep it short and sweet. Think about your own reading habits. Of course, there are exceptions, but it’s likely that you skim an article to pull out the important details and information that is relevant to you. Keep this in mind as you write, and be sure to include useful, applicable information that will keep readers interested.

Choose a topic based on something a friend or customer would ask.
Writing up a quick explanation of a frequently asked question is a good way to engage potential customers. You’ll be providing relevant content for your readers while also helping them better understand your company.

Write an announcement about your latest project, customer or event.
To keep your business in front of existing and potential customers, keep them updated on your recent projects or events. Did your product successfully help a client? Briefly highlight their experience to help readers gain an understanding of how you can help them, too.

Write about a product you carry or a service you provide.
An easy way to write about your company is to describe a product or service you offer. For example, a flooring company may describe their newest tile sample and the advantages of using that specific product when remodeling. Reach out to readers and remind them to contact you with any questions they have about the product.

Staying consistent with writing will help build your web presence and customer base. Remember, keeping your business in front of existing and potential customers is what’s important about writing, not the length of your article.

Now for the good stuff…

Instagram Support

We love Instagram. It’s so easy to use that there’s no excuse for not taking photos of your store, your staff, your customers and your events. If you are using Instagram or are about to, you can now feature your Instagram photos on your Connect Site. Just go to your tools page, click on “Link social and web accounts” and choose “Instagram.” Your photos start displaying on the front page of your Connect Site with links back to your Instagram feed.

WordPress Support

We also love WordPress. WordPress is now used to run almost 20% of all websites. That’s a lot. We recommend it exclusively for customer websites because it’s free, well understood and easily maintainable. And now, you can distribute your content to your WordPress blog(s) as easily as you distribute to social media and BubbleLife.com. To distribute to WordPress, first connect your WordPress site by clicking on “Link social and web accounts” and choose “WordPress.” Now, when you go to distribute, your WordPress blog is in the list of distributions.

Agency Certification

Because we have an increasing number of agency and marketing firms using Connect, we’re putting together a “Certified Specialist” program that provides customers with a list of people and firms who are already familiar with BubbleLife Connect. We’ll promote this list on all of our news websites. Besides being “official,” we are working on a special set of features to make it easier to manage multiple clients that will be exclusive to our certified specialists. To get in on the launch of this program, take a few minutes and complete the certification at:

https://sites.bubblelife.com/type/connect/view/scoring

The test doesn’t take long and we’ll be surprised if you have problems. So click the link, get certified and don’t miss out on the launch!

Contributor Badges

One last item is our contributor badges, which are awarded to posters who achieve 1,000 views over the previous 90 days. If you qualify, the badge appears on your “My BubbleLife” page which is accessible by clicking on your email address after login.

Thanks,

Jeff Farris
President/CEO

The health care industry requires businesses interested in marketing to abide by the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which defines what constitutes marketing and the rules that must be followed for marketing to take place.

Perhaps the most basic rule is that marketing in the health care industry is allowed only after clients provide a written authorization accepting marketing materials.

For example, a dentist can send email updates regarding new specials or products to a list of clients who have given their permission to receive these messages. In short, health care providers cannot simply send marketing materials to any person who has received treatment; instead, clients must “opt in” to receive the marketing materials.

There are exceptions to the HIPAA Privacy Rule that don’t require written authorization prior to marketing. An example on the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services website includes: “A hospital provides a free package of formula and other baby products to new mothers as they leave the maternity ward.” As stated, a gift of nominal value from the covered entity is not required to obtain authorization, even if the act is considered marketing.

To learn more about HIPAA and marketing, visit www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/coveredentities/marketing.html.

So, what is a hashtag and what is its purpose?

You’ve probably noticed the pound symbol (#) in front of what seems like a random word or phrase on your Facebook or Twitter feed recently. (For example: It’s a beautiful #December day here in #Dallas!) When a user precedes a word with the pound symbol (#) on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, the word becomes a clickable link — called a hashtag — that opens a search of public posts using the same hashtag. If another user is curious about what’s going on in Dallas that day, they can search #Dallas, and posts including the #Dallas hashtag will be aggregated to a single feed. Words can also be combined to form a hashtag. (Example: #DallasTexas, #NewYearsEve…etc.)

Hashtags work similarly on sites including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+, Vine, and Pinterest, but understanding the minor differences of each site will maximize your hashtag’s potential.

Twitter

• Twitter’s hashtag presentation is pretty straightforward: click an existing hashtag within a tweet or type it in the search bar, and you will be met with a feed of recent posts from users across the site who included the term in their tweet. If a hashtag is tweeted frequently within a short amount of time, it may “trend” on your home page.

Facebook

• You can also click or search hashtags on Facebook. You’ll be presented with popular status updates, photos or links posted by users you follow and other public profiles that include the hashtagged term. In addition, you’ll also see a list of related hashtags that are being used across the site.

Instagram

• When you click or search a hashtag on Instagram, you’ll be shown a stream of photos that include the searched hashtag in the text portion of their photo update. These are public posts from users across Instagram.

Pinterest

• Pinterest uses hashtags a little differently than the previous examples. Hashtags are only accessible on pin descriptions, and search results for a hashtag will also include non-hashtagged terms. (Example: If you search #recipe, it will likely pull up many posts that simply include a non-hashtagged “recipe.”)

Google+

• Hashtags are simple on Google+. Click a hashtag within a post or search a hashtag in the search bar and you’ll find a stream of relevant posts that include the hashtagged term.

Vine

• Vine hashtags function similarly to Instagram’s use of the feature, just with videos.

Though hashtags can be very useful for finding and attracting new eyeballs, make sure to follow a few rules for proper “hashtag etiquette.”

First, make sure your hashtag is relevant to your post. It may be tempting to include the popular #DallasCowboys hashtag in your post on a Sunday afternoon, but unless your post is relevant to the team, avoid using the tag. If you include irrelevant tags just for possible views, you’re contributing to hashtag spam (yes, it’s a real thing!).

Secondly, don’t use too many hashtags in a single post. You don’t #want your #post to #look #like #this. Keep hashtags to a minimum (Twitter advises using two at the most) and make them only the most relevant terms.

Hashtags can be extremely helpful for finding news or reaching your target audience, so make an effort to try hashtags on your upcoming posts and test the results!

We’ve just made some major updates to BubbleLife which affect both your Connect account and your ability to get free advertising on BubbleLife.com websites.

BubbleLife Connect

BubbleLife Connect now sports a fancy new interface with a lighter look and feel. In addition, Connect now features:

• Easier navigation with menu options on the left and improved use of tabs to link related items.
• Improved responsive design of your public Connect site. This means your site looks good regardless of whether customers view it on their computer, smartphone or tablet.
• Increased free email support to 30 people on your email list.
• Support for image attachments with calendar events.
• Support for Instagram social media links.
• Email alerts that look better on your phone.
• Numerous minor function tweaks and improvements
• It also includes links back to My BubbleLife, where you can change your personal settings and discover more of what BubbleLife has to offer.

Here’s a link to the revised Getting Started Guide:

http://help.bubblelife.com/knowledgebase/articles/252007

Free Advertising

On all the BubbleLife.com neighborhood sites (now all 60!), we’ve added a feature we call the “Bulletin Board”. The bulletin board let’s you post your announcement, ad, open house, job opening or event and distribute it to the neighborhood through our daily newsletters and website.

To post on a neighborhood bulletin board, click the “Bulletins” link just under the masthead of any of our local sites, then look for the green “Post a Bulletin” button. You can include a date, an address and even photos and an inquiry form is shown along with the bulletin to direct responses back to you.

The bulletin board is free to use for individuals, business and organizations. We welcome your posts!

Thanks,

Jeff Farris
President/CEO

Website not bringing in business? Check to see if your website follows best practices:

Tip 1 – Explain what your business does on the front page.

You would be surprised how many businesses don’t even explain what they do on the front page.

There is a new, fabulous catering company in Dallas, operated by a professional chef that has found a niche of preparing affordable, gourmet meals with items from local farmers and ranchers. They prepare meals for home delivery.

Their front page does not mention once that they cater OR have home delivery. It is driving me nuts to not tell them, but I know that they just had their website redone (not by us).

Here is simple front-page description done correctly:

• Example: www.executivetouchcleaning.com — Executive Touch Cleaning Service is exclusive to McKinney, Texas and provides exceptional customized cleaning services at affordable prices. Being local gives us the edge of being the most dependable, flexible and affordable cleaning company in the area.

Tip 2 – Sell yourself! Explain why I should do business with you.

Differentiate your business from your competition and highlight how you can better serve your potential customer. Qualify the value of your business and why you are the best fit to solve their problem or needs. Customers don’t care about your mission or goals; bury that on your “About Us” page.

• Example: www.4bettersleep.com — 4BetterSleep Center is one of the most comprehensive sleep disorder treatment centers in Texas. Located in Dallas, we are one of the few centers to offer, in one location, a medical evaluation by a physician certified in Neurology and Sleep Medicine, and a state of the art sleep laboratory for patient sleep studies. Let us help you put your sleep problems to bed!

Tip 3 – Place your phone number on the front page.

Pretend that you only have a one-page website. Put your phone number on the front page; best practices is to have it on the top, right-hand side of the page. Don’t make people dig — on the Internet, we all have the attention span of flies.

Tip 4 – Place a lead capture form on the front page.

People surf the web at night and after business hours. A contact form is the best way to catch an email and contact information for nocturnal prospective customers. Always have a message area so they can write a note to you about their interest.

• Example: www.soccerpalz.com — Soccer Palz has their phone number on the top of every page, as well as a lead capture form. Getting in touch with someone at Soccer Palz is very easy.

Tip 5 – List out your services.

First of all, Google loves this for search engine purposes but so do your potential customers. At a glance, they can quickly see what you have to offer and can learn more if needed.

Tip 6 – List out your confidence builders.

These can be customer testimonials, memberships to organizations, awards…etc.  Potential customers take note and it gives them confidence in your abilities, making them more likely to use your business.

• Example: www.spotstx.com — Suggs Pediatric Outpatient Therapy Services has done this well by mentioning that they accept insurance with the Cigna and BlueShield logos.

The front page of your website is the first impression of your company. Yes, the site needs to have a professional look and feel, be written and keyworded with Google in mind, SEO’d and built for expansion, but most importantly, customers need to know what you do when they get to your site, why they should do business with you, and how to get in touch with you day or night.

