Interruption marketing is DEAD. Alright, well, maybe not dead. But it’s been fatally wounded. It’s lying on the floor, bleeding out fast and reaching for it’s gun so it can fire back in vengeance. So you can either stand there and let it take you down with it, or you can finish it off!

Easy decision.

Interruption marketing is any type of marketing or advertising that gets in the way of what people want to be doing or seeing in order to deliver a message. When a commercial interrupts your favourite TV show, that’s an interruption. When a billboard blocks out the beautiful scenery, that’s an interruption.

This should all sound familiar because interruption marketing has been the go to for marketers trying to sell just about everything for just about forever. Don’t judge the marketers of our past though because they had good reason to be so interrupting. It worked. It worked really, really well.

It doesn’t work anymore though. People don’t want to see commercials so they TiVo shows and fast forward past them. People don’t want your junk mail. They don’t want your radio commercials costing them time they could be using to hear Van Halen. They don’t want anything from you (as far as marketing goes) that they didn’t essentially ask for.

And they’ve gotten incredibly good at blocking you out. Your commercial ends and 30 seconds later they’ve forgotten what it was about. They walk down the street past hundreds of ads and don’t notice a single one of them. They’re ad-blind. It’s a well documented phenomenon. It’s real and it’s costing you money.

So why do so many businesses still spend so much time, effort and money on stuff that doesn’t work? Well, the main reason is that huge corporations have equally huge marketing budgets and they don’t mind spending a million dollars to put up a billboard that might have an effect on you if you see it enough times over the next six months.

But you’re a small or medium sized business and you can’t do that (nor should you want to). So why do so many small businesses still spend the majority of their marketing dollars on junk mail, annoying radio ads and badly produced local TV commercials?

The reason is that they don’t fully understand the alternative. And you can’t fault them because it’s a very new alternative.  What is that alternative? And how many times can I write alternative in the same paragraph?

Market to people when and where they want to be marketed to.

Saying that often makes marketing people, especially the ad folks working at big agencies,  gasp, scream, faint, vomit, you name it. But get used to it because it is the future of  marketing. Gone are the days of force feeding people ads and having them smile and hand over their money.

So how do you market to people when and where they want? Well, there are a lot of ways a smart business can do this. Here are just a few:

1) Use permission based marketing.
A great example of this is permission based newsletters. Sending someone an email they don’t want is SPAM and it pissed people off. But sending someone an email they’ve specifically asked to receive, even if it’s promotional, is good service. People won’t hold it against you for sending them emails they’ve asked for, and even if they don’t read them, just seeing your name in their inbox on a regular basis can go along way to build brand recognition.

2) Put yourself where they want to see you, not where you want them to see you.
Don’t push your marketing on people, let people come to your marketing. Use the web to ensure that every time someone goes looking for information about what you do or what you sell, or a closely related topic, you’re there. When people go to Google and do a search on a product or service, they’re seeking out information and they won’t be annoyed when they find marketing material. In fact they’ll be incredibly receptive to it. You can’t afford not to be there when they go looking.

3) Make your marketing something worth seeing.
Why do beer drinkers love beer commercials? Because they’re normally pretty funny. Why can some companies take markets by storm with viral media? Because their video is so wacky, funny, unbelievable, or whatever, that people want to watch it. Games, contests, videos, the list goes on. Interactivity is the name of the game. Whether they’re playing with an application on you website or forwarding your video to their friends, people shouldn’t just be seeing your brand, they should be interacting with it.

4) Realize and embrace the fact that the users now control the content.
Back in the day if you wanted to watch Charlie’s Angels you’d plunk your butt down in front of the TV on Wednesday night at 9:00pm and you’d grin and take in every moment, including the ads. Those days are gone. Long gone. Now, if you want to watch 24 or Lost or whatever, you might watch it when it airs. Or maybe you’ll TiVo it. Or maybe you’ll get it on the network website. Or maybe you’ll get if off iTunes. Or maybe you’ll downloaded it illegally. See the difference?

People have more choice than ever in deciding what gets in front of their eyes. So you can either realize that and give them what they want, and benefit from it, or you can ignore it, keep shoving what you want in front of them, and suffer the backlash.

The reason is quite simply that there is a lot of value in business blogging, and it’s not just something that benefits large corporations. It’s great for small and medium sized businesses too, and if your business doesn’t already have a blog, you might want to seriously consider getting one.

Here are just some of the reasons business blogging is so beneficial:

It keeps you in constant touch with your customers:
When you blog you open a constant line of communication with your existing and potential customers. By consistently posting to your blog about relevant and interesting topics you give those customers a reason to come back to your site and to expose themselves to your business.

This kind of continuous contact is one of the most important steps in ingraining your brand into the minds of your potential and existing customers. This helps ensure that when a potential customer decides to make a purchase, they think of you first. And when it comes time for a previous customer to buy again, they’ll come back to you because of the trust and rapport that exists between you and them.

