Every company wants to know what is the quickest way to get leads coming in the door immediately. 

It doesn’t matter if you are talking to the owner of the company or the Marketing Director. Each might have different reasons, but they still want the same product.

This is and always will be paid advertising. Why? Time. It takes time to build SEO, email subscribers, mailing lists, conventions to happen, etc.

When you do paid advertising you are essentially paying to take the time out of your marketing efforts.

Is Paid Advertising the most effective way to market? Absolutely not. Factually only about 30% of internet users look at paid advertising. That means you also need to account for the other 70% when working out a marketing strategy.

If I am only targeting 30% of internet users….what’s the point. Unless your company is on page 1 of a Search Engine Result Page you will miss out on 93% of all internet users.

There are only 10 companies on a Search Engine Results Page. Depending on the industry, you could be looking at thousands of companies not getting their brand recognized as people do not see it.

Therefore people bid to get their advertising on page 1 of the Search Engine Results Pages and work at the same time to increase their organic search engine rankings.

There is an axiom regarding this – The lower you rank on search engines the more money you need to spend on paid advertising and conversely, the higher you rank on search engines the less you will need to spend on paid advertising (for a specific keyword or keyword phrase).

Since Paid Advertising is so important, we felt it would be relevant to discuss the subject and layout the basics of this technology.

Knowledge is power and it can never hurt to understand how this can help your company.

There are three main aspects to every paid advertising campaign: Bidding, Ad Creation and Destination.

In this blog we will discuss the first of these, bidding. In two following blogs we will cover ad creation and destination.

Bidding

If just throwing money at paid digital advertising worked, we would all be very rich people. Unfortunately this is not the case. You need to remember that each and every competitor you have is probably doing the exact same thing.

To solve this problem, search engines came up with two different answers. 

Bidding to pay the highest dollar amount and an algorithm to determine the most relevant ad based on the keyword or keyword phrase entered into the search engine.

Now, there are two ways to pay for digital advertising. You can pay-per-impression or you can pay-per-click. Each has different end goals.

Pay-Per-Impression’s (PPI for short) only objective is to increase brand awareness. While you might get a limited number of conversions, that is not the purpose of this form of advertising. You will pay the search engine a certain amount based on how many people see your ad.

Pay-Per-Click’s (PPC for short) objective is conversions. You want the potential client to click on your ad, go to a landing page and convert. You only pay when a person actually clicks on the ad and gets directed to your landing page.

As you can see PPC will be a much better method of spending if you are looking for conversions.

Google specifically has tools that can help you determine the best spend for the keywords you would like to rank for.

https://ads.google.com

Once you have a Google Adwords account set up, you can go to the tools and setup icon in the top right corner. In the drop down menu find the Performance Planner and follow the instructions.

You can only spend how much you have in the budget, but this will help you determine the best way to do that.

Of all digital marketing, Paid Advertising is the one thing that I tell all my friends, family and peers to hire a competent marketing firm for.

I hope you found this article helpful. Please follow us on any of our social media accounts to continue to receive helpful articles such as this.

EVERY search engine crawls your social media accounts looking to see if they can find new content every time it crawls your page.

First let me address the Elephant in the Room. Is Social Media Important to small businesses?

Does the sun rise and set every day? Does the tide rise and fall?

That is how easy this answer is. YESSSSSSS!!!!!! 100% without a shadow of a doubt Social Media is important for small businesses.

1,000 people all yelling at me at once “ My clients don’t use social media, my ideal customer isn’t using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc”.

I call b*llsh*t. There are 3.6 billion people using social media in the world. That is approximately half the world’s population. There are 247 million people in the United States that use social media. That is 81% of the population in the US.

I don’t care who your clientele are…they use social media.

Here is an even better reason to have and use social media accounts. EVERY search engine crawls your social media accounts looking to see if they can find new content every time it crawls your page.

This means the more new content it finds on your social media accounts helps with your Local and Organic Search Engine Optimization. Say what? Did I just hear you right. 

Yes…even if you do not get direct contact with your clients through social media, it is helping your Search Engine Optimization to use ALL the social media platforms.

So, now that is out of the way we can get down to how we can make using your Social Media accounts easier.

I know it is a pain in the you know what to post new content to each social media account daily or even every few days. Just the main ones (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn) can take too much time.

Not to mention they don’t make it compatible. You would think that if you made one post for Facebook it should work on all your social media accounts. Unfortunately that isn’t the case.

social media marketing tampa

Well, here is the good news. There are software programs that companies can use that will let you post to your social media accounts in one place. It will even make sure that the pictures are modified to be compatible with each platform.

The good ones will even give you a calendar functionality so that you can make all your social media posts for the week, month or quarter all in the same hour, day or week.