BubbleLife Media has an inexpensive smart basic website solution. The site is built on WordPress, includes up to 6 pages, SEO, and the above best practices. To learn more, call 214-233-0740 x802.

BubbleLife Connect’s lead tracking feature gives you the ability to easily track new leads, their source and their status from one central location. Connect’s lead tracking integrates easily with any source that generates an email.

At the bottom of your Connect leads page is an email address that looks something like this “w333333@mail.bubblelife.net“. Simply take any web form or other source that generates a lead to your inbox and either use this email address or add it to the list of recipients. Then, your valuable lead is automatically added to your list of leads inside of BubbleLife Connect where you can monitor its status and track overall results. Plus, the lead is formatted and forwarded to each administrator on the BubbleLife Connect.

If you want to improve the formatting of your new leads, you can use a special format for your email that will specify exactly where you want to put your lead information. Use the following format for best appearance:

The more visual content you’ve got floating around on the web promoting your goods and services, the more opportunities you have to direct potential customers back to your storefront or online store.

Pinterest is a great tool because of its simplicity. Using it as a platform for logos and photos associated with your business allows people to engage with your brand. It’s one of the main reasons that good quality images go viral. Users pin, repin and comment on Pinterest — all you have to do is give them captivating content to work with. And then you need to monitor the success of that content to determine what your audience connects with. Pay attention — what do they respond to?

On Pinterest, pin images and videos of your company’s offerings. Pin quality-looking graphic coupons or information about sales you have going on. Pin tips from other industry professionals and share them with your followers. Pinterest, even as a largely visual platform, can be used to disseminate useful info.

And for EVERY pin, make sure your URL and contact information are attached. Each piece of content on Pinterest should direct users back to your business.

Consider creating boards for each of your employees. The potential effectiveness of this will, of course, depend on the type of business. If it’s a nail or hair salon, Social Media Today suggests, each artist could use their personal boards to pin their favorite work. Also, invite your customers to pin to your boards to deepen that relationship.

Use your Pinterest to cross-share across all your other social media platforms. Share your pins to your blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

You might use Pinterest for contests, too. Asking customers to “pin it to win it” has been used in the past as a method to “build buzz and engagement.”

For more tips on using Pinterest for your small business, click here.

Happy Pinning!

Blogs are the place for you to promote your company on a deeper level than your website or social media sites. A blog is also a place for customers to learn more about your company. A business or organization can utilize a blog by publishing content that will not only promote its brand but will also engage readers, enticing them to interact with the company.

Remember, an important aspect of blogging is consistency. Make sure to post interesting, relevant content regularly to keep your business at the top of existing and potential customers’ minds.

Maintaining a blog is a time commitment, but if done correctly, the efforts will pay off in the long run.

Getting your content published in media outlets like newspapers, magazines and digital publications is a difficult, competitive task. Even if your business has the newest, brightest concept, your chances of getting attention from an editor among thousands of small business inquiries seem slim to none. Instead, take matters into your own hands.

Create a blog, to which you can post directly about your business. Write informational, useful articles benefit your reader by offering them free knowledge. This way, you’ve got a two-part strategy — your readers will be influenced to call, and search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will “see” your content, enhancing your company’s online visibility.

Once you’ve distributed an article, it’s easy to forget about the work you’ve already done and move on to the next project in your marketing strategy. However, you’ve already put in the effort to create this content — don’t let it go to waste!

Content repurposing is the process of reusing existing content in additional ways (think: newsletters, social media, video, presentations, in-store handouts, slideshows…etc.) For example, if you’ve published a blog post, distribute the same information to your social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Depending on the medium, you may need to condense or add to the content. Another example: if you’re repurposing an article’s content into a video, try to avoid reading the article like a script. Work through the article to add a conversational tone. This way, you’ll maintain the content you began with, but you’ll also increase its effectiveness for video.

Get creative with content repurposing and adapt your existing content in fresh, new ways. You’ll be surprised how far one article will go!

In online advertising, an impression is when an ad is displayed to a person on a webpage. So, if a person is viewing a webpage that has your ad somewhere on it, that counts as one impression.

To calculate the CPM of an advertising campaign, you need to divide the cost by the number of impressions. Here’s an example:

If your one-month advertising campaign cost $200 and had 5,000 impressions, you paid 4 cents per impression. (Calculation: $200/5,000 = $.04)

The M in CPM stands for a thousand impressions. In the example above, you would multiply the cost per single impression by 1,000 to find the cost per thousand impressions:

Calculation: $.04 x 1,000 = $40 per thousand impressions ($40 CPM)

CTR is a measurement of the amount of times your ads have been clicked on. To calculate a single ad’s click through rate, you must divide the number of clicks by the amount of impressions — the amount of times an ad has been displayed on a webpage — the ad has received.

Example: You are running an advertisement that has been clicked on 50 times and has 4,000 impressions. To calculate the CTR, you divide 50 by 4,000 to get .0125. (Calculation: 50/4,000 = .0125)

You will want to express your CTR as a percentage, so you will multiply the .125 by 100, revealing that your ad has had a 1.25% click through rate. (Calculation .0125×100 = 1.25%)

The industry average CTR is about .08%, so having a 1.25% CTR means your advertising campaign is doing very well.

Twitter is unique because you can get away with sending multiple messages in a day, or even in an hour, without overwhelming potential customers (like what might happen on Facebook). Tweeting shorts bits of information in real-time can be a highly effective way of keeping your followers in-the-know. If used properly, it is just another fantastic opportunity to stay top-of-mind and brand yourself online.

Here’s what you should do with your business’ Twitter:

Tweet (duh)

Tweet about everything. Tweet to introduce staff members to your followers (include their Twitter handles) to engage customers and make them feel like they know your leadership personally. Tweet blog posts from your company’s website. Tweet about your sales, specials and promotions, and consider tweeting a “Twitter users-only” secret code that followers can redeem. Tweet tips pertaining to your line of work (e.g. “How to Unclog a Showerhead” if you’re a plumbing company). (Re)Tweet articles and tweets from competitors and media sources that interest you and that are relevant to your business’ goods and services.

And remember: good Tweets are short but informative; memorable but simple. Your Twitter presence should display one identifiable, cohesive voice. Decide on your Twitter personality and stick with it.

Hint: Tweets are best received when conversational.

Tweet photos of your storefront, products, sales team and staff members, customers, etc. People LOVE visual content. Putting a face and/or an image to a name on Twitter helps people to remember you and what you do, and they’re likely to share images.

Lastly, RESPOND when people tweet to you or about you. Address your followers quickly by tweeting them back, retweeting, or favoriting their tweet. This shows that you care about your customers whether online or in person.

Use hashtags

Hashtagging can take a bit of practice, but if you remember to do it, it’s a great way to connect with potential customers. Try to avoid sending tweets without at least one hashtag. This allows people to congregate around certain topics and find what they want to talk or learn about.

Also, search for hashtags relevant to your industry and check up on your competitors. See what they’re tweeting about and how you can one-up them. It’s much quicker than driving down the street to spy on competing businesses (not that we’d ever suggest something like that).

Follow, follow, follow

Use Twitter’s search mechanism to find potential customers in your area, and simply follow them. Chances are, you’ll get a follow back. This is the simplest way to expand your reach and find your audience. You never know who you might be following – they might turn out to be one of your most valuable customers!

For more on using Twitter for your business, follow @TwitterSmallBiz and/or order Twitter’s Small Business Guide.

The site offers opportunities for individuals to network, find jobs and even conduct business, but many people are unsure of what they should post after they get their profiles created.

Here are a few recommendations of good things to post to LinkedIn, which can be of use to others and help promote you and your company:

Links to Articles and Videos About Your Industry that Others Would Find Useful
Do you work in real estate? Posting an interesting article, such as one about market trends, would be good because it not only shows that your are staying up to date with your industry, which enhances the credibility of both you and your company, but the article could also serve as a useful resource to people in your network who are looking for new home. (And hey, by simply posting the article, you are reminding people that you are in that career field so when they are in need of that service, they will think of you!)

Talk About One of Your Contacts Whom You’ve Done Business With Recently
Mentioning the name and/or company of someone you’ve done business with recently can benefit both their company and yours. A post that says, “Check out my new company logo that was created by the graphic designers at Crystal Roznik Creative”, gives exposure to both companies.

Ask Relevant Business-Related Questions to Increase Engagement and Help Keep You and Your Company Top-of-Mind
Periodically posting business-related questions, such as “Does anyone know of a good website developer?” or “Where is the best place to get business cards printed?”, can help increase engagement on your LinkedIn page, keep you and your business at the top of people’s minds, and it may even be a good way to network.

Highlight Interesting Things You Learned at a Career-Related Event
If you are attending a conference that is related to your career field, post one or two interesting pieces of information that could be of use to the people in your network.

Post Updates About Company Milestones
Make sure you don’t come across arrogant about your company’s success on LinkedIn, but it’s important to do self-PR work by letting others know that your company is making waves. Be sure to occasionally mention positive things that have happened in your company, whether it was an outstanding quarter or maybe you are now offering a new service that your contacts would be interested in.

If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’ve already created a Facebook page for your small business. If you don’t have one, get one NOW!

Your business’ Facebook page can be a powerful, efficient and (most importantly) free way to reach out to customers, brand yourself and advertise your goods and services. You need to be where your customers are, and take it from us, they’re on Facebook.

For maximum impact on your social media accounts, make sure that your Facebook page has the following items:

Company bio and contact info

Under the “About” section of your Facebook, offer a brief description of what your company does and provide the business’ address, phone number, email and website URL. It’s imperative that you include your site’s URL and a blog, if you have one. Make it as easy as possible for customers to find your page online.

Visual content

Have photos of your business’ storefront or YouTube videos promoting your company? Include them on your page with captions containing key words potential customers might search for on Google. That way, your Facebook page will likely show up near your business’ website in search results.

Upcoming events

Your company Facebook page should also serve as a calendar to your followers. Promotional events, sales, open houses, new product unveilings should all be posted on your page.

And while your customers are at your business, encourage them to “check-in” on Facebook and share it their Facebook friends. Just like word-of-mouth recommendations, only online!

