Local Search and Marketing: Bye bye Yellow Pages… Hello 21st Century Advertising

If you have a business that caters to a local area, REMEMBER! The world has moved online for finding products or services, even if you own an “offline” business. If you are still cold calling customers, you need tools that get the customers calling YOU! Your competitors won’t know what hit ‘em, or why your business is growing. Matt and Brandon talk about the tools to help grow your local business. From putting your business on Google Maps, to using Craigslist, and facebook for promoting your local business .

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Links from the show:

• Zagat
• Mobilestars
• Angie’s List
• Geotag
• Geo Sitemap
• Google Map
• Mapquest
• Bing Maps
• Yahoo
• Google local
• Bing local
• Yahoo local
• Google.fr
• AOL
• Urbanspoon
• City’s Best
• BBB – Better Business Bureau
• Chamber of Commerce
• Professional Associations
• Adwords
• Facebook
• Mobile Search
• iPhone Augmented Reality apps
• local.google.com
• Yellow Pages online
• Craigslist
• Odesk
• NPR National Public Radio
• Infousa.com
• Goleads.com

Transcript:

Welcome to Automate My Small Business where we show you how to set up and run your own automated business on the cheap. So get ready to take back your life and add a little spice. It’s time to build something automated.

MATT: Hello and welcome to episode #10 of Automate My Small Business. I’m Matt.

BRANDON: And this is Brandon.

MATT: Did you think we’d make it to 10?

BRANDON: Double digits, that’s a big step. I’m really excited about it actually. We’re starting to get a lot of input from our listeners and feedback and looks like what we’re doing is ringing home with everybody so I’m happy about that.

MATT: I’m really excited we’re being listened to in over 31 countries.

BRANDON: That’s right. And what do we rank now in general business?

MATT: I don’t know but we opened a new notable section in iTunes and I think we’re like #2 or something there, which is awesome.

BRANDON: So thanks everybody for listening to us. If you have anything you want to tell us to say more of, or focus on more, let us know. But I think we’ll just keep on chugging here. Let us know if there is anything else we’re missing.

MATT: Yeah, so what have you been doing these last couple of days?

BRANDON: I’ve been a little bit down with the flu. Well, I don’t know if it’s a flu. It seems like it’s more of a cold although I’m a little scared because my brother came down with the H1N1 last week. I think he’s over it now so I thank God for that. But …

MATT: You’re making me glad that we do this podcast remotely, keep you quarantined up there.

BRANDON: Yeah. Everything is safe over the internet. So yeah, you know, I’m just kind of getting over this cold, maybe you can hear it a little bit in my voice but we’ll get through it. And to try and stay healthy, I went to my doctor the other day. We plan to go to my doctor’s appointment, me and my wife, because we plan to go to dinner with him later since we are friends with him and it’s a little awkward because, you know, I have my in the doctor’s clinical office with me as he’s giving me my physical. And normally it’s just, you know, asking questions, maybe drawing blood but now he decided to do the testes one two, you understand what I’m saying? With my wife right there, it was a little awkward.

MATT: Is that kind of weird being friends with the guy who’s doing that to you?

BRANDON: Yeah, I’d say. And then we went to dinner about an hour later. He’s ordering dinner and I’m thinking myself, “Where are those hands been?”

MATT: Oh man.

BRANDON: But, yeah, it was kind of funny actually, that is to say.

MATT: So you’re going to live?

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: Okay.

BRANDON: I’m going to live. I’m getting healthy. Thanks for that though.

MATT: Cool.

BRANDON: So what about you? What’s been going on?

MATT: Nothing quite that exciting. But I do have modern electricity in my house now which I’m really, really happy about.

BRANDON: Is that right?

MATT: Yeah. My house is kind of about 80 years old now and lot of the original wiring was still in there so when my wife would turn on a little space heater or whatever, the whole half of the power in the house would go off so I finally decided to get an electrician to come in and redo everything and I’ve clean, smooth power now, you know, brand new service entrance, so I can’t be happier to have the basic service of electricity now.

BRANDON: It seems like everybody would have electricity but I guess with the old house you need to upgrade every once in a while.

MATT: Yeah, once you have a couple computers and you know flat screen TVs and stereo systems running off at one circuit that it’s easy to trip the breakers or the fuses in my case so…

BRANDON: Did you upgrade the aluminum wiring to copper?

MATT: I was, even before they did aluminum way back in the day. It was like ten copper, very rare.

BRANDON: Oh my god, that was old.

