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Small Business Marketing

Of course many businesses have discovered search engine marketing, and are trying to determine how best to tap into the millions of time a month consumers and businesses use the Internet to look for products and services.

In the past, marketers had to rely on a variety or techniques to get their sites listed in the search results, and those techniques didn´t always work.

Overture and Google are the largest sources for paid placement. I recently wrote an article for DMNews on the changes within the Overture system that pertain to all marketers. Many of these changes also apply to smaller and mid-sized businesses, particularly those marketing to a smaller geographic area, or within a specialty niche. Feel free to read the article by clicking here.

I also wrote an article for ClickZ on the importance of understanding creative execution of listings now that Overture and Google systems are maximizing their revenue and CPM, which is available here.

Marketers also have at their disposal other types of paid search engine marketing that work quite well, such as Google, Looksmart and something called XML paid inclusion that is incredibly powerful for catalogers, B-To-B manufacturers or distributors with a lot of items in their database.

Regardless of whether you are a small, medium of large business owner, if you have a web site that you use as part of marketing, you should be looking at paid search engine marketing. Where else can you find a prospect that just searched for exactly what it is you do?

However, before you start any campaign its important to define your success metrics. What do you want visitors to your site to do? Some sites sell their products via an online store, so purchase is an obvious goal, but what about lawyers, accountants, consultants, and real estate agents?

In many cases a "successful" site visit is one where the visitor requests information online or calls your toll free number. Believe it or not, some search terms will work far better than others and that´s where measurement of success comes in. Your webmaster can tie back each search result clickthrough to an order, or filled out form by making sure you have a unique tag on every listing that you use in a search engine listing vendor.

If you don´t´ want to build a complex tracking system and then do the data analysis, you can use an outsourced solution like Did-it.com or GoToast to manage listings and track listings. Recently, my company Did-it.com implemented a phone-tracking module for clients who receive most of their leads from phone calls from the site. All that data is then tied back to individual keywords so money is not wasted on keywords that don´t work.

When planning and implementing a campaign, choosing the search terms is one of the most important areas. Use geographic modifiers if your products or services can only be sold locally. For example, "Chicago accountant" or "New York Water Tanks" Use the Overture and Google keyword suggestion tools that are available to generate the best list to try for search engine marketing. These lists can be found at the links below:
https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

As a small business, you can even distinguish yourself by chatting with your site visitors, knowing where they came from and how much was paid for that visitor. For example, Both Did-it.com and Overture have partnered with a live chat application that allows businesses to monitor their search engine traffic in real time and greet visitors, inviting them to chat online.

The Overture partnership is with Liveperson and shows Overture search listing data, and the Did-it.com solution partners with www.ClickIM.com and provides the business with data on searchers that come in from a variety of paid sources, including Overture, Google, Looksmart, FindWhat and others. If you are paying for a visitor, it makes sense to let your customer service sales people know when they are chatting with the visitor, just what you paid to get them there and what that person was looking for, automatically.