Note: Don’t forget that often, people simply need to be asked to do something, and they’ll do it. Just ask your potential customers to “like” you on Facebook or to share your statuses/events/photos. Don’t bombard them, of course, but populate your page with useful information, and it’ll be a nice complement to your online footprint.

With your own blog, you can post news and information about your business directly. Write informational, useful articles that benefit your reader by offering them free knowledge. This way, you’ve got a two-part strategy — your readers will be influenced to call, and search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will “see” your content, enhancing your company’s online visibility.

Did you know that the World Wide Web hosts more than 100 million websites and that Google tracks more than 1 TRILLION URLs? Try not to be too overwhelmed by these numbers. Sure, it might sound impossible to get your business’ name and URL at the top of Google’s search results. But really, where your business ends up in a search has everything to do with the way you write on your website.

Co-author of “Neighborhood Brands” and CEO of BubbleLife.com Jeff Farris explains that fancy Adobe Flash features and websites running complicated scripts aren’t the way to go if you want to capture page views, leads and eventually customers through Google:

“When Google loads a page from your site, it doesn’t use a web browser. Google loads your site with proprietary software that downloads the text but doesn’t run Adobe Flash, scripts or any of the other things that make a website visually interesting. Google only sees text. If you’ve got a Flash-based website, chances are that Google either doesn’t see it or doesn’t give it much attention.

No Text = No Google = No Web Visitors,” Farris writes.

The key when writing your business’ website content is to pretend like you’re a customer. What would you search for? Really put yourself in a potential customer’s shoes, and use those phrases and key words in your content.

In the words of Jeff Farris, “If your website has plenty of good phrases that potential customers might search for, the better your chances that your website moves up the list of search results.”

Finally, he offers some final tips for businesses when making their websites Google-friendly:

Besides writing for searchers, here’s a few of my favorite Google techniques:

• Include location information on every page.
• Don’t use graphics to display text information such as phone numbers or addresses.
• Use good page titles.
• Keep your site focused on one business and one set of business terminology.

All too often, businesses assume that once they get a few leads, they no longer need to continue with their advertising efforts, undervaluing the importance of consistently getting their message in front of old and potential new clients.

Let’s quickly dive into a few reasons why continuing your business’s advertising plan even after your phone has started to ring is crucial:

Consistent Advertising Increases Brand Awareness
Your company is your brand. By repeatedly getting your message in front of your targeted audience, you can maintain top-of-mind awareness so they will think of you before a competitor when in need of your services.

It Takes Repetition to Get Your Message Across
It can take up to 10 exposures of your ad before a potential client may even notice its message. If you stop advertising after you get a few leads, you are missing out on more potential new clients.

Consistency and Success Go Hand-in-Hand
Businesses often have the misguided mentality of, “if this one ad placement doesn’t generate leads immediately, I need to try something different, somewhere else.” In order to get results, you need to pick a platform that reaches your targeted demographic and then advertise consistently to get your message across.

Overall, make sure that when you’re ready to launch an advertising campaign, you are able to do it consistently — that’s how you will generate the results you desire.

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Reaching the Wrong Audience
If you are a luxury car salesman in Plano, Texas, you want to make sure that high-income residents in your city and neighboring communities see your advertisements, so you need to place your ads in local media where potential clients will most likely be exposed to your message.

If your advertisements haven’t elicited a response, it could be because you are not reaching the correct targeted audience, whether it’s because you have picked too regional of a media platform to reach enough residents in your city, or because you are reaching a local audience that isn’t likely to purchase a luxury vehicle.

Having the Wrong Message
What does your ad say? Is it memorable? Does it have a good call to action?

You need to make sure that your advertisements are written in a way so that they are memorable and encourage people to pick up the phone or send an email and ask about your services. It’s also important that your message resonates with your targeted audience.

Not Remaining Consistent
Many businesses think that if they run an advertisement one time and it doesn’t generate a response, then it doesn’t work and they need to try a different message in a different publication.

When creating an advertising strategy, it’s important to identify your audience, pick a media platform that reaches them, such as BubbleLife.com and its neighborhood news websites, and then remain consistent with your advertising.

It can take up to 10 exposures of your advertising message before a customer absorbs it, so it’s important to be consistent and not stop advertising, even when the phone starts to ring.

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Don’t let yourself think that advertising doesn’t work just because you’ve had bad experiences in the past. Just remember to make sure you reach your targeted audience consistently with a message that resonates well with them.

1. Having your business in Google’s business directory gives you the opportunity to put your website URL in the listing, which will help you build up relevancy inside the Google search function
2. Google Places uses geo-targeting to help customers and local businesses connect. When your URL is positioned on other servers online, Google will “like” you better. That means your business listing will be more likely to turn up in the top search results when potential customers search Google.
3. Ultimately, having your business in Google Places will direct more traffic and page views to your site, resulting in more business.
4. Why not? It costs nothing and is simple to manage. Even if you don’t have a website, Google Places allows you to have an online presence. Who doesn’t want more visibility?
5. If your business is not listed on Google Places, your competitors are. You want people to be able to find you easily.

Once you create your listing, don’t just forget about it – maintain it! Ask your happy customers to write reviews of your goods and services, put photos and video on your listing, and make sure all the information stays up-to-date and accurate.

Though it’s always a good idea to provide answers or solve a problem for your readers, go beyond this model and include a human-interest angle to your content. Use real life examples to tell the story of how a customer benefitted from your product or services. Your readers will not only read the information, but they’ll also relate to it. This will encourage them to share your content with family and friends, likely via social media.

Finally, this option is probably the simplest and the most obvious way to get people to share your content: just ask. That’s right — ask your readers to share your posts. You’ll be surprised at the response!

Yes, word-of-mouth is free and effective, but in order to make it work, you have to constantly remind people to promote your company, and even then your audience is still very limited. Here are reasons why relying solely on word-of-mouth is inefficient:

• Limited Audience: Only relying on word-of-mouth severely limits your exposure to new customers because you are relying on friends, family and your existing clients to promote your company.

• Hard to Maintain Top-Of-Mind Awareness: Consistent repetition of your advertising message, such as through BubbleLife.com and its daily email newsletters, reminds those familiar with your business to visit while maintaining top-of-mind awareness with potential new customers. Word-of-mouth alone does not provide consistent top-of-mind awareness.

• Slow to Generate Leads: More often than not, word-of-mouth is a very slow way to generate leads. Potential customers, who have only heard about your company through a referral, may or may not currently need your business, and when they do, they must remember to contact you instead of a competitor.

Investing the time to figure out how to utilize and execute an efficient marketing plan will help you reach more potential customers than word-of-mouth alone, while repeatedly informing them about why they need to go to you instead of your competition.

1. When you write compelling, relatable stories about your business or your customers, you foster a relationship with the reader. (This reader could become your customer!) Make sure your business’ literature and/or blog posts aren’t blatantly advertorial. Tell a story illustrating what makes your business stand out and give the client a convincing reason to pick you over others. Make it interesting. Then share it across as many platforms as you possibly can – social media, your website, trade publications, and blogs. It will make a difference.
2. If you write articles and publish them online, people will share them. Think about it: when is the last time someone cut out a newspaper or magazine ad and said to you, “You’ve just got to do business with this place!” This has probably never happened. On the other hand, when was the last time someone forwarded an article about a business or local product to your email inbox? You probably get these daily! Take advantage of the Internet’s opportunity for efficiently sharing information. Write articles and distribute them to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. People will share them, and they might even go viral. More eyeballs to your content is ALWAYS a good thing, no matter the medium you used to get them there. If you’re providing quality content, it will get people talking about your business – it’s the “word-of-mouth” you’re striving for.
3. Because the options are endless for where to do business, you need to stand out. Customers are practically begging to read your content! Potential customers do nearly all of their research online now. Make it easy for them to find you by writing multiple articles that link back to your site’s URL. When writing articles about your business’ goods and services in a story format, include relevant “key words.” Pretend like you’re a potential customer – what kind of words might you type into Google’s search box? Ensure that those key words make their way into each article. Then, your articles will show up in a client’s organic search results. With key words, there is a greater possibility that your business’ article(s) are ranked higher organically and a better chance your content will be read and shared.

For more information about developing a content strategy for your business, read “Get Content, Get Customers” by Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett.

How does this apply to you?

It means that you’ve got to think about how you can incorporate quality photos and short videos into your website’s content to maximize your SEO and entice searchers to click on your links. This is just another thing you can do to improve your online presence and capture more clicks and sales leads.

Biznology’s Tim Peter says the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” applies to digital marketing for both still images and videos.

Consider Google’s launch of Local Carousel, which displays a stream of images at the top of a local search page, even above the first paid listing. And that Google AdWords announced an Images Extension beta, which adds images to a business’ paid listing.

Just like we talked about in “What Are Organic Search Results?” the more content you have on the web, the better off you are. Don’t just write –- add good-quality images and videos attached to your URL so that potential customers have a better chance of finding you organically. If they’re good images, they will generate clicks, and Google’s Local Carousel categorizes them based on who’s getting the most clicks.

In the words of digital marketing expert Tim Peter, “Ensure Google selected images you want displayed by filling your website, Facebook brand pages, LinkedIn business pages, and other elements of your web presence with the highest-quality images you can afford to produce.”

People are more likely to share images with their friends and to social media sites. You can also encourage your customers to share photos and videos shorter than 15 seconds (research shows that anything longer has a lower chance of being watched and shared) to their online communities.

Quality content leads to clicks, which leads to better organic search results. Good organic search results and SEO result in sales leads and customers. So don’t wait to add visual content to your online presence!

For example, instead of telling people about the award your business recently won, provide a real-life customer testimonial that demonstrates why your company was selected for the award. Though it is important for potential customers to be aware of your qualifications, once again, show them why you’re qualified by sharing your expertise. If you’re a dentist, don’t just tell readers about your services — share your knowledge with useful information like “How to Get Rid of Bad Breath. Simple Steps to Defeat the Most Common Social Disease.” This is not only more interesting than a parade of awards and education, but also beneficial to the reader.

Without an incentive (a deal or helpful knowledge), readers are highly unlikely to care about what you have to say. You must entice readers with catchy headlines to prompt the initial click. Otherwise, readers will keep scrolling and will miss your message, regardless of its quality.