Here are some of the main companies that provide these softwares:

Loomly
HootSuite
Monday.com
Buffer
TweetDeck
SocialOomph
Zoho Social
Our personal favorite – Evolved HQ

For small businesses I would recommend setting aside time at the end of the week or even on the week and work out the social media posts for the following week. 

You can come up with the visuals and copy, put together the posts and schedule them to go out on certain days and times during the week and not have to worry about posting to your social media for the rest of the week.

You will need to assign someone in your company to monitor your social media accounts to ensure that any communication from your audience is answered promptly.

But, if you find the right software all this can be done within one system so you don’t have to monitor them all separately.

Boom. Another problem solved for small businesses.

social media marketing tampa

I hope you found this article helpful. Please follow us on our social media accounts to continue getting helpful articles such as this one.

The entire buying process has drastically changed over the last decade. A brand is no longer in direct control of the public perception of their product, service or business.

I don’t know about you, but I think small business owners are some of the most remarkable people in the world.

Just the other day I was speaking with a client in the Mobile Detailing business. He was doing 60% of the work, meeting with me regarding his marketing, starting another business during the later hours of the evening, still finding time for his family while juggling everything.

I just had to sit back for a second and marvel at this man, but when I thought about many of my clients I found a similar case with almost every single one. Regardless of how big or small the business was.

Every small business owner I have met has poured her/his heart and soul into their business and their clients.

This got me thinking about Reputation Management. I’ve had too many conversations with businesses who pay absolutely no attention to their online reputation.

They are wondering why they are not getting conversions with their marketing when they are spending thousands of dollars each month.

When I look I often find mediocre stars and review ratings on the internet or even worse I find none at all.

A company’s online reputation is directly proportional to their marketing conversion rate.

Let me break down some numbers.

93% of consumers say online reviews impact their purchasing decisions.

92% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase after reading a trusted review.

It doesn’t matter if your B2C or B2B, the numbers are almost exactly the same. Reputation plays an enormous role in the buying decision.

The entire buying process has drastically changed over the last decade. A brand is no longer in direct control of the public perception of their product, service or business.

This entire process is now in the hands of the consumer/client. At any time they have a bad experience with a brand they can go online and leave a scathing review or if they have an exceptional experience they can likewise leave a raving review.

Unless a company is tracking their online reputation they would never know. As you can see from the statistics I laid out earlier, these reviews have a HUGE impact on a person buying decision.

Have you ever heard the statement “Word of mouth is the best marketing”? This statement is 100% true and in 2020 word of mouth marketing is your online reviews.

Example – You are the IT specialist for a small business. You are trying to find a service to help manage server speed. You search on the internet and find 3 companies that deliver very similar products. How is this guy going to determine which company to choose?

One company has a couple of 4 star reviews, one company has seven 4 star reviews and the last company has 45 reviews and their average rating of 4.5 stars.

Who do you think he is going to call first? It is going to be the last company.

As you can see, keeping track of your online reputation is a must. But there are so many review sources and not to mention if the business name or employee is mentioned online.

Is there a way to keep track of all this without using a million different software systems?

It’s 2020, of course there is. Some of them are:

Podium

Cision

Reputation.com

ReviewInc

Swell

BirdEye

And our favorite – Evolved HQ 

A good reputation management software should pull all your review sources into one place, it should give you the ability to answer them from that one place, it should also help you with artificial intelligence to come up with responses based on the amount of stars and the tone of the review and if necessary to be able to customize those answers.

It should crawl the internet for any mention of keywords you want tracked (business name, key employees of the company, specific product, etc). It should do the same thing on social platforms.

It should track main competitors both online and how they are expanding with their reputation over social media channels.

It should track the most used words or long tail keywords in your reviews so that you can see what your audience is saying about you.

Check out the companies list above and find the one that is best for you, but in the end it will save you a lot of time and keep your companies reputation intact.

Another problem solved for small businesses. If you found the article helpful, be sure to follow us on our social media accounts to continue to get helpful content.

20% of small businesses fail within their first year, 30% of small businesses fail within their second year, 50% of small businesses fail within five years and 70% of small businesses fail within 10 years.

I deal with Local and Small Businesses each and every day. I get to interact with able and productive Business owners constantly. I have seen some of the most amazing services or products, where you just have to marvel at the ingenuity of man.

There are 627,000 new businesses open each year. That means in year one 125,400 of these businesses will fail. In year two that number will climb to 188,100. By year five that number will be 313,500 and finally by year ten that number will be 438,900.

What I find most interesting is that these numbers are known by almost every small business owner and despite the statistics these men and women still put their heart and soul into their work to service their clients.

I thought it would be a wonderful idea to assist them in their endeavours.