Google loves fresh content:
Google is the king of the internet and Google search is the number one way people search for things on the web. You want your site to be as Google friendly as possible, and blogging is a fantastic way to do that. The reason is that Google absolutely goes crazy for fresh content. They don’t want their search engine to be full of old and outdated pages, so they go out of their way to reward websites that consistently publish new material.

A blog is an easy way to keep adding new content to your website. Not only will it increase the number of pages that your site has indexed in Google, but you’ll benefit from Google’s love for fresh meat! So in addition to providing your customers with great and interesting content, you’re also providing Google with the same, and this can have a big impact on your SEO efforts.

It humanizes your business:
It’s important to relate to your customers on a personal level, and ideally you want them to think of you on a personal level rather than as just some faceless business. Blogging provides that human touch because blogs are normally written in a very informal tone and they’re normally written as individuals. Big corporations have been taking advantage of this for years by having their top execs write personal blogs.

Even if you’re a small business you can take advantage of this. Even something as simple as a customer knowing the name of the owner of a given business can go a long way in changing their perception of that business. So when you blog, don’t blog under your business name, blog under your personal name and make your blog something more personal than just a place to talk shop.

Contact us today to discuss how we can help you set up your own business blog.

The reason for this is that it is statistically proven that the top 3 to 5 results that show up for any given search get almost all of the clicks, and the further down the page you go (or onto subsequent pages), the less and less traffic you’ll receive.

So it’s very important for businesses, especially small and medium sized businesses, to take search engine optimization very seriously. It could be the difference between getting your business seen and making a sale, or remaining unknown while your competitors rake in business.

But how can a small business compete with all of the larger companies and giant corporations floating around on the web? Is it even possible to outrank them in the search results when they have such vast amounts of resources available to them?

The simple answer is: yes. And it’s all about the strategy you take when approaching your SEO.

If you’re a camera store and you try to outrank the major players for the search term “cameras”, you’re sunk. You literally have almost no chance of taking those spots from them. It isn’t impossible, but it would take a huge amount of time and effort. And that isn’t worth it because there is a better strategy.

That better strategy is targeting long tail and local keywords to give yourself a better chance of showing up higher in the results. Sure, those terms will get less traffic, but the idea is that instead of trying to fight for a very tiny piece of a big pie, you instead take a whole bunch of very large pieces of smaller pies! In the end, you’ll be much better off.

So what is a long tail keyword? Well quite simply a long tail keyword is a longer, more specific keyword, as opposed to a short generic one. So for instance, “cameras” is a generic keyword, whereas “Point and shoot digital cameras” is a long tail keyword.

By doing some good keyword research, you’ll be able to identify a list of such long tail keywords that get a decent amount of search traffic, but also have low competition, thus making it easy for you to rise to the top of the search results for those terms.

That brings us to local keywords. Local keywords are valuable for much the same reason that long tails are. They’re highly specific, and so the amount of competition you face is much lower. Local keywords also have the added benefit of being location specific, meaning they’re likely to provide your site with more qualified traffic.

The vast majority of small and medium businesses focus on local sales, and so someone coming to your site from across the country, or in another country, probably has little to no value. By targeting local keywords, you get the benefits of lower competition for search rankings and also ensure that the traffic coming to your site is made up of people who are actually potential customers.

So if you’re that camera store, and you’re operating in Mississauga, Ontario, trying to get your site to rank for “cameras” is a waste of your time. You probably won’t hit the top, and even if you do the traffic it brings you might not fit your target customer profile.

However, by targeting the keyword “Mississauga digital cameras” or “Mississauga camera accessories”, or other such terms, you have a much higher chance of taking one of those top spots in the search results, and the visitors they bring you will be exactly the kind you want: potential customers.

So why is it then, that despite all of the budget cuts and layoffs in the business world, and the decreased willingness of consumers to part with their money, online advertising comes out unscathed and even grows?

The answer is simple enough; recession drives consumers online. When times get tough, people don’t stop spending money, they simply spend money more carefully. Consumers are still completely willing to spend, they just want to be absolutely sure that they’re getting good value for their money. The easiest, and often best, way for them to do this is to research purchases on the internet. This isn’t limited to product purchases either. People will research chiropractors or daycares just as closely as they’ll research a new television or car. Anywhere money is involved, people will closely scrutinize.

So how does this affect your business? Quite simply, if you aren’t online yet (or you are but your site is lacking), then you’re taking yourself out of the picture for a great number of potential customers. Remember, when people hit the web to do their research, if they’re not finding you, they’re finding your competition. Not being online or being online without a plan hands their business over to your competitors.

The fact is that during a recession, online is where the consumers head, so it’s by far the best place to reach them. This is why the online advertising industry continues to grow even as traditional advertising, and most other industries, shrink. Huge corporations know how important online marketing is during tough times, and so they pump up their online budgets. The same principal holds true for all businesses. If you engage in marketing, you should be engaging in web marketing.