At its core, PR is the act of distributing information about a business or organization to a target audience on a consistent, timely basis. This means reaching out regularly customers, potential customers, and those who have an interest in your business’ services or products.

PR is a combination of information about your business, relevancy to the your audience and marketing all rolled into one. PR goes beyond marketing and advertising to tell your business’ story, connecting your business to local customers, media and influencers.

1.    Your customers will appreciate being asked for your opinion of the services your business offers. In a world as technologically driven and unfortunately, impersonal at times, people really value when companies give them the chance to share about their experiences. Whether the feedback is positive or negative, customers always like being asked because it means you don’t just care about making a sale – you care about the customer, too.

2.   Receiving feedback helps you develop your business strategies and therefore, customer loyalty. When they have an opportunity to be honest with you and lines of communication are open, they’re more likely to stick around. Plus it could be a way for you to learn more about your competitors. Customers might even divulge what made them go with your business over others.

Customer feedback is like a secret weapon for a business – it will help you put your finger on just what makes them happy. If you keep making them happy, you develop a loyal customer base that will be willing to refer you to others. A win-win for everyone!

3.    Getting information via surveys allows you the chance to get to know your customers better. Ask a couple of questions regarding demographics so you can better profile your customer base. You won’t want to ask too many of these or your customers will get bored and quit the survey. Engage your customers with questions so you can really get to know them – then you’ll be able to better serve them.

For more information on developing successful customer surveys, click here.

If you’re anything like me, you look at the first page of results. If you can’t find what you’re looking for there, you revise your search. Failing to include specific keywords relating to your business could keep your website off the front page of Google and out of potential customers’ minds.

When writing, keyword your content with words and phrases that apply to your business. For example, if your business is a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Dallas, make sure your content includes the name of your business, basic keywords (car, SUV, sedan, dealership, Dallas…etc.) and more specific terms (Mercedes-Benz, E-Class, C-Class, roadster…etc.). This way, if someone searches the term “Mercedes roadster Dallas” in Google, your business will have a better chance of appearing higher in search results and catching the attention of potential customers.

As a rule of thumb, headlines should not be longer than 10 words. All of the words in a headline should be capitalized except for articles (a, an, the…etc.).

Examples of good headlines include:

• “Struggling with Stress? Those Unhealthy Coping Skills Won’t Help You Deal”
• “Five Things You Need to Know About Choosing Your Teen’s First Car”
• “Pop Into the Soda Gallery in Oak Cliff to Find Your Favorite Vintage Sodas”
• “I-635 Commuters Invited To LBJ/Skillman Urban Planning Initiative Meeting”
• “LOST DOG: Have You Seen Angel in Allen?”

Here’s a secret: you don’t have to buy paid search ads to get customers to find your business. But there are a few things you should keep in mind when building your online presence so that your business fares well in organic searches.

1.     Include your business in every online directory out there

Having your business in multiple directories gives you the opportunity to put your website URL in each listing, which will help you build up relevancy inside the Google search function. When your URL is positioned on several servers online, Google will “like” you better. That means your business listing will be more likely to turn up in the top search results when potential customers search Google. These organic (and free) results will direct more traffic and page views to your site, resulting in more business.

2.     Write, write, and write some more

Start a blog for your business. If your business already has a website, write articles about the specific services you have to offer a client. There should be plenty of reading material on your site. Potential customers searching Google will be more likely to stumble upon your site if their search mirrors your article’s title.

You might also consider hosting a blog on your business’ website, as well as another online location such as WordPress. BubbleLife.com offers a blog with your free directory listing. Using our blog gives you the opportunity to take advantage of our traffic and ranking according to Google. Another reminder: NEVER blog and/or write an article on your site without including your business’ URL. (More on that below).

3.     Choose your words carefully

When writing articles about your business’ goods and services, include relevant “key words.” Pretend like you’re a potential customer – what kind of words might you type into Google’s search box? Ensure that those key words make their way into each article. Then, your articles will show up in a client’s organic search results. With key words, there is a greater possibility that your business’ article(s) are ranked higher organically.

4.     Always include your URL

Include your business’ web URL and basic contact information in everything you write on your blog platform. The more servers your URL is included on, the more important Google will think your business is. Then you’ll likely be ranked higher on organic search results.

In conclusion, you don’t have to purchase search result ads to generate business online. In fact, if you’ve implemented your online visibility strategy well, organic search results will get you more long-term business because they have a longer “shelf life” than paid search results. When businesses buy high search ranks and decide to quit paying, their search results disappear. With organic results, your business will continue to show up on Google – but only if you’ve key worded your written content well, included your URL in every article, and input your business on several online directories.

For more on Google search results, you can read John Battelle’s “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” and/or R.L. Adams’ SEO White Book: The Organic Guide to Google Search Engine Optimization.”

CAN-SPAM does not require a business to get a person’s permission to send them an email, but it does require the business to allow people to unsubscribe from receiving additional emails.

Here are other CAN-SPAM provisions that affect email marketing:

• Almost all emails must include the business’s mailing address;
• Deceptive content is prohibited, such as fraudulent subject lines and return addresses;
• Automated harvesting of email addresses from websites is prohibited;
• Businesses who have procured spammers’ services can be implicated.

To calculate the open rate, you divide the number of opened emails by the amount of delivered emails and express the result as a percentage. So, if you delivered 50 emails and 10 of the recipients opened it, you have a 20% open rate.

   Here’s the calculation:
   10 opened emails/50 delivered emails = 20% open rate

Open rates are not 100% accurate because recipients must enable images in the email or click on a link in the email in order to calculate the open rate percentage. But, the open rate does serve as useful measurement of the effectiveness of an email blast.

As a rule of thumb, an open rate of about 20-30% for a reasonably sized email list is about average with few email blasts getting above a 50% open rate and almost none above 80%, primarily because people are too busy to open all of the emails in their inboxes.

Here are three tips to increasing your open rate:

1) Make the Subject Line Stand Out: Word the subject line of your email so that it’s compelling enough to make people want to read it.

2) Try Sending Emails at Different Times and Days: You want to avoid sending an email blast on a Monday morning because that’s when people play catch-up after the weekend and will disregard your email.

3) Put the Most Important Information at the Top: Journalists write news stories with the most important information in the first few paragraphs, and that’s exactly how you should structure your emails as well.

All of your business’s advertisements and promotional materials need to have a strong call to action in order to help elicit a response from potential clients.

A good call to action must be compelling and specific, while preferably emphasizing the benefits of your product or service. On top of that, it needs to be short enough to engage the reader and include information about how to get in contact with you.

Here are some examples of good calls to action that have been used by BubbleLife’s clients and generated results:

• Contractor
“Looking to redo your bathroom or kitchen? __________ can help turn your dreams into a reality. Click here or call xxx-xxx-xxxx to learn more.

• Preschool
“Register your little one for preschool. Call xxx-xxx-xxxx today to schedule a tour and learn more about your child’s first school experience.”

• Insurance Agent
“Protect Your Employees: Develop a benefits package that allows you to attract and retain good employees. Click here or call __________ at xxx-xxx-xxxx to learn more.

• Transportation Service
“Travel in Reliable Comfort and Style: With vehicles ranging from personal and corporate limos to party buses, __________ is ready to help you get around in comfort and style. Click here or call xxx-xxx-xxxx for more information and rates.”

Other ideas for creating good calls to action are to promote a limited time offer or a special event that you’re having, since both have a sense of urgency.

As a general rule, your business should be listed at:

• Google Places
• Yelp
• YP.com
• Bing
• CitySearch
• MerchantCircle
• Yellowbook

Then do a comprehensive search of the most respected directories in your specialization. Are you a dentist? A painter? A psychiatrist? Make sure your business has a space in local, specialty directories.

As much as I would like to be on the selling end of your expensive endeavor, I don’t want to listen to you complain in a month about how it didn’t work for you. 

A few weeks ago, I went on a rant about consistency in advertising. In case you missed it, here it is:The Number One Secret to the Success of Your Local Business

I want you to think of advertising consistency like you would a new prescription after a trip to the doctor. Sometimes, results are seen quickly, but other prescriptions may take weeks or even months to be fully effective. Just as you wouldn’t quit taking a medication because you didn’t see immediate results, you shouldn’t end your advertising campaign because customers aren’t swarming your business the first week your ads are live.

Here’s why you must stay consistent with your advertising strategy:

Consistency is measurable.

It’s hard for small business owners to see past their limited budgets, but you have to think long-term when advertising. A long-term campaign is the only way to accurately measure whether your advertising campaign is effective, especially with online ads. The online medium you use should track each time your ad is viewed, clicked, and should calculate the click-through rate (CTR).

Consistency gives you direction.

When a local business doesn’t get quick results, they typically throw in the towel and profess that advertising doesn’t work. The truth is that the message is usually a failure — not the advertising medium.  If you’re measuring results, you can see this and tweak your message. The beauty of digital is that you have the flexibility to make changes at a lower cost than traditional media.

I don’t know if I am violating some advertising HIPPA policy, but I have a client in the European car repair business that started with an offer to try his service. We learned that the area he is marketing in is not coupon-driven. He then changed his messaging to “Looking For An Alternative to Foreign Car Dealership Repair?” and the leads started generating for him.

He would have never figured this out without measuring his results, and I’m very proud to say thatBubbleLife Connect (our portal for local business advertising) came in handy and salvaged his campaign instead of throwing his marketing dollars to the wind.

The ease of online advertising allows for quick changes and is affordable enough to continue the campaign until it’s messaging is a perfect fit for your business. Protect your investment and measure the results.

Consistency makes you popular.

It’s called mind share and the only way to get it is with a consistent strategy. You must target potential clients on a regular basis. They’ll see your ads repeatedly, and when they’re in the market for your services, your business will be at the top of their minds.

Think about a plumber. I don’t need one today, but the toilet might not flush tomorrow. Truthfully, toilets aren’t something I want to deal with, so the ads that I have seen consistently — over and over and over on various websites — will win my business.

Consistency pays off.

By staying consistent with your advertising strategy, you’ll not only continue to reach new customers, but you’ll even draw in old customers who just need to be reminded you’re still around.

Most local business advertising fails because owners are looking for a “quick fix.” Rather than searching for immediate results, you need to regularly work your customer pipeline.

Stay consistent, stay patient and the results will speak for themselves.

