What is Social Media Marketing?

Celebrating, Connecting and Uniting - Every Day

A few weeks ago I joined old friends and neighbors at the annual town festival, where everyone came together to taste local specialties, listen to hometown bands and catch-up with one another. We talked about everything we like about this town, including the great people that live here and those that serve this community.

Amongst those we met were the new owners of a traditional Italian restaurant that recently opened downtown. We exchanged a few mouthwatering family recipes and cheerful kitchen stories. We were grateful of the encounter and promised to visit soon. Since then, we have tried a few of the recipes at home and shared them with friends. We also held our promise and have become regular patrons at the restaurant.

It’s unfortunate that it will take another town festival before we have a chance to socialize like this. In the meantime, we’ve connected with the restaurant owners through Facebook and Twitter, where they regularly share culinary secrets and special offers. In turn, we’ve been able to share our newfound love for this restaurant with our circle of friends online.

Defining Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing (SMM) refers to the process of generating attention about your business through social media sites – like Facebook and Twitter – by engaging with customers and creating relationships through online social interactions.

Small Business: Why Should You Care?

Social Media Marketing can help you better understand, respond to, and engage with customers. It can also be used to reach a larger audience through viral dissemination of real-time news updates, special offers, and multimedia content.

Visit Happy Planet Central for more information about Social Media Marketing.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Image - just for a moment - the Internet without search engines. How would anyone find anything online? Now imagine your business not being prominently listed on search engine result pages. How would anyone find out about your business online?

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet Marketing that seeks to increase website traffic by improving website visibility in search engine result pages. This is often accomplished using a combination of paid search advertising and through higher ranking in un-paid search results.

Keywords

Did you know that people type an average of three words when querying a search engine? These three words are key to people finding your website. These keywords are the way you connect with your customers.

A cornerstone of Search Engine Marketing is to select specific keywords or phrases associated with your website for which you wish to achieve higher ranking in search results. For a small business, good keywords may include the business name, type of business, products and services offered, and location. These keywords should permeate throughout your website to increase their relevance vis-à-vis your website and achieve higher ranking in search results.

Paid Search Advertising

All search engines incorporate some form of text, banner, or rich-media ads with their Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). These paid listings are often displayed at the top and along the sides of the search results, with the advertisers paying either for ad views (aka CPM) or pay-per-click (PPC). Paid listings can be very effective for small business owners that wish to quickly build visibility.

Google AdWords is a good example of a self-service online advertising service that sells sponsored listings above and to the right-hand side of its regular search results on Google.com. Using Google AdWords, small business owners can bid on keywords they wish to appear for, and pay a per-click fee each time someone clicks on their paid listing to visit their website.

Local Search

Local Search is a powerful tool for small business owners that wish to benefit from geographically constrained searches. Typical local search queries include both “what” and “where” information, such as “Vietnamese Restaurant San Jose” and “Apple Store Palo Alto”. Small businesses should pay particular attention to this form of search engine marketing, as local search is considered by many the new phonebook.

All major search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo, support local search. Local search results are most often displayed in search engine result pages under the paid search advertising. Participating in local search requires small business owners to submit their business information for consideration through services such as Google Places, which is also used by Google Maps.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website in the un-paid section of search engine result pages. As a website increases in relevance for certain keywords and phrases, so does its prominence in search results.

Small business owners that recognize the value of search results will want to engage in optimizing their website for search engine crawling and indexing. This includes making sure that your website has great content, relevant page titles and page names, meaningful section headers, and clear meta tags. Additionally, you will want to encourage backlinks, which are incoming links to your website. When combined, these techniques should help improve your ranking in search results for your target keywords.

Visit Happy Planet Central for more information about Search Engine Marketing, including a list of popular SEO tools you can use to help with your SEO initiative.

What is Online Reputation Management?

How often do you hear that a potential customer found your business through an online search or directory listing and decided not do business with you because of what they read online? Probably not so often. But rest assured that – like a tree that falls in a forest makes a sound even when no one is around to hear it – negative online comments adversely affect your brick and mortar business, even when you don’t hear about it.

Today, every business is defined – at least in part – by their online identity, even if they don’t have an online presence such as a website. That’s because customers can easily share their satisfaction or discontent with friends on social networks, or gripe in a very public way through online directories, news sites, message boards, and other social media venues. As a result, businesses are loosing hundreds of thousands of dollars every day due to their negative online reputation.

Online Reputation Management is the practice of monitoring and repairing the online reputation of a person or business. Repairing an online reputation involves suppressing negative mentions entirely or decreasing their visibility on search engine result pages, social networks and media sites. Suppressing negative comments often combines online and offline techniques, including the inoculation of positive content in order to supplant negative mentions.

Visit Happy Planet Central for more information about Online Reputation Management, including a list of twenty popular sites you can use to gain an initial assessment of your online reputation.

Seven Reasons Why Small Business Owners Should Care About Their Online Reputation

According to a recent survey, only 15% of U.S. Retailers monitor and manage their online reputation.

More and more small businesses are establishing an online presence - and so can you. More and more small businesses care about their online reputation - and so should you. In this article, we present seven reasons why small business owners should care about their online reputation:

People are spending more time online. The Internet has created a new world order where people are spending more and more time online to research products and services in their local area. Whether looking for a good deal at a nearby spa, a reliable plumber for a leaking pipe, or a last minute restaurant recommendation, people will seek the Internet in search for answers.

Online searches drive customers to your doorsteps. A recent comScore study shows that most online searchers follow up offline with an in-store visit, phone call, or purchase. This suggests that the balance of power is shifting to businesses that have an online presence and good reputation.

