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29 Oct This post is from from my other blog here When I was at the Kelsey Group conference ILM’08 I spoke with a number of different companies about the services that they provide. One of those was AgendiZe. They provide some interesting options for small business, so I did some extra q&a with Alexandre Rambaud (founder and CEO) of AgendiZe. Q. What is AgendiZe and what do you guys do? A. AgendiZe offers a full suite of user engagement tools to help SMBs, yellow pages publishers and marketing companies generate more leads in online marketing initiatives. In other words, instead of just clicks, we help any company generate actual phone calls, emails, customer interactions and real-world store visits from their online campaigns. Q. How long have you been around? A. We started five years ago and now power more than 3 million local online ads. Q. How can your services help small business promote themselves online? A. AgendiZeMe, our Call-to-Action toolkit for SMBs, helps local businesses increase their conversion rates in two ways. First, we make it easy for consumers that visited their website or saw an ad or email to contact them live with free Click-to-Call. Second, we help customers revisit them later, remember and save business product or service information, and recommend it to their friends & colleagues on more than 80 services and devices, including cell phones (SMS), social networks (ie. Facebook, MySpace), email, IM, address books, calendars, PDAs and more. Q. Have you found one particular click to action to be the most effective? A. Send to Phone and Send to Address Book are two of the most effective Call-to-Action tools that consumers use the most. Your customers are busy people who, even if they’re interested, don’t have time to call you or visit your store right now. However, if you give them the ability to save your contact information to their phone or address book, you give them an easy way to save your business information and quickly contact you in the future when the time is right. Over the past five years, we’ve seen that SMBs who offer a combination of 10+ different AgendiZe Call-to-Action tools (including Click-to-Call) within their websites, ads or emails can generate up to up to 20 times more direct customer interactions (ie. Calls, emails, in-store visits, etc.). Q. Can you provide some live examples of where Agendize is being used?
Q. Where do you see social marketing going these days? A. We’re seeing a move towards closer integration with Permission Marketing. It’s important Marketers understand that at one point you must rely on the users themselves to make an actual decision and move to the next stage in the decision/buying process. A traditional online ...
27 Oct This post is from from my other blog here The economy is the big news these days. Most everyone I have spoken with, is dealing with it one way or another. I have read a number of articles on how online marketers, such as myself, could deal with the current economic situation. Definitely good articles but I thought what was covered in them could apply to almost any small business. Thus below is the articles and my two cents. The one point I want to make is, that this not the time to cut down or totally eliminate your online marketing budget. Online marketing still works and will work. I think more folks will be going online looking for deals, info, etc during this economic crunch so you need your small business to be there! 1. The first article was Online Marketers Can Weather the Financial Crisis, By Bryan Eisenberg. Brian said:
2. Over at TopRank Online Marketing Blog they conducted a survey: SEO Tops Recession Internet Marketing Tactics. The top five results of the poll: Search engine optimization (36%, 149 Votes) Blogging (33%, 134 Votes) Pay per click (26%, 107 Votes) Email marketing (22%, 89 Votes) Social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) (21%, 86 Votes) 3. Chris Smith wrote Local Business Marketing Tip: Turn Economic Lemons Into Sales Lemonade For The Holidays over at Search Engine Land and said: “My secret local search engine optimization tip du jour is exquisitely simple: coupons! Local businesses should provide a special coupon page on their websites for each of their local outlets. The page should be accessible to search engine spiders, and it should clearly state what the coupon is for, using all the classic SEO signals. You should particularly frame the title of that page with keyword-rich, targeted text.” Coupons are a great way to help promote your business- I know I am always looking for coupons, who isn’t. 4. The last article is Making the Most of Your Local Search Marketing Dollars by Gregg Stewart. Gregg concluded his article with: Think Horizontally, Execute Vertically Local search continues to offer national and local advertisers the ability to connect with consumers who are ready to buy. The best campaigns are comprehensive programs allocated across a variety of media properties. IYPs, local search sites (e.g. CitySearch) and the search engines provide the best cost per lead and volume of leads. Yup-my thoughts exactly. Online marketing, especially locally, can help your business even when you think things are bleak. Being creative, finding new ways to reach customers and having some patience are important these days to keep your business moving forward. Good luck! 
20 Oct This post is from from my other blog here Sorry for the late notice-just got back from camping with my sons’ Boy Scout Troop. Tomorrow, October 21, 2008 at 2 PM Eastern, my good friend Dick Larkin will be having another one of his great webinars on Developments in Interactive Local Media. Matt Booth, Peter Krasilovsky and Mike Boland will be speaking. Should be a great and information webinar. Click here to register. If you want to go to ILM’08, check out the Kelsey Group’s website.
10 Oct This post is from from my other blog here Got some nice reading for everyone: Yesterday: Looking Back At “The Summer Of Local” by David Mihm Today: Tips for a Local Business to Compete in Local Search By Mary Bowling Tomorrow: The Future of Local — Revisited by Greg Sterling Thought these were worth your read. Have a great weekend!