MATT: Yeah. So the idea for this podcast as I was talking to my electrician that rewired my whole house, we’re talking about, you know, how he gets business and how I found him and he’s just starting to build a website and get online so I was trying to give him some advice about what he needs to do to cater to local clientele and get his business noticed. And as I was telling him this stuff I thought this would be a really good episode for us to tell everyone else because local is really kind of key to a lot of small businesses and probably a lot of our listeners.

BRANDON: Yeah, absolutely. I know there’s a huge number of local businesses or businesses in general that really just haven’t taken that step to get online and start catching more customers instead of spending their time trying to go out and get more customers with little results.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: My mom is a interior designer and she has a certain area that she works and tries to get business in her area so I’m trying to kind of show her some of these techniques that we’re going to be talking about today, you know, to help her get more business in her area. She lives in the Chicago area so if you need design services, look up Stephanie Kennington. But yeah she’s getting her website put together and we’re going through all this things, the local search and all the techniques we’re going to be talking about today.

MATT: Yes. I guess some of the first things we should talk about before we get into any of the techniques is just kind of what are the differences between being off line and then moving online, right? So in an offline world, in traditional kind of local businesses, I think word of mouth is probably the biggest driver of businesses for a lot of small businesses. And so what does that look like in the online world? Well, word of mouth still exists with social networks and things like that. We’re going to get into how do you get your customers to refer you to their friends and things like that. But I think the biggest way you see it is reviews and reputation on different sites.

BRANDON: Right. You know I know hotels relied huge on the reviews they get on some of these travel sites, and if you’re a restaurant, you’ve got to be looking at your reviews online. If you’re not managing your reviews, or at least, you know, keep in track of what people are saying on there, you’re missing the boat.

MATT: Yeah. I think both of those businesses are probably very used to reviews in the sense of you know restaurants have always had Zagat and Mobilestars and things like that, some of the hotels. But as you move online and there’s more and more local directories and local things like that. Now almost every business gets reviews. I mean I gave my electrician a great review for the work he did.

BRANDON: On Angie’s list.

MATT: On Angie’s list. Yeah, we’ll get to that.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: Even if you’re in an industry or business that hasn’t traditionally been affected by reviews, everything is going to reviews. That’s the way that people spread word of mouth on the internet. It’s not just I told someone, that’s that. I told someone I gave this quantifiable rating that’s not searchable and unratable.

BRANDON: Right and you know that’s how people research now…

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: … is they want to know reviews. Search any product and start typing in r-e-v in Google and reviews pops up because there’s that many people looking for reviews of any product out there, service or …

MATT: That brings up another good point that you know we’re going to keep hitting home on a couple of different of these podcasts is where you’re targeting your customers on the buying cycle. So customers generally go from not knowing anything or not caring or anything to be interested in a product or service to researching a product or service and then a purchasing a product or service.

BRANDON: Yeah, so if you’re going to be putting a billboard up on Sunset blvd, you might catch a lot of eyeballs. A large majority of those eyeballs are going to be customers that are either not interested or in a very early stage of research.

MATT: Yeah. You’re basically trying to move them from …

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: … not interested or not caring into the interested phase, right? And so we want to target people in all these areas in the research stage and getting them in the purchase stage.

BRANDON: And so by advertising or getting in front of them when they’re searching for your product, it’s a whole different ball game. You’re actually going to be driving your revenues up because you’re going to be able to convert your customers at a much higher rate. Because they already know they want to buy, they want to buy something, maybe they’re not sure what it is. So maybe your ad pops up or your local business pops up on the map and so it’s a whole different business model to be capturing customers by throwing out a larger net instead of going out and using your dollars and your effort to try to convert potential customers into customers. It’s just a much more effective way to go.

MATT: Okay, so with that in mind, so let’s get started on some of the different techniques and things that you need to be a local business advertising on the internet and pulling customers on the internet. So what’s the first thing you need?

BRANDON: You got to have a website. I mean if we can’t tell you one thing and you don’t learn one thing, learn this, get a website. If you’re a pizza place, have a website. If you’re a retail store, get a website. All these things we’re going to talk about tonight, it doesn’t work without having a website.

MATT: Okay, so once you have a website, there are certain things that you need to do to optimize your site for local search and people finding you in the local area and one of those is put your location on your website. So number one is your address. This serves two purposes: one, you know, the customers will see the address which is really important, and two, the search engines will see the address and the search engines will associate your business with that local area. So make sure you have your address in there. Another thing you can do that’s a little bit more sophisticated is Geotag your website. So you can do this with a Geo Sitemap and there’s this file called the KML file which is really coordinates and all these kind of more technical stuff we’ll go into in a more detailed how-to video. But look into getting a KML file and a Geo Sitemap for your business.

