Some smaller businesses have a deep understanding of the marketing potential that the Internet offers; others languish in the online world. There are even some small, service businesses that don’t use the web at all.
I want to focus this article on those small service businesses whose online presence is clearly not as well utilized as it should be. If you business is dedicated to providing your community with professional plumbing services, reliable heating system and air conditioning repair or hair care, are you limiting you online exposure to a simple listing on some classified advertising site? Remember the community of web users now includes almost everyone, and it continues to grow even among those demographic groups that were slow to find it.
Increasingly your potential customers are turning away from print advertising media and using the Internet to locate services when the need suddenly arises, when they move into your community or when they move into their first homes. While a small listing giving your phone number and address is better than nothing, don’t most of your first time customers want to know more about you before they entrust you with their bathroom sink or their next haircut? A building trades company should market online well just as any other service oriented business.
A beginning point is with your own business website.
Establish your professionalism in the minds of your site’s visitors by publishing informating articles on your website. For example, if you are in the lawn care business, you might have a series of articles about how to protect perenniel plants during the winter. If your business is plumbing, you could write informative pieces dealing with preventive maintenance of the home’s systems. A hair stylist might write about maintaining healthy, lustrous hair. Someone who runs a child care center could post parenting tips.
Develop a newsletter for your site’s visitors. A newletter is as much to develop a long-term relationship with your subscribers as it is to serve a marketing purpose. Mostly send informative emails, rather than focussing entirely upon self-promotion. , such as a coupon, infrequent, they will become more powerful.}
Develop ways to promote your website, itself, so that it is displayed near the top of the search engine results for relevant searches in your community. The mere existance of a website is not enough. You need people in your community to find it. One very effective way to promote a website is through a process called article marketing. If you don’t have the time or the talent to write the necessary articles, there are businesses that provide this service very affordably.
You may want to start on a relatively small scale and build up your efforts as you begin to see increased revenue as a result of your online marketing efforts. You will doubtless be pleased by how many fresh contacts your Internet marketing efforts generate over time.
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