07 Oct This post is from from my other blog here After some searching and experimenting, I have put together a nice (IMHO) local business profile & submission service for small businesses. I have come across a lot of small businesses that are not on-line and do not want to invest the time or resources into a full fledged web site. Creating a local business profile is an easy alternative (which has been mentioned many times before here at LocalBizBits). The site is LocalBizProfiles.com. I have teamed up with ShowMeLocal to support the back end of this small business directory. You can go to ShowMeLocal or LocalBizProfiles directly to sign up, but to help out my clients and readers of LocalBizBits, I have created a special package, that includes features and pricing not available on-line. The only way to get access to this package is to contact me directly (phone or email). The general details are on the submission service page but basically I will create a customized business profile, show you how to use and take advantage of its features and then submit your business information to a large number of local search engines, directories and Internet Yellow Pages. This is not some affiliate program or cheesy directory to waste your money. This is a customized package I have set up and one that should do the job for your small business. Even if you already have a web site, this can nicely compliment and augment your existing site. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
07 Oct This post is from from my other blog here Yes, you need to be doing search engine marketing always! You do not have to do a ton of it but you need to doing something, even in this economy. Found a great article Search Marketing in a Recession you should read. “Traditionally, marketing budgets are cut during a recession. But search marketing is not traditional marketing.
Search marketing is basically virtual point of sale display marketing, but far more relevant and targeted”
Happy reading!
04 Oct This post is from from my other blog here The big news this week has been the U.S. Government’s proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial industry. MerchantCircle has conducted a survey through a random sampling of its members, to see how small business felt about the whole thing. Results of the complete MerchantCircle survey will be made available October 7, 2008. The questions range from which candidate would help out small businesses the most, whether race or age would play a part in their decision, and which candidate they planned on voting for in November. For the complete survey results on October 7, check the MerchantCircle blog. “I think what we’re seeing here is Washington not conveying their message to Main Street America,” says MerchantCircle Founder, Ben T. Smith, IV. “Nearly 45% say the bailout will not help them out, and 35% aren’t sure. To me, that means they view this bailout as only helping out Wall Street, with little effect on the economy around them. The focus should be on how Main Street America sees this bailout – and that’s not coming across.” Some preliminary results: State Bailout will help Won’t help Unsure Ohio 20.4% 42.7% 36.8% Florida 21.1% 43.4% 35.6% Wisconsin 50.5% Nevada 24.5% 52% Michigan 16.2% 42.4% 41.4%Will be interesting to see the complete survey on Tuesday
02 Oct This post is from from my other blog here You own a small business, are in a smart market, the economy is weak, and you do not have a lot of money for marketing. What do you do? First off, you need to spend some money. You cannot avoid that, but you can control some of it. In a recent article, SEO Marketing In An Uncertain Economy at Webpronews confirmed what I (and many others) have been saying all along. WebProNews spoke to Milind Mody, CEO of eBrandz Inc, an SEO and SEM firm, about online marketing and advertising. “Mody said that local search is an important part of the overall mix. “Client reviews and customer ratings form an important aspect of local search SEO. These reviews also helps in branding and reputation management. Mody says trends in SEO marketing in 2009 will focus more on local search and that companies will spend more on reputation management.” At the DMS’08 conference I attended two weeks ago, the Yellow Pages industry spoke about the multi-platform approach. This is using a mixture of off-line and on-line marketing. In essence this is what I believe small business should do in a small market. Here in Augusta, GA a lot of business still rely heavily on off-line advertising to promote. This is important but more and more folks are going on-line to search and research. It is this growing on-line population that needs to be tapped into. It is only going to get bigger. So in a small market, continue advertising off-line but begin to get on-line. What is the goal to advertising on-line? It is to increase your business’s visibility where people search-the search engines, Internet Yellow Pages, specialized directories, local search engines and so on. To accomplish this, you will need to approach it from many angles. The beauty of the Internet is that it is a dynamic media and you do not have to do everything all at one time. Start small and build upon what you have done. The Internet can be one of the best ROI out there and you, the small business owner, can do for many of these activities yourself, if you are so inclined. Where to start? The basic on-line marketing plan usually will start with:
Once this is done, how else can you promote that web site or business on-line? Some options are:
30 Sep This post is from from my other blog here Wanted to bring your attention to a long but good article over at Ben Saren’s blog. The title of the article is Local 1.0. I found his insights and thoughts on where local search is very good. I wanted to focus on the numbers. for this post. You probably heard of Web 2.0, but a lot of folks probably do not understand what that means. In essense it is to describe what “version” of the web we are currently using. Ben described is as:
Ben goes on to comment on what “version” of local search we are on.
Ben’s whole point and I agree with is that local search is so very young and has a lot of growing to do. There is so much potential in the area and more and more options and ways for small business to get on and participate are developing. Zvents getting $24 million to invest and build its local search event business is just one example. I am excited to see how and when Local 2.0 gets into full swing! FYI: At the SES San Jose conference this year, there was a Special Kelsey Group Presentation: Local 2.0: The Evolution of Local Search which also discussed this subject.
30 Sep This post is from from my other blog here Paul O’Brien just dropped a note by telling me about how Zvents, has secured $24 million in funding from Nokia Growth Partners, AT&T and NAVTEQ. That is a ton of cash! From their press release, it says: “Zvents will use the proceeds to expand the reach of its local listings advertising network, which enables both local businesses and national chains to promote their locations with search-targeted events such as sales and weekly specials. Zvents will also further invest in expanding the deployment of its successful local search platform, which currently powers a network of more than 250 media partners. ” Paul O’Brien also commented on it on his blog, SEO’Brien. It has been neat seeing all that Zvents is doing in the local sphere. I assume we will be hearing more in the future.
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