If you’re looking for affordable, consistent advertising and operate in a BubbleLife.com area, consider us. At the time of this writing, we have a $99 promotion in most of our neighborhoods. I believe local news and local business go hand in hand!

Dear Mr. Local Business:

Here is the flip side of what you are asking me to do for you:

“Come on over to my house and install outdoor lighting in all my trees, and after a couple of months, if it is the outdoor paradise you promised, I will pay you and use your service for the next year.”

Though I probably shouldn’t, that is what I really want to say when you tell me that I must “prove” to you that advertising on BubbleLife.com works by giving you a free trial.

I can hear your anxiety. Your business is not what it used to be. You need customers, and you need them now.

You have spent a boatload on advertising in the past, with this glossy magazine ad here and that expensive, slick mailer there. I hear your pain when you tell me that the one full-page ad you ran in the local paper didn’t get a single call. You’re convinced that advertising doesn’t work.

While listening to you (I’ll admit, listening is not one of my strongest qualities), it hit me that you have done nothing consistently. You are searching for the magic bullet to grow your business overnight and have customers knocking down the door in the morning.

I know you’re in a panic, and I want nothing more than to help you, but I can’t turn your business around in 30 days. If we want to grow your business, you need to first grow a marketing strategy.

This marketing strategy should include the following goals:

• I am going to get my name out to new potential customers;
• I am going to measure performance of those efforts;
• I am going to capture customers’ information whenever and wherever possible;

THEN

• I am going to consistently touch those customers (maybe by email, social media or even snail mail) and offer them incentives to return with their friends and family.

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again

If after a couple of months you’re not seeing results, instead of giving up on your advertising plan, modify your ads to see if a new message brings customers into your business.

(I’m inserting a commercial break for BubbleLife.com here!) 

We A/B test your banner ads, which means we put up a couple of different ads to see which messaging works. Because we are digital, it is inexpensive to make changes and test the response to pricing, service, reputation, features and/or branding messages. Being nerds, our tracking features gives us the advantage of data, allowing us to narrow down your top-performing ads and modify your strategy to focus around those messages. At our low price point (click here to check out our advertising promo for summer), you could justify advertising with us just to figure out your strategy — you may even pick up a customer or two!

(End of Commercial Break…)

Following this model, you’ll learn something about your clients. You’ll learn what draws them to your business — in addition to what doesn’t — and you’ll become a smarter marketer for your company.

The most important thing you can do to grow your business is to be consistent. Consistency builds mindshare (a fancy word for reminding people of what you do and that you are open for business).

We have a client that sends out a paper newsletter; I have pleaded with him to send it by email but lost that battle. But, the good news is that he consistently sends the newsletter and his revenues have grown from it. Like me, his clients may not open it and may even pitch it directly in the garbage, but the newsletter is a reminder that he is open for business.

Remember, advertising is about branding and mindshare. In the future, potential customers who have seen your ads repeatedly for an extended period of time will have your business at the top of their minds when they have a need for your service or are planning a purchase.

I strongly believe in what we do, as we have helped hundreds of local businesses.

For the small business, I frequently preach, “touch your neighborhood, touch your existing clients and touch your social media places for your local neighborhood word of mouth strategy.” Stay out there and stay consistent. It is the number 1 secret to your long-term success.

BubbleLife.com is a tactic in your overall plan. We have your neighborhood audience (actually 60 local communities), the analytics and the affordable price point to reach local customers, but you need to view advertising as a long-term investment versus an expense for a one-time Hail Mary.

This is entirely normal. Finding new customers requires dedicated time, different skills and completely different tools than those necessary for servicing existing customers. Worst of all, time spent finding new customers is time not spent on creating the type of customers that give word-of-mouth references.

But the rewards for learning how to market a business are huge. Businesses that learn how to market themselves and deliver a quality experience are the ones that create reliable cash flow, outgrow their original space and even continue to grow outside their original neighborhood.

So what is required?

Most businesses are already reaching outside their business for help in their marketing to people with titles such as website developer, social media marketer, PR professional, SEO consultant and Adwords expert. That’s a step in the right direction, but the old saying “too many cooks in the kitchen” often starts to ring true. Expertise is required, but expertise needs the following to work effectively:

1. Guidance as to what a good customer looks like
2. Targeted plan for how to reach and best engage these customers
3. Multiple paths that address the way online customers find and engage with your business
4. Data and Adaptability to learn what is working and make the necessary changes to what isn’t working
5. Consistent efforts that don’t lurch from project to project or fade to fade
6. Tools to lower costs, increase results and provide more business owner control

Over the last few years, BubbleLife Media has worked with numerous Dallas-area businesses to help refine an approach that puts all of this together under one roof or as a toolset for an agency that seeks to accomplish the same goals. The advantage of this single source approach is:

1. Increased efficiency
2. Lower cost
3. Improved results
4. Multi-path expertise to assess the best of many possible approaches
5. One phone call takes care of everything
6. Predictable and planned expenses

Word-of-mouth is a testament to the quality of your product or service, but it should not be your primary source of new customers. BubbleLife Media or one of our certified agency partners can take your success with existing customers to the new ones you want. Give us a call, the consultation is free.

Yet, if just purchasing the “latest thing” were an effective strategy, political candidates would just put up a Facebook page, SEO their website and wait by the ballot box. But, clearly something else is required. You’ve got to go get in front of your likely customers, get them to understand your benefits and then get them to “vote” for you with a phone call or visit.

Getting the vote of your customers is hard work. It requires applying old-fashioned and proven techniques such as advertising, marketing and public relations in the context of the Internet. Plus, since your potential customers aren’t on any single online site, your efforts have to be spread among a wide variety of online efforts to see results.

This is where BubbleLife Connect comes in. We take away the hard work, uncertainty and give you an outsourced marketing staff that comes fully equipped with all the tools for advertising, marketing and public relations plus the focused audience of our BubbleLife.com neighborhood websites. In a nutshell, BubbleLife does the hard work for you so you see results at a much lower cost than that of a part-time marketing person.

How do we know BubbleLife’s solution works? Because we track everything that happens so we know it works. Plus, all this tracking gives us the ability to improve results over time.

Want to quit buying the “latest thing” and start buying results? Call us today at 214.233.0740 or email us at sales@bubblelifemedia.com.

As media has become more and more fragmented it has also become less local. New advertising opportunities don’t deliver the same neighborhood audience that the Yellow Pages once did.  That’s where BubbleLife comes in. Here are a few examples of how we make the phone ring for our clients.

William Briggs, Architect

William has advertised with BubbleLife for over two years and since then has come to rely on BubbleLife as a source of new projects and local word-of-mouth referrals.  BubbleLife keeps William consistently in front of his targeted neighborhood prospects and his previous customers through BubbleLife’s content focused advertising strategy. It also doesn’t hurt that William had BubbleLife redo his website to make sure all that exposure converted web visitors into leads for his business. For William “BubbleLife has been a lifesaver. Their advertising has generated some of my best projects and their marketing work is a part of every sales pitch I make.” To see the website BubbleLife did for William, click http://bubly.us/185.

Dr. Aaron Jones, Dentist, Highland Park Dental

Dr. Jones has advertised with BubbleLife for over a year and half.  Highland Park Dental uses BubbleLife to cost effectively raise their neighborhood profile in one of the most competitive dental markets in Dallas. Highland Park Dental uses a combination of advertising to build brand, content to build trust and offers to generate first time patients from the neighborhood. To quote Dr. Jones “BubbleLife is the only thing we’ve tried that has consistently delivered new patients.” To see the news center BubbleLife did for Dr. Jones, click http://bubly.us/187.

Eric Devlin, President, Premier Transportation Services, LLC

Eric has been one of BubbleLife’s longest running advertisers. He uses BubbleLife to keep his company name in front of target neighborhoods most likely to generate his best customers. In his own words “As a resident of University Park and a business owner who advertises on BubbleLife, I cannot express how much I appreciate the information I receive as a consumer and the business I receive as an advertiser.  The BubbleLife crew is top notch, assist with all our marketing and analytical needs, and are quick to make economical recommendations for our advertising dollar. Premier routinely earns new business from our neighbors by our relationship with BubbleLife.  I highly recommend BubbleLife – a great place for a neighbor to be!” To see the directory entry and ads BubbleLife did for Eric, click http://bubly.us/186.

Want Your Phone to Ring?

If you are interested in advertising that makes your phone ring, give us a call. Our affordable and sales-focused solutions are ideal for maximizing results and minimizing costs. We promise we’ll make it easy.

Want to Have it All?

If you are interested in advertising that makes it easy to stay in touch with existing customers and increase repeat business, give us a call.  Our affordable and sales-focused solutions are ideal for maximizing results and minimizing costs. We promise we’ll make it easy.

It really is that simple, yet surprisingly few businesses take the time to ask their customers to come back either during their first visit or later after they’ve left. Asking for a repeat visit is simple and there are a variety of ways to ask including:

1. Providing a return visit coupon
2. Posting on Facebook
3. Sending an email
4. Calling on the telephone
5. Sending a postcard
6. Scheduling a future appointment

But, in order to accomplish any of these steps, two things are necessary. First, you must establish a method of contact or engagement with customers during their original visit such as:

1. Providing them a coupon
2. Encouraging them to “Like” your business on Facebook
3. Asking them for their email address, phone number and/or address before they leave

Second, you must provide a reason for customers to return such as:

1. Reminder of their previous great experience
2. Coupons or discount offers
3. Sales
4. New merchandise
5. New products or services
6. Special events

One More Very Important Thing

One simple technique to double the results is asking customers to bring their friends and extending the incentives to them as well. When you ask customers to come back and then ask them to bring their friends, you’ll substantially reduce your costs of marketing while also improving your results. It really is that simple.

Want Your Customers to be Repeat Customers?

If you are interested in advertising that makes it easy to stay in touch with existing customers and increase repeat business, give us a call.  Our affordable and sales-focused solutions are ideal for maximizing results and minimizing costs. We promise we’ll make it easy.

On the Internet an unhappy customer can:

• Post a bad review on Yelp, a frequent source for business reviews for many potential customers
• Post a negative comment on Facebook telling all of their friends and family
• Post a negative comment on Twitter linking your company name to the bad experience
• Post a bad review on Google Places, a frequent search result for people searching online for your business

On the Internet, one bad experience now potentially affects business with hundreds and potentially thousands of customers. So what does a business do when they are faced with an unhappy customer? The simple answer is to try to make it right either through a sincere apology, a discount or a refund. The costs of a liberal resolution policy will be far less than the cost of Internet damage control.

