Leveraging Local Search to Market Your Small Business: Part II

This is a continuation of the series on local search.  Read Part I here.

Consistent Business Listing Information

In the last post,  I mentioned that the need for consistent business listing information in the form of business name, business address, and telephone number could not be overemphasized.  A company’s listing is the one piece of information that ties everything (search engine keywords, user reviews, photos, user generated content) together.  Google, for example, aggregates the web content found with the company’s business information on Google Maps.  So please, please, please, please, PLEASE make sure you information is consistent across the web.  It the single most important thing to do.

The Benefits of Brochure Marketing During Tight Times

Times are tight these days and many small and local businesses are struggling to keep a marketing budget going.  Unfortunately, tight times also result in increased competition between vendors and consumers spend less money.  One often over looked marketing tactic for times like these is brochure and flyer marketing. Distributing these eye-catching and information rich ads to local consumers may very well drive customers to your site for very little money.

To put it simply, there are three reasons to consider brochures marketing right now:

Leveraging Local Search to Market Your Small Business: Part I

An Introduction to Local Search

The use of major search engines to find businesses and services within a geographic area is one of the fastest growing segments of search.
The overall goal of local search is to make it easy for local consumers to find your small business.  Consider the case of a consumer using a search engine to find pizza in Port Jefferson, NY.  If a consumer uses the search query “pizza port jefferson, ny,” Google will provide that individual with a list and map of matching businesses.

Long Tail Search Engine Optimization and Social Media results in Increased Traffic Over Time

As we’ve mentioned in earlier posts, we are leveraging our experience at the smbZen BizJournal to investigate the effect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media marketing on web traffic.  Two months of data derived from consistent execution of this strategy at the BizJournal indicates that Search Engine Optimization of long-tail search engine keywords coupled with Social Media marketing can produce a substantial increase in web traffic (visits and pageviews) over time.  The following week-by-week snapshot of BizJournal website traffic, measured in unique visits, clearly illustrates this conclusion:

What follows is a discussion of the strategy we employed to drive this growth and the conclusions we can draw from this two month data set.

An Overview of Using Surveys for Market Research

Using Surveys for Market Research

Most of us, at one point in our life, have been asked to complete a survey. I know I have certainly been asked to complete surveys - most recently by a PhD student I encountered at the local Starbucks! Having personally never relied upon large scale surveys to guide new product design, I wanted to explore the role surveys could play in launching new ventures. Here’s what I have found.

From a pedagogical level, a survey is a short or long questionnaire designed to solicit feedback on a product or service. They are typically used to assess customer satisfaction, conduct customer segmentation studies, evaluate product usage, and, among other things, understand the perceptions consumers have of a business brand. The data gained through survey information are also descriptive; they are expressed in percentages terms and frequency counts, and sometimes cross-tabulated for the purpose of comparison. And while the aforementioned definition and uses of surveys are simplistic and intuitive, their execution is not. Just like business forecasting, it is part art and part science. And just like business forecasting, garbage in yields garbage out.

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