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Find Customers FastFour Smart Ways to Produce Leads and Sales By Kim T. Gordon If you’re looking for strong sales in the coming new year, now is a great time to invest in marketing programs that will yield quick results plus continue to bring steady growth in 2006. For many types of businesses, the key to shortening the sales cycle is to find prospects who have already started the buying process. That means you need to reach out to prospects who are actively looking for what you market. A few years back, that might have required investing heavily in the print Yellow Pages, which has traditionally absorbed a disproportionately huge percentage of small-business owners’ marketing budgets. Now, however, there are many fast and more affordable ways to reach customers who are in the "search" mode. And they can often outproduce traditional print Yellow Pages when it comes to lead and sales. Here are four ways to reach customers who are actively looking for what you market: 1. Advertise Using Paid Search Increasingly, successful local businesses have websites and they use online marketing campaigns to drive traffic and sales. Online advertising placed by locally based businesses totaled $2.7 billion last year, according to Borrell Associates, and paid search is one category that will continue to grow. After all, nearly 85 percent of all Internet users perform online searches. These are customers who have an idea of what they want to buy and are looking for the right vendor or retailer. When your best prospects search for what you market, does your company show up near the top of the pack? If not, you may be losing sales – since sites that appear on the first page of results may attract six times the traffic and double the sales of others. Advertising using paid search with Google, Yahoo! or other major search engines ensures that your message will appear near the top of search results and receive maximum attention from online searchers. 2. Optimize Your Website Another way to turn up near the top of search results is to optimize your site. While it may take a bit of attention and patience, optimization can improve your site’s ranking in organic (or natural) search results, and positively impact your site traffic and sales. In fact, that was the result for approximately 3000 marketers surveyed by MarketingSherpa, who said organic clicks increased an average of 73 percent in the six months after optimization. You can improve your organic search rankings by: increasing inbound links to your site from high-ranking referrers, sprinkling keyword phrases throughout your content, and creating keyword-rich title tags and meta tags. Since the more links you can acquire to your site from prominent referrers the higher your site will rank, it’s important to obtain them from prominent industry associations or Web portals. It’s also essential to sprinkle keyword phrases your prospects are most likely to search for throughout the content on all of your Web pages. Include your most important keyword phrases in your title tags (these are what the search engines use as the titles of your listings in search results). And be certain to create "description" and "keywords" meta tags that include your most important keyword phrases. If you’re targeting local traffic, optimize your site by adding local search terms to your tags. 3. Try Online Yellow Pages The Yellow Pages Association and comScore have just revealed a new study that claims while more consumers searching for local services or merchants turn to search engines than Internet Yellow Pages, those who use online Yellow Pages are more likely to convert to buyers – at least in five categories, including the automotive industry, financial services, drugstores, home and garden, and restaurants. In these categories, users who converted spent more money per purchase. So while search engines accounted for 66 percent of local searches and Internet Yellow Pages accounted for 34 percent, some businesses may find the online Yellow Pages to be a cost-effective, high-return option for bringing in qualified prospects and sales. 4. Advertise in Print Search Corridors The "demassification" of America has led to media diversity – and an explosion of newspapers and magazines that address every topic or special interest imaginable. A search corridor medium is created when the advertising and editorial focuses on a single topic. For example, the Business and Home and Garden sections of your major newspaper are search corridors because readers know they can look there specifically for information in their areas of interest. Suppose you wanted to buy a computer. You’d look in the section of the newspaper where most of the computer ads are clustered and compare prices – and you’d be shopping in a search corridor. Which publications do your target audience turn to when they want information on your types of products and services? Do those publications offer a section for direct response advertising or other shopping or search opportunities? To build sales fast, the trick is to place effective advertising in the media your prospects turn to when they know what they want – from model boats to prescription eyewear – and are looking for the right place to buy it. It’s one of the best ways to build sales now and in the coming year. Get In-depth Coaching on this Topic>>
Kim T. Gordon's columns and articles are read by more than 3 million small-business owners each month. She is a small-business expert and the author of four books, including Maximum Marketing, Minimum Dollars: The Top 50 Ways to Grow Your Small Business. Copyrighted material. May not be reproduced in whole or part without expressed permission from the author. |
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