Social media - My Internet Marketing Consultant

It may come as a surprise to many, but according to recent statistics, 60% of small businesses are yet to invest in their own website.

It is not a surprise to me at all. As a small business owner since the age of 23, I know all too well that spare time is not a luxury you have at your disposal; either to explain to an agency in sufficient detail what you would want so that you get something resembling your vision, or to learn the whole internet thing which these days involves the mastery of domain registration, changing Nameservers to your carefully chosen hosting service, installing and learning WordPress, where to find free-to-use images, how to resize them and add text and change formats and themes and menus and… and… and… what’s the difference between a page and a post anyway?

It is the Small Business nightmare. I have been building and tweaking Html and WordPress sites for years in my spare time before I started taking it more seriously, and I still get caught out with updates – recently with php 5.2 being deprecated, and I never, ever wanted to be someone who even knows what that means!

The good news is that you don’t need to become an expert, or waste your time learning and configuring so-called “website in a box” software packages or online “web-builder” platforms. Either contact a local agency like ourselves and demand an affordable price, or opt first for a Facebook business page.

Before you dismiss Facebook out of hand, the business side of Facebook is very different to the user-facing side. If you find social media to be an intrusion or distraction then that’s fine; you won’t need to be on it all day long trying to keep up with the Joneses. Instead you might find yourself engaging with new potential customers and clients you wouldn’t otherwise have found, and that’s what business is all about, right?

Facebook business pages are relatively quick to set up, and with the right tools added you could have a powerful and portable lead generation and client communication system in your hands (your smartphone), and one that carries on working while you sleep, and even when your phone is on silent while you grab those precious moments of “spare” time.

Do You Know Your Customers?

For example, do your customers find you or do you find them? It might seem like an irrelevant question, but if you stop to think about it the techniques required in each case are very different.

If you have plenty of customers, or more than enough, then it might never occur to you that you could be passing up opportunities that your competitors are taking – because if you don’t, they will.

Being reactive is fine when you are busy but when you are not then you need to be proactive. Ideally you want to be looking at proactive strategies while you are already busy, which is of course when you have the least amount of time! This is why it is important to build a customer database and start interacting with your customers and build up a rapport that will allow you to make suggestions of other products, services and upsells in an informative and natural way rather than coming across as being pushy or desperate in the harder times.

To answer the original question, if your customers find you then SEO is of the utmost importance to ensure the right customers are finding you for the right reasons, and preferably when they are already predisposed to buying your product or service. If you find your customers then PPC (pay-per-click) and all other forms of paid-for advertising are the modern forms of newspaper and magazine printed ads, and also where social media offers numerous opportunities for those that have the perseverance necessary to work out how to do it effectively.

But there are many other ways to be proactive that can be much more cost-effective, and some of which are “paid-for-once” and can then be set to sell and promote for you indefinitely.

In summary, building a database opens up a whole new world of opportunities. If you already have one then you also need to consider the best ways to monetise it.