Web marketing connects you to your client base in a vast number of ways, in a time when communicating with potential and existing customers is more important than ever. Right now, people are worried about money, and they won’t part with it without knowing they’re making the right choice. If you aren’t actively communicating with them, your competitors are. Why risk losing new and old customers alike by ignoring the web as a key part of your marketing strategy? Get online today. It might be the best move your business ever makes.

For a consultation on a web marketing campaign for your company, contact us using either the general contact form, or the online quote form.

1) New customers are looking for exactly what you provide, in exactly where you provide it.
Whatever your product or service might be, and wherever you may be located, there are people looking for you. Without a website optimized for search, you’re hiding your business from these potential customers.

For instance, according to the Google Keyword tool, the term “Toronto movers” and it’s related terms receive over 40,000 searches per month on average. That means each month, 40,000 people turn to the internet to search for a moving company in Toronto. Imagine being a mover in Toronto without a website? It seems crazy, yet so many small businesses are missing out on huge numbers of potential customers by not having a website, or by having a poorly done website.

2) A web presence gives you a way to keep in contact with existing customers.
Having a good website gives you a way to keep in constant contact with your existing customers. Building relationships with customers is the best way to ensure repeat business, and the lifetime value of a customer is so great, that you can’t afford to ignore the ones you’ve already got.

A good web presence gives you the means to build that relationship, through newsletters, online promotions, and up to date information about your products or services. Leaving your customers in the dark gives them a reason to switch to someone that will keep them updated. Your existing customer base is your most important asset. Don’t risk alienating them!

3) A website is one of the most flexible and effective promotional materials.
You spend money printing up brochures, fliers and catalogs, so why wouldn’t you want a strong promotional material on the web? The beauty of a website is that it can be changed constantly to keep up to date with changes in your companies offerings. If you decide to drop a product or service, or change your address or business hours, the cost to reprint all of your promotional materials is absolutely enormous. On the flip side, a website can be quickly and easily changed at very little cost (or no cost if you’re up to doing it yourself!).

By centering your marketing efforts around the web, you gain a degree of control and flexibility that doesn’t exist in any other marketing medium. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to make a change to your business and have it refelcted in your marketing campaigns immediately and at very little cost? The benefits of making your website your number one marketing material are immense.

Any way you look at it, you can’t afford to deprive your business of a good web presence. There is simply too much advantage to bringing your company online that it would be almost irresponsible not to. You want the best for your business, so don’t ignore the web. The benefits a good site to your marketing and your customer relations are just too great.

What is PPC advertising?
PPC search advertising is the process of placing paid ads on search engines and search engine partners that display when users search on terms relevant to your product or service. When you go to Google and type in a search term, you’ll likely see some search results off to the right side under the heading “sponsored links”. These are PPC ads. Those ads have been placed there by companies targeting the terms or “keywords” that you’ve searched on, and every time someone clicks one, they pay Google for that visitor.

How exactly does PPC advertising benefit my business?
The benefit of pay per click advertising is that it delivers highly targeted visitors to your site. It does this because you specify the keywords that will trigger your ads. For instance, if a dentist were to run a PPC campaign, they could specify that their ads only show up for dentistry related searches. This means that the visitors that dentist will get to his site from his PPC campaign will be people who were looking for dentistry information in the first page.

The real value in PPC though is that you can tightly narrow down the terms you advertise on. The more narrowly you target, the more qualified those visitors to your site will be. For instance, if that dentist is a cosmetic dentist, they can choose only to advertise on searches related specifically to cosmetic dentistry instead of general dentistry. Or if that dentist specializes in teeth whitening, they can narrow their campaign even further to target only visitors looking for information on teeth whitening. They can also choose to only advertise to people within their geographical area.

This high degree of targeting ensures that the visitors coming to your site are qualified prospects. Targeting your advertising is extremely important, since it’s a waste of money to advertise to people who aren’t in your target market. PPC lets you ensure that you aren’t wasting money presenting your product or service to people who have no interest in buying it.

Can I do it myself?
You can get started with pay per click advertising by signing up for an account with Google AdWords. AdWords is the number one PPC ad provider, showing ads on Google  and Google’s search partners such as AOL, Ask.com, Kijiji.com and more.

The tricky thing with PPC is that done right, it will deliver a constant stream of high quality, valuable prospects to your site. But done wrong, it will bleed money and deliver very little. Because of this, it is highly recommended that any business seriously looking to run PPC campaigns get consulting on the design of their campaigns.

Is it for me?
The short answer is simply; yes. There is no limit to what kinds of businesses PPC advertising can benefit. The largest corporations and the smallest local businesses alike can benefit from it, and really, targeting smaller markets can be very beneficial budget wise. If you have a business, and that business has a website, PPC should at the very least be something to consider. The odds are, if done right, it could have real benefits for you.

For a consultation on a PPC advertising campaign for your company, contact us using either the general contact form, or the online quote form.