Want Your Business to Excel with Customers?

If you are interested in turning your customers into a loyal and returning crowd, give us a call.  Our affordable and sales-focused solutions are ideal for maximizing results and minimizing costs. We promise we’ll make it easy.

1. Did my ad reach the people it needed to reach?
2. Is the “local” media popular in surrounding neighborhoods but not in mine?
3. If people saw my ad, were they interested in my type of business?
4. Did people notice my ad?
5. Did it convince them to learn more?
6. Where did they go to learn more?
7. Did I do enough to differentiate my business from my competitors?
8. What do I do to make it work?

When traditional advertising doesn’t work you really don’t know where to start.

1. Was it the publication?
2. Was it because of your type of business?
3. Was it the design of the ad?
4. Was it because of referrals?

But BubbleLife.com is not your typical local media. Our approach gives you the results and the information you need.

Why Advertise on BubbleLife.com?

At BubbleLife Media, we go to bed every night thinking about how to make your advertising more effective. Our proprietary technology let’s us redefine neighborhood advertising stressing:

1. Targeted Online Neighborhood Audience

BubbleLife.com, with its daily growth in readership, is quickly becoming recognized as the leading provider of neighborhood-specific news in the Dallas metroplex. Every day, BubbleLife.com’s combination of website, email newsletter, social media sites and mobile products touches thousands of your most valuable potential customers – those within 5 miles of your front door.

Those customers who are most likely to be your best customers, repeat customers and tell their friends and family about your business are those closest to your front door.

2. Comprehensive Multi-Media Approach

Readership is just a part of our story. Rather than rely on “old-fashioned” banner ads alone, we have pioneered a unique approach to neighborhood advertising that puts our advertisers front and center in the neighborhood. Based on your advertising package, we’ll use a combination of banner ads, text ads, newsletter ads, photo-ads, email, articles, social media and your own customer contacts to get your message out to as many people as possible. Plus, our approach makes it easy for all of these people to pass your story along to their friends and family driving improved pass along results.

Worried about how hard it is to do all of this? Don’t be, our technology makes most steps as easy as a click of the mouse.

3. Affordable Pricing

BubbleLife.com’s advertising is designed to generate new business now and in the future through affordable neighborhood branding. With classified solutions starting from just $2/day and full advertising solutions from $10/day , BubbleLife.com has an advertising solution for any budget.

4. Easy Implementation

BubbleLife.com’s personal and full-service team makes it easy for you to get started and to stay in control of your efforts. We’ll take care of your creative so you won’t need to scout around for graphics or copywriting expertise.

5. Control and Insights

Our proprietary Neighborhood Marketing Center with its powerful reporting, integrated email, social media and blogging puts you in control of your advertising. No more wondering if your ads are working, NMC opens up the black box of advertising to let you see everything.

How to Advertise on BubbleLife.com?

There are basic ways to advertise based on your budget and needs:

1. Classified Ads – For personal services businesses and those with limited revenue needs, our Classified Ads provide limited exposure at a very affordable price.
2. Business Ads – For professional services and storefront businesses, our business advertising packages provide more exposure designed to attract, engage and inform potential customers.
3. Sponsorship Ads – For businesses considering postcard drops or that need to maximize their visibility, our site sponsorship ads provide unequalled opportunity to reach neighborhood customers in a “can’t miss” way.

BubbleLife has a solution for any size business. From individual instructors to regional businesses, BubbleLife has the combination of audience and pricing to make your business more successful.

• Ultramodern storefronts
• Cashless and paperless checkout
• Minimal inventory
• Abundance of available floor staff

A better role model, and one that any business can emulate, might be Bubba’s the local diner I’ve been eating at for almost 30 years. Their tips are these:

• Always provide a consistently excellent product
• Whenever possible call customers by name
• Never let the store appear dirty
• Minimize staff turnover to provide familiar faces
• Pay attention to the smallest details such as using the best butter or jellies
• Don’t charge a premium even though you can (also called over delivering)
• Always ask for customer feedback on how to make things better

Bubba’s may not be most glamorous business, but I can think of few others that represent a better role model for a neighborhood business.

Want Your Business to Excel with Customers?

If you are interested in turning your customers into a loyal and returning crowd, give us a call.  Our affordable and sales-focused solutions are ideal for maximizing results and minimizing costs. We promise we’ll make it easy.

1. Doesn’t ask for and thus doesn’t generate leads
2. Doesn’t showcase your business to Google and other search engines
3. Expects the visitor to read the home page
4. Doesn’t answer common questions (phone number, hours, directions)
5. Doesn’t tell a visitor why your business is special or different from a customer’s point of view
6. Attempts to make you look big and impersonal
7. Appeals to the lowest-profit customers
8. Has outdated or stale information
9. Doesn’t work on the iPhone, iPad or other mobile devices
10. Nobody pays attention to whether the website is up and working

If a website looks good, but doesn’t generate new customers, then it isn’t doing its job. Businesses should expect their website to work as hard as they do in building the business.

Want Your Website to Generate Sales?

If you are interested in turning your website into a great performing website, give us a call.  Our affordable and sales-focused solutions are ideal for maximizing results and minimizing costs. We promise we’ll make it easy.

Facebook

Pros

• Easy to compose and distribute post
• Easy to showcase photos
• Goes viral through “Likes”

Cons

• Relies on the customer to join
• A single post is easily lost on a busy Facebook wall

Email

Pros

• More likely to get seen
• Supports longer and more complete content
• Easy to add customer emails to distribution list
• Goes viral through “Forwards”

Cons

• Time consuming to create
• Requires testing
• Must comply with federal guidelines for bulk email
• Graphical layouts not always readable in all email readers

Want to Use Facebook, Email, Plus a Lot More Too!

If you are interested in getting results no matter where your customers are online, give us a call.  Our affordable and sales-focused solutions are ideal for maximizing results and minimizing costs. We promise we’ll make it easy.

A website is the transition from marketing to sales – where advertising stops and customer acquisition begins.

When done right, a website takes the interest generated from a Google search, a direct visit or link from local advertising and turns that interest into a phone call or an email lead. When done wrong, a website is just one more rabbit trail a customer goes down before they buy from a competitor.

Here’s some quick rules of thumbs to use to see if your website is achieving the right goals?

1. Would you direct someone you meet at a party to your website for more information? Do you trust it to close the deal?
2. Has someone filled out the lead capture form on your website in the last month?
3. Has someone called the phone number on your website?

If the answers to any of these are no, then your website may be attractive but not doing its job. There is a solution to this problem. BubbleLife Media routinely turns great looking websites into great looking websites that generate results.

Want Your Website to Generate Sales?

If you are interested in turning your website into a great performing website, give us a call.  Our affordable and sales-focused solutions are ideal for maximizing results and minimizing costs. We promise we’ll make it easy.

That’s the estimate for Apple unit sales in 2012 alone. And, Adobe Flash runs on none of them. Those numbers are a large part of the reason Adobe abandoned mobile Flash development last year. Adobe’s announcement means that even the newer non-Apple devices won’t be supporting Flash either such as Google Android-based phones and tablets.

Not only are iPhone, iPad and mobile devices increasing in number, they are also increasing as a percentage of website traffic recently accounting for almost 8% of all Internet traffic. But that number is a little misleading since it is growing so rapidly having doubled from just a few months previously.

But Wait, There’s More Bad News

Not only are Flash websites not supported by mobile devices, they are also not supported by Google search. Google, which analyzes text on a website to determine search engine placement and result rankings, often has little or no textual content to work with on a Flash-based website. Though Flash looks good to users viewing your site on their computer, Flash looks like a blank page to Google.

Want Your Website to Work on iPhones and iPads?

If you are interested in making your website deliver results from mobile and tablet visitors, plus generating the best results from Google searchers, give us a call.  Our affordable and sales-focused solutions are ideal for maximizing results and minimizing costs. We promise we’ll make it easy.

What is Customer Flow?

The path a customer takes to a business turns out to be pretty similar no matter what the business type. If a business illuminates this path with its own guideposts, customers seem to naturally flow in its direction. However, if a business fails to have a guidepost at each step, the customer often heads in a competitor’s direction.

Here’s how the flow works:

Here’s the guideposts a business needs for each of the above steps:

1. Advertising & content can short-circuit several steps. When a business is identified with an issue, product or service it gets the call first.
2. Generate neighborhood awareness to drive word-of-mouth and make it easy for people to share your information with others.
3. Getting your information in Google’s search results or in paid advertising is critical in reaching buyers when they actively search for your business.
4. Next to your front door, your website is the most important part of your customer efforts. Information needs to be customer friendly and easy to understand.
5. An easy to find phone number, email address or contact form are critical. For retail businesses, store locations and hours should be easy to find.
6. Once a business has received a phone call, email address or visitor, there needs to be a defined flow that gains the customer’s current business, repeat business and referrals.

Flow is one of the easiest things to understand because, as consumers, we follow a flow with each and every purchase. Flow isn’t hard for business to implement, but it does take time.

• Benefit – Is there a great benefit for the recipient?
• Timeliness  – Does the message have a near term benefit?
• Audience – Is there a great fit between the message and the readers?
• Exclusivity – Is there a benefit to being “In the know”?
• Ego – Will the sharer be thought of more highly for sharing the message?

A good email and social media effort can pay additional rewards beyond just keeping in touch with existing customers. Email forwarding, Facebook likes, Twitter retweets and LinkedIn shares all give a message an extending audience.

To keep from becoming like a close relative’s forgotten birthday, a business needs to stay in front of previous customers. At BubbleLife, we consider this step part of the Engagement process. Engaging a customer isn’t just answering the phone on their first call, its also maintaining the relationship over a long period of time.

To engage, businesses need a way to stay in contact. Everyone has a phone, but few like getting solicitation calls. This leaves the four primary online ways of:

1. Email
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. LinkedIn

As a part of every visit, a business needs to find the best way to reach a customer for continued engagement. Email is the best way because it puts a business in control of future contact and provides a high likelihood of reaching that customer in the future. The social media methods work too, but a business must rely on a customer accepting an invite or “liking” your business after they have left.