Your online presence defines your online reputation. With the advent of social media, information about your business is flowing in both directions faster than ever before. Businesses no longer control of their “brand”. However, a businesses website, a Facebook Page, a Twitter feed, or a Yelp account can certainly ensure that you are participating in the discourse.

People are talking about you online. Small businesses are likely to be impacted by what people say about them online. When someone goes online to research a business, product or service, the results returned often include information published by the business owners and facts posted by happy and disgruntled customers. If a business has poor customer reviews, less people will be likely to call for its services or purchase its products.

Online feedback represents an opportunity to engage with customers. Businesses can improve their reputation by engaging with customers online. In the case of a positive review, a simple “thank you” will go a long way and bear customer loyalty. On the other hand, unattended negative feedback can harm a business for a long time, as the Internet doesn’t forget.

Customers are only a click away from moving on. Despite the advent of social media and the power of social recommendations, people are still dependent on search engines and online directories to find what they are looking for. And if they don’t like what they see, they’ll simply move on, as the next choice is only one click away. Making sure you have a good reputation across a broad spectrum of online destinations is more important than ever.

Stepping onto the world stage. Small businesses often do best when marketing their products and services to a local and targeting customer base. However, the Internet represents a unique opportunity to reach new customers visiting the area, or who would like to buy your products from away. In this case, a good reputation will make all the difference.

As Benjamin Franklin once said: “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” Customers can be extremely judgmental online, which can have devastating effects on your business. Establishing and managing your online presence can only help improve your reputation, grow your business, and make an impact on your local community. Visit Happy Planet Central to see how you can get started managing your online presence and reputation.

Starter Websites for Small Businesses

Your presence on the Internet is a direct reflection of your business and everything it has to offer - and your business website is a critical building block of your online strategy.

Just like every business has a street address, now a days, every business should have a web address. Business websites can serve many purposes, such as providing information about your business. They can also be used to interact with customers, or sell goods and services. But ultimately, a business website should inspire and reward its customers.

So you're wondering how to get started with a website for your small business?

You have a few options. In fact, there are probably as many ways to tackle this project as there are web sites. OK... I'm exaggerating, but only slightly.

Option 1: Outsource

One option is to hire an agency or freelancer to take on the design and development of your site. This option works best for companies that need to design a highly interactive site using specialized design tools and server-side technologies that will meet the dynamic requirements of your site. You will also need to decide where to host the site and pick a hosting plan that meets your bandwidth needs. This can be a fairly involved and expensive proposition.

Option 2: Do It Yourself

A second option is to do-it-yourself (DIY).

The first DIY approach is to start coding the pages yourself using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Should you want to create dynamic pages, then add server-side tools such as PHP and MySQL to your repertoire. We recommend against this approach unless you have a lot of time on your hands and wish to take on web development as a full-time hobby.

The second DIY approach is to find a web-based service that offers what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) tools for creating and hosting web sites. There are a many companies that offer this type of service, including:

• Webs
• WebStarts
• Weebly
• Yola

Our favorite DIY WYSIWYG tool is Google Sites.

Google Sites

Here are the top eight reasons why we like Google Sites:

• Ease of Use. The tools for creating your web pages are powerful, easy to use, and free.
• Free Hosting. Your site will be hosted - for free - in the Google Cloud, which is designed to be highly available and deliver web pages very fast.
• App Integration. Google Sites is part of the Google Apps productivity suite, which means that it works well with other Google messaging and collaboration apps such as Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Docs.
• Media Integration. Google Sites makes it easy for you to incorporate Picassa photos, Google Maps and YouTube videos on your site.
• Site Analytics. Google Sites integrates nicely with Google Analytics, which generates detailed statistics about the visitors of your site.
• Search Engine Optimization. Google Sites integrates nicely with Google Webmaster Tools, which helps manage the indexing of your site on Google Search so that people will find your site when searching for it on Google.
• Online Advertising. Google Sites integrates nicely with Google AdSense, in case you're interested in displaying ads on your site and generating some revenue for these ads.
• Mobile Support. Google Sites are designed to work on smart phones such as the iPhone and Android devices.

Visit HappyPlanetCentral.com for an example of a website based on Google Sites.

Option 3: The Best of Both Worlds

A third (and final) option is to find a service, like Happy Planet Central, that can cost effectively design, develop, host, and maintain your small business website. Using tools like Google Sites, these companies focus on the delicate balance between website form (i.e., site design) and function (i.e. site usability) and will work diligently with you to produce the most appropriate and cost effective website for your business.

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Small Business Online Presence and Reputation Management

According to the Kelsey Group, nearly all consumers use the Internet when researching products or services in their local area. Equally noteworthy, a comScore study shows that most online searchers follow up offline with an in-store visit, phone call, or purchase.

This suggests that the balance of power in local shopping is shifting to businesses that have an online presence and good reputation. As a result, businesses are adopting creative ways to reach and stay in touch with their customers online:

• Web sites have become a powerful marketing tool
• Businesses are competing for top search engine results
• Social networks are being used to spread good word of mouth
• Online directory listings are replacing printed Yellow Pages
• Local businesses are finding their place in online maps
• Online storefronts are adding revenue and profits to the bottom line
• Excess inventory is being released through online auctions
• Businesses are reaching new customers with special online deals
• Goods and services are being promoted through online classifieds

More and more businesses are establishing an online presence. And so can you. More and more businesses care about their online reputation. And so should you.