Leveraging Local Search to Market Your Small Business: Part III

This is a continuation of the series on local search. Read Part I, and Part II.

This search on local search was meant to proceed along the following path:

1. Search Engine Optimization, with a local flavor!
2. Social Media Marketing
3. Enhanced Profiles on Internet Yellow Pages (IYP)

An Overview and Primer on Web Marketing

Over the last few weeks, we have met with small business owners, venture backed companies and a few enterprise software firms. Here’s a presentation on web marketing we put together for these individuals. Enjoy!

The Future of Small Business Marketing and Operations

This past February, the Intuit Institute for the Future issued a 32 page report discussing the three trends that will affect small businesses over the next decade.  Given our focus on entrepreneurship and small business here on the smbZen BizJournal, we found the report to be both interesting and incredibly insightful.  The trends are:

1. “The Connected World: Small Business Management On My Time, On My Terms”
2. “Beyond Web 2.0: Technology Fuels Small Business Formation, Operations, and Innovation”
3. “Small Business Marketing: The Mindset from Push to Pull”

In the following sections, we discuss trend two and trend three.

Using Social Media Marketing To Understand Buyer Desire

“Rivers of Revenue” is another books I highly recommend. In Chapter 3, Kristin Zhivago writes about tapping into buyer desire through customer interviews. In the current marketing environment, the growing adoption of blogs and social media tools make this easier and more effective than ever before. Through Technorati, BlogCatalog, and Google BlogSearch you can identify bloggers within your target market, and by commenting on these blogs, by truly adding to the conversation, you can overtime, obtain valuable “buyer-centric” feedback.

Let’s review a few of the reasons Zhivago outlines for conducting customer interviews and frame them in social media marketing terms.

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