Letting a customer leave your business without and email address or social media connection is a sure way to put your business on the path to being forgotten.

Where Things Go Wrong

Think about the way you made your last purchase. Chances are it started when you heard about some new product or restaurant, did a little research online or through friends and then visited the business. These three steps have now become a common approach to new purchases, whether the business is in another state or down the street. We categorize these three steps as:

1. Awareness
2. Content
3. Engagement & Follow-up

First, customers must know your business exists and why it matters to them. Then, customers need to know enough about your business to make it worth their time to visit. Lastly, if everything has checked out, customers visit and judge the results for themselves. With further engagement, customers can be encouraged to return and even tell their friends. If there are problems in any of these areas, your business won’t be generating as much new business as it could.

Awareness

Many businesses believe that a great location is all they need to generate neighborhood awareness. While a good location seems to work for doughnut stores and other simple storefronts, it usually isn’t enough for others. If your business has multiple inventory items or services, potential customers need to know more specifically why your business matters to them.

Typically, awareness takes several impressions through a variety of efforts such as:

• Directories
• Web search
• Review sites
• Advertising
• Editorial
• Coupons
• Window displays

Different businesses require different tactics, but the goal is always the same – create an awareness that your business is worth checking out.

Content

Once potential customers are aware of your business, you need to convince them to take the next step. For this, you need to be able to demonstrate why they should engage with your business and spend their time to call, email or visit. This is a big challenge since most people value their time more than they value their money.

To support this trade of time for engagement, businesses need to educate potential customers with content and references. There are many ways to achieve this education including:

• Blogs
• Websites
• Editorial
• Social media
• Word-of-mouth referrals

These elements work best when used together and should reinforce why someone should do business with you. Content should ultimately educate customers as to why your business is their best choice.

Engagement and Follow-up

Marketing doesn’t stop once you have a prospect on the phone, in an email or in the store. Engagement marketing is about defining the quality of the customer’s experience, both before and after the sale, and building a more direct relationship. Relationships generate more repeat business and more referrals.

Engaging customers should include:

• Customer friendly policies
• Clean and inviting store or office
• Fair pricing
• Excellent service
• Surveys
• Email
• Social media

Each of these engagement options seek to further the relationship through trust and respect. Simply sending “Save money with us” emails won’t qualify in the minds of the customer as the best form of engagement, but at least it will be better than doing nothing. The goal of engagement marketing is to maximize the lifetime value of your customers.

On To The Checklist

Click Here to View the “I Need More Customers Checklist”

With awareness, content and engagement (ACE) defined as the three steps of the new customer cycle, it becomes easier to see where things could be improved to increase sales. Each area has specific techniques that can be used to improve performance.

My son is on Facebook everyday and never on email. I’m on email all the time and seldom on Facebook. My wife surfs the web each morning to find her news. My brother-in-law doesn’t surf the web but uses Twitter to keep up with new topics.  Four people with four different ways of finding information – and this is just a small sample of the people I know. We like this arrangement, but for marketers trying to reach all of us it can be very frustrating – no one way works.

Each evolution of technology and social media has further increased the number of methods it takes to reach customers who at one time were easily accessible through the yellow pages or the local paper. But in this case, this problem is solvable through something we developed called the Neighborhood Marketing Center.

The Neighborhood Marketing Center is a combination of content blog and tools that make it easy to create an article and then get that article to where readers are likely to read it. It also features a wide range of tools that make it easy to track results and stay on top of the entire neighborhood marketing effort.

With just a few clicks in the Neighborhood Marketing Center, you can:

• Post a new article
• Distribute that article to your blog and website
• Share that article on your neighborhood news website and neighborhood newsletter
• Email that article to all of your customers
• Post that article to all of your fans or Facebook, connections on LinkedIn and followers on Twitter
• Send the post to news editors
• Make sure that article has the maximum visibility to search engines such as Google

Neighborhood Marketing Center won’t write the article for you, but it makes sure your article gets the widest possible distribution with the least amount of effort.

But Wait There’s More

If posting and distribution were all the Neighborhood Marketing Center did, it would already rank among the biggest timesavers any small business could have. But beyond article creation and distribution, the Neighborhood Marketing Center provides a complete set of tools to integrate all your local marketing efforts such as:

• Reminding you to post and distribute new articles
• Launching advertisements and campaigns in the neighborhood news sites
• Monitoring the results of those campaigns
• Managing your email customer list
• Tracking search engine activity
• Integrating statistics from Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yelp for a single source of information
• Storing account logins and passwords
• Creating landing pages for special offers and downloads
• Analyzing your website for optimal search engine results
• Reviewing leads generated from your blog or website
• Sending surveys to customers

With Neighborhood Marketing Center, small business owners spend their time managing their business not managing their tools. What Quickbooks is for accounting, Neighborhood Marketing Center is for local marketing – a single integrated solution that gets the most done with the least amount of effort.

1. Help Google tell searchers about your business.
2. Convert web visitors to phone calls, leads or store traffic.

Get these two things right and you’ll immediately see the results in your business. This article helps you understand how to solve the first problem. A future article will help you understand the second.

How Google Works
The Internet consists of over 100 million websites with Google tracking over 1 trillion URLs. With all those web addresses, trying to get your website to the top of the search results is not an easy task. But, before you can even begin to solve the problem, you first have to look at your website the way that Google does.

When Google loads a page from your site, it doesn’t use a web browser. Google loads your site with proprietary software that downloads the text but doesn’t run Adobe Flash, scripts or any of the other things that make a website visually interesting. Google only sees text. If you’ve got a Flash-based website, chances are that Google either doesn’t see it or doesn’t give it much attention.

No Text = No Google = No Web Visitors.

But even text may be a little challenging. Google isn’t an English major, it’s a text processing engine. It doesn’t grade on style, it grades on quantity with results determined by the words and phrases searched for by your potential customers. If your website has plenty of good phrases that potential customers might search for, the better your chances that your website moves up the list of search results.

Most Important Tip – Write for Potential Searchers
For example, the phrase “Customers love us, you will too!” may work well for human visitors to your website, but Google won’t spend much time on it and more importantly few users will ever search for that phrase. However, changing the phrase to “Dallas customers love us! See for yourself with a free home theater consultation!” gives Google more context and provides potentially more hits for customers searching for “dallas home theater” or “home theater consultation”. This second phrase may not be the most concise, but it’s much better for Google and potential searches.

Besides writing for searchers, here’s a few of my favorite Google techniques:

• Include location information on every page.
• Don’t use graphics to display text information such as phone numbers or addresses.
• Use good page titles.
• Keep your site focused on one business and one set of business terminology.

A Smart Website is Your Best Investment
I’ve been amazed at the improvements that we’ve achieved by revising a client’s website. So, I know this approach works and improves results. The bottom line is that today’s websites have two audiences, a customer actually visiting your website and a customer you want to visit your website. Writing for both audiences improves the bottom line and is often the smartest investment for a neighborhood business.

Yelp.com is a marvel of business reviews from everyday customers. I’ve used Yelp many times to locate a restaurant when in an unfamiliar city, and I’m not alone. Almost 50 million people visit Yelp every month. With over 18 million reviews, “Yelpers” have a lot to say about local businesses and sometimes even yours.

Yelp works great for local businesses when the reviews are good, but what if a bad review gets posted?

The first answer that almost everyone tries is to get a friend to post a positive review. But, Yelp figured out long ago that a single glowing review (or maybe even all glowing reviews) from a Yelper was an indication that the review may be “biased”. Yelp employs an interesting and undisclosed filtering algorithm that attempts to detect biased reviews and filter them out. Businesses can still display these filtered reviews but it takes a bit of work.

The best way to get positive reviews posted on Yelp is to regularly encourage all customers to provide their reviews of your business and hope that a few of them are not excluded by Yelp’s bias filters. And of course, the best way to get people to say positive things about your business is to give them a positive experience.

For more information on Yelp’s filtering please visit:

http://officialblog.yelp.com/2009/10/why-yelp-has-a-review-filter.html

When our phone quits working we know it because we cannot even make a call. But when a website goes down, how’s a customer suppose to let us know? No website means no phone number, no email address and usually no new business.

Website availability is too important to leave to chance. If you do a search for “godaddy website hosting problem” you get about 14 million results. Though Godaddy has one of the highest rated uptimes for hosting, at over 99%, that only means that if your site is down all day, 100 other sites worked fine.

That’s why in this latest release of Neighborhood Marketing Center, we added a site uptime monitoring tool that checks your site every 30 minutes to make sure everything is working okay. If your website cannot be accessed or is loading slow, you’ll get an email or text message letting you know.

With BubbleLife’s new site uptime monitoring, you’ll no longer have to rely on the kindness of strangers to keep your website up and running.

1. Email – 86%
2. Facebook – 49%
3. Telephone – 25%
4. Mail – 9%
5. Twitter – 4%
6. Blog – 3%
7. LinkedIn – 2%

“Social media has opened up new opportunities for marketers to amplify their brand, build loyalty and connect with consumers,” says Jeff McKenna, senior consultant at Chadwick Martin Bailey. “Creating relevant, sharable content needs to be part of the overall marketing strategy, as it is an important vehicle for Word of Mouth advertising.”

Next time, you think about “word-of-mouth” marketing, remember email, Facebook and voice are the top 3 ways it gets done.

“Social media is not “cool.” MAKING MONEY IS COOL. Social media is simply another arrow in the quiver of marketing, and that quiver is designed to GENERATE REVENUE.”

Why I Will Never, Ever Hire A “Social Media Expert”
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-i-will-never-ever-hire-a-social-media-expert-2011-5

• Did people see my ad?
• Did they like it?
• Are they interested in what I sell?
• Do they know about my business?
• Did they tell their friends about it?
• And the ultimate question, did the ad bring me a customer or would I get the customer anyway?

When businesses market and customers call or come through the front door, there might or might not be a cause and effect. When  businesses ask customers where they heard about them, customers don’t remember the process that led them there (see pinball marketing). So, what should be the best source of the information, the customer, may not be the most reliable. This is why “word-of-mouth” gets so much credit. It’s easier for the customer to explain.

Dang you marketing black box!!

But, with the right tools, we can see inside the black box.  With the right tools:

• We can see if people view an ad.
• We can see if they responded to it.
• We can see if they read more about your business.
• We can see if they tell their friends.
• And ultimately, we can see if the ad brings a new customer.