One of the biggest contributing factors to small businesses failing is concentrating only on delivering to the clients they have managed to get without spending the time necessary to get new clients (Marketing).

Marketing is how ANY company gets new clients. There is an interesting law in this world that most people don’t know or don’t give a lot of credence.

Nothing in this world stays the same. NOTHING. If a company is not expanding continuously, then it will fail eventually.

Digital marketing Tampa

Let me paint you a picture. You have a small business that deals with setting up Internet phone services for companies in his local area. He has 100 clients and he feels this is enough and doesn’t want to take on any more clients. Thus he dedicates all his resources to servicing the clients that he does have.
His clients appreciate his service. A few months goes by and one of his clients sends in a notice of cancellation. Of course the business owner calls up his client to understand how his services didn’t meet up with his expectations, but his services are not the problem. His client is going out of business or sold his business, etc.

Another client sends in a request for cancellation. Again the business owner contacts the client to understand why this client )who just a month ago told him how great his service was) has decided to cancel. He finds out that another company contacted his client and gave him a lower monthly cost with the same exact services. The client is sorry, but it was a financial decision and not a personal one.

These types of problems/circumstances happen every hour of every single day for small businesses all across the country.

The small business owner is in a bit of a panic mode and goes into super delivery mode, only to lose a few more clients due to circumstances not under his control.

Now he realizes he needs to get new clients. He frantically tries to start a marketing campaign, hoping to negate some of his losses.

How long do you think it takes a marketing campaign to become effective? 6 MONTHS at the minimum and 12 months for seeing the best results.

Sure you can throw up a Google Search Ad and might get lucky and snatch a client from the low hanging fruit, but a company is going to need a lot more than one client.

This is how local and small businesses fail. They do not put the necessary attention on marketing or they can’t because they don’t have enough resources (Time, Money, Employees).

So how do we help a local or small business owner address these problems?

First is education. There are many marketing companies that provide marketing education for local and small businesses in blogs like this one all across the country. Subscribe and start educating yourself on best practices.

What are some of the key actions that every local and small business should do?

In this article I am going to cover two must have marketing functions for every local or small business.

1. Listings
2. Reviews

Digital marketing Tampa

Digital marketing Tampa

Lets review both of these separately and how this can be made easier with the proper tools.

Listings – What is a listing as it pertains to the marketing world?

There are local business directories in every city in the Country. There are over 205 actually. These directories have listings for businesses. Think of the Yellow Pages from 20 years ago.

This is the same scenario, except now there are over 200 (Yellow Pages being one of them).

These listings will give your business name, business address, phone number, website and other pertinent information.

Why are listings important? Well, all major search engines will go through each of these directories when looking for search results. It is not the only thing these search engines do, but it is one of them.

What are all these directories? I will put many of them here to give you an idea:

Digital marketing Tampa

As you can see there are a lot of them and this isn’t even the full list.

How much time do you think it would take you to set up individual listings on each of these directories? It seems a bit daunting and time consuming doesn’t it?

Well here is the good news. There are tools you can purchase for a minimal fee to do this job for you and make sure that it is 100% accurate and that is EXTREMELY important.

Evolved Strategic Marketing offers such a service and if you search on the internet I am sure that you can find other companies that offer similar services.

Not only will such a tool help your Local Search Engine Optimization, but it will also help your Organic Search Engine Optimization. Why?

That is a bit technical, but it will create what are called citations and these citations help increase your Organic Search Engine Optimization.

See, you just vastly increased your marketing and it would take you all of maybe half an hour to get it done.

Digital marketing Tampa

Reviews – How important are reviews to a business?

There is not a word in the English language that could describe how important reviews are to a business, so I’m not going to even try.

Let me just give you some statistics:

97% of people read reviews for local businesses.

91% of 18-34 year olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

93% of consumers say online reviews impact their purchasing decision

89% of consumers read businesses’ responses to reviews

92% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase after reading a trusted review

Only one of these statistics was under 90% and it was at 89%. That means that reviews are 100% one of the most important things that your business can do for its marketing!

When I tell my clients to work on getting reviews, guess what is the number one response I get back! It takes too much time to get reviews from clients!!!!

ARE YOU KIDDING ME!

Do you know what the most effective marketing on Earth is? WORD OF MOUTH.

What do you think reviews are? WORD OF MOUTH.

So how can this be made easier? Well I can think off the top of my head of at least 3 different pieces of software that help a company get reviews, while not spending a lot of time doing it.

These services would allow you to upload your contacts via a CSV file. It will allow you to build out email and text message templates so that the messages can be branded to your company, it allows for you to send bulk messages or one at a time and you can even use them to forward other marketing messages.

Once a week you can upload your new clients. Bulk send out a request for review either via email or text. Problem solved and time saved.

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