The right tools transform neighborhood marketing from guessing into a consultative process that can be reviewed and modified to achieve the desired results. At BubbleLife, we call these tools “Insights”. Insights is a monthly report that goes to all of our customers that gives them information they can use to improve their marketing results. Insights is valuable when the process works, because there is always room for improvement. But, Insights is absolutely essential if results are not up to expectations. Insights can help figure out the problem and design a new solution.

Every customer or potential customer is now on the Internet and turns less and less to newspapers, postcard mailers, yellow pages and the stuff us middle-aged dinosaurs used 10 years ago. The question ishow do you reach customers online where they spend their time? The first guess would be banner ads – but, banner ads don’t work or at least don’t work the way most people think.  The next guess might be deals – but, deals don’t work for every business and have their downsides as well. So what are dinosaurs fighting off extinction suppose to do?

Before I tell you the answer, let’s spend a little time understanding how people behave online. Think about the last time you went to Facebook, CNN or some other website. Now, try to recall the name of an advertiser you saw on that website? Don’t worry most can’t remember. Now, try to recall something you read – a wall post from friends, a news story about oil prices? This is a much easier task. That’s because, almost every person spends 99% of their online time focused on the content of a website and minimal time focused on the surrounding messages from advertisers. This idea is what underlies a neighborhood content strategy.

Content is something that tells a story. “Good” content is something we find interesting. “Bad” content is something we don’t. Content can be short like a Facebook post, medium like this article (hopefully you’re still reading) or long like a magazine article. Each subject has its own appropriate length and the definition of “good” and “bad” doesn’t change based on length or any other factor.

A neighborhood content strategy is a strategy that helps businesses get their name and stories out into the neighborhood they depend on for business. A content strategy is similar to public relations (PR), except that the form is quite different and there is no editor in the way.  A content strategy provides stories to the neighborhood that readers can act on or tell their friends about. When properly done it turns business opportunities into interesting stories. For example which of the stories would you most like to read:

• “New Shipment of Shoes Now In” or “The Best Shoes for Jogging in Caruth Park”

• “Builder Receives Award” or “Neighborhood Family Loves Their New Home”

• “New Dentist Opens Door” or “When Should My Kids Start Brushing Their Teeth?”

The first example in each of the above is similar to the PR style – business or event focused. The second example in each of the above is focused on the reader – something that they might find interesting. A content strategy’s goal isn’t to get your content out, it’s to get your content read.

So, the evolutionary story now reads something like this, after dinosaurs roamed the earth, a new species of content creators emerged that made their businesses interesting. And that is what a neighborhood content strategy is all about.

1. Someone decides they want to buy a product or service you sell. (Ball is launched)
2. They try to remember where they could buy it. (Ding)
3. They ask a friend at work or over coffee. (Ding)
4. They do a web search. (Ding)
5. They read up on the purchase through a web article. (Ding)
6. They see a related ad – hopefully yours. (Ding)
7. They visit a website – hopefully yours. (Ding)
8. They consider buying online and having to wait or getting it right away. (Ding)
9. They consider the hassle of returns. (Ding)
10. If the product or service is expensive, they will ask other people about the options they’ve found. These people may give them information that restarts the process. (Paddle)

Unlike real pinball, there is no guarantee that the ball drops all the way down. Some other “ball trap” or competitor may capture the customer before they make it all the way down.

Tilt Early, Tilt Often

Given this pinball challenge, think about how you can “tilt” the board to your advantage. Surprisingly, the game actually favors the neighborhood business since they have more ways to “cheat” by:

• Connecting early in the process. If customers remember your business at the beginning, it works like a shortcut. Advertising helps with this.
• Making sure customers find you through friends or Google. Blogging helps with this.
• Giving reasons why your customers should visit. Offering a deal helps with this.
• Getting your website to inform potential customers and capture their information. A good website design helps with this.

When all these pieces come together, the pinball game is tilted for an easy win. Have fun playing!

1. Using Too Seldom – If customers visit your Facebook page only to see an empty page or with a last post dated many months ago, it will seem as if your business is going out of business. Remember no activity means no interest which means no sale.
2. Using Too Much – Anybody who “likes” your business page automatically sees your business posts on their wall. This is great unless 50% of your customer’s recent wall activity is your business. Businesses need to use Facebook regularly but not to the point of seeming to be “spam”.
3. Being Boring – This is where remembering the audience is so important. Just because something is interesting to you doesn’t make it interesting to the customers.
4. Being Irrelevant – When someone “likes” your business on Facebook, it typically means they are interested in your business for the product or service you deliver. Posting about personal problems, politics or similar matters may not go over well with customers who simply thought they’d get some special offers.
5. Ignoring Comments – When you post on Facebook, it is not uncommon to get comments back. Each comment should be treated just like an inbound email message and given the appropriate follow-up.

A Facebook business page is like a customer’s next-door neighbor. Neighbors you never see, who talk too much about boring things and who don’t listen are not your favorite next-door neighbors. And so it is with Facebook business pages.

Neighborhood businesses, across the board, are feeling this decline in yellow page usage. Online, there is not just one source of businesses listings that customers turn to but potentially thousands, each with their own rules, signup procedures and often costs. However, there are three key directories every business should be in and, fortunately, they are all free:

1. Google Places http://www.google.com/places

When users search Google for a business or type of business, Google will attempt to return local businesses at the top of its result list. One of the ways Google knows about local businesses is through its Google Places service.

2. Yelp http://www.yelp.com

Yelp took the standard web business listing and made it easy for customers to add their own opinions. When users have something to say about a business or when they want to read what others have to say, the often turn to Yelp.

3. BubbleLife Neighborhood Directories http://bubblemedia4.wpengine.com

General directories are great for potentially touching anybody, but for local businesses the most valuable customers are those within five miles of their front door. Local customers are most likely to be repeat customers and are the most likely to influence other nearby customers through word-of-mouth referrals. BubbleLife’s focus on the neighborhood makes it very complementary to other online directory efforts.

Each of these three services let a business enhance their online profile and it is worth a little extra time to make your business stand out.

1. Repeat business
2. Word-of-mouth referrals from deal customers
3. Cross-selling opportunities

If you run a promotion but don’t see one of these three results then you’ll be guilty of the old adage “losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume”. This may be one the factors in why almost 40% of Groupon (one of the more well-known deal advertisers) customers don’t have a positive experience.

Does This Mean You Don’t Do Deals? 
No. Deals can work great. Businesses just need to be smart about the deal they construct. A good deal:

1. Targets your neighborhood where you are most likely to see repeat business.
2. Generates an email address that can be used in future marketing efforts.
3. Compliments other marketing efforts.
4. Results in a positive experience for the customer, so they will spread the word about your business to their friends and family.

Deals are a great way to attract customers to your business and to drive the opportunity to build a long-lasting relationship.

Google is always working to improve the search results for a given query. As of last count, Google uses over 200 factors to come up with the right results. The most popular of these is known as PageRank or the number of incoming links. Yet, PageRank is just one of 200. And, to make matters a little more confusing, these factors change as Google determines new ways to create better results.

So, how can a business get highly ranked on Google? The first rule is to give up on trying to get highly rated for a broad query like “restaurant” or even “dallas restaurant” and focus on narrower queries like “restaurant near 75205″ or “indian restaurant in highland park”. Make sure your website has the location and text that Google can find. Then, follow these other tips that help:

• Take advantage of all the standard website practices for search engine optimization. Avoid heavy use of flash and other content that Google can’t “read”.
• Use the broad queries to identify the online directories that Google likes for a given category. Then see about getting your business listed in those directories.
• Claim your listing on Google’s local business list.
• Look for other opportunities to get your business listed on other websites such as online yellow pages List your business in all available online directories.
• Blog and blog a lot. The more your blog, the more content you create and the more likely one of your articles will match a query.
• Don’t cheat. It may be tempting to try to create bogus content or a site with lots of links back to your site. But Google has been scammed by much more elaborate efforts and their a number of the 200 factors are designed to punish the “cheaters”.

If every business was great at the above steps, it might be difficult to get on the front page of results. But surprisingly, most businesses still don’t take follow these steps. Remember it’s not important to be the best, you just have to be better than your competitors to get Google to notice.

The link in this article references the 200 million blog post milestone celebrated at WordPress.com. That is a lot of blog posts. More importantly it is a lot of blog posts for customers to search through trying to find your blog posts. That is why where you put your blog is more important that what you say.

Unless you are actively marketing your blog you need to make sure your blog is hosted some place that gets visitors already. This is the idea behind our neighborhood websites and just one more reason why a neighborhood website is a much better place to setup your business blog.

Featured Link
http://mashable.com/2010/06/18/wordpress-200-million/?utm_so…

• Spend more than others
• Are easier to service
• Generate more repeat business
• Generate more referrals
• Are worth more over their lifetime

Targeting these types of customers rather than just any customer generates the best return on your marketing.

Clearly, they found a correlation between frequency of blog posts and new customers. But I think there are some other factors that are reflected in this chart that are also driving the correlation. Companies that blog more are also more likely to:

• Broadcast to Existing Customers- Customers who receive blog posts are more likely to pass the information on to their friends and family. Even though a blog reader is most likely an existing customer, they are also your opportunity to reach their network of contacts if you give them something to pass on.
• Integrate their Online and In-Store Efforts- Businesses that blog more are also more proud of their blog and more likely to encourage new readers with sign up encouragements.
• Become Findable in Search Engines – The more content about a business, the more for Google and other search engines to work with.
• Become Findable in Neighborhood Websites – The more content about a business, the more likely neighborhood readers will see and learn about the business.

Creating and growing a blog take time, but the chart above gives businesses a compelling reason to keep it up. Though it takes some time, a business blog is often the least costly way of growing revenues.

For more charts and information from HubSpot, visit http://www.hubspot.com/charts

Recently, Google added the ability to refine searches with the “Nearby” tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so users don’t have to worry about adding “Minneapolis” to a query and missing web pages that only say “St. Paul” or “Twin Cities.”

For neighborhood businesses, the Nearby search option starts to tilt the advantage back to local businesses as opposed to the national online businesses typically favored in past Google searches. If you haven’t tried out this feature, check it out by doing a search, clicking on “show options” and selecting “Nearby.”

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