BRANDON: And I think it’s important if you have a location that if anybody visits your site, you give them easy directions or put a map on your site and there’s little snippets of codes or even if you just pasted a copy and paste of a map from Google maps or Mapquest but there’s also directions snippet of code you can get where the customer can put their address in and it gives them directions how to get to your location basically through a route.

MATT: Yes, especially if customers are coming to your store then make it as easy as it is to find out where you are and how to get there.

BRANDON: Right. So those are the basics. You got your website. You want to at least have your address and content on there that the search engines can find.

MATT: Now if you’re a service business, you know, you might have something slightly different, right, you know. My electrician for instance, he doesn’t want everyone coming to his home or his office or wherever the address is that he has listed. He has a service area that he wants to advertise or so if you have a bunch of different cities that you work in or towns or areas and regions of a big city, make sure all those are listed on your website so Google can index you with that. So when someone searches for electrician in Sta. Monica versus electrician in LA, they’re going to find you.

BRANDON: That’s right. And that kind of leads into wanting to get your business in the local search as well. Things like Google maps, Bing maps, Yahoo, you’re going to want to get in there and get your business listed in there even if it’s just your home office or…

MATT: Yeah. It’s really easy to do and you’ll notice now if you search for like attorney Los Angeles, the first lock of like half the screen is all listings from Google local or Bing local or Yahoo local, with maps and listings all over the place. So, you know, that’s a free way to get really high up on the listings and you know not a lot of businesses are doing it now so you kind of have a jump start if you get in there right now.

BRANDON: And it’s free I mean there’s no reason why you wouldn’t do it. It puts you on the map, literally.

MATT: And it’s also verified so it’s legitimate so you’re not going to get a whole lot of spam in there. Google actually send you a postcard to verify your address or verify your phone number and then again with the reviews we talked about before, there’s a bunch of reviews that get added into that so people will find your business first of and see if you’re a trusted and reputable business with the reviews.

BRANDON: You know I don’t have a local business but when I was looking through how to put your business on local search, I was surprised to see that you can actually get statistics on how many people looked at your business when it was on the map, you know, basically impressions and how many people actually clicked on it and so you can just by putting your business on the map, you can start to generate some feedback on how it’s being used and now that can be helpful.

MATT: Yeah, I think something else that most people don’t realize is that beyond just the local search stuff, the listings that you actually see both in your paid advertising listing inside of Google and the natural are different depending on where you search on different parts of the country. So Google is already optimizing results based on your location.

BRANDON: So that might use what, the IP address of the person searching Google.

MATT: Right so, you know, they’ll see I’m in LA and if I just search for lawyer, I might get more LA lawyer kind of stuff prioritized for me.

BRANDON: They’ll also use if somebody is searching on google.fr which is the French version of Google, they’ll know that the person might want to find something first in France versus the US or you know even if they are in France and they don’t use the google.fr, they just use google.com, just having their IP address in France would bring up French directories and things of that sort.

MATT: Right. So getting your site listed in search engine listing so Bing, Yahoo, Google, AOL, they all have local listings that are really easy to get into. The next step is getting into the local directory. So people don’t just go to the search engines, they’ll go to things like city search in Yahoo when they’re looking for things around them, especially restaurants and hotels and clubs. So if you are in any one of those, you have to be in Yahoo city search. But also for services businesses and things like that so …

BRANDON: Yeah. Urbanspoon is a great one. I use Urbanspoon.

MATT: Yes. All those iPhone users, yeah.

BRANDON: Yeah. City’s Best, yeah, so those are all great to be in. If you’re in as a club or a restaurant, you’re missing the boat there too so you got to be there.

MATT: And again there’s lots of reviews in there so make sure you’re managing your reviews and getting your satisfied customer to go post reviews in those things. It’s critical, critical.

BRANDON: So those are all free ways to get your business put on the map, so to speak and literally. Just a few more free ways to get there, there’s the Better Business Bureau – the BBB, Chamber of Commerce, Professional Associations you know like the bar, the realtor associations.

MATT: And a lot of those will let you put a business listing and have a link back to your site. And so that’s only just getting customers that are going to those first to look for things, but also that’s building inbound links for your search engine optimization and building inbound links with location specific relevance. So that’s just going to add to your search engine optimization and get you higher and higher rank for those local searches.

BRANDON: So to take it to the next level, you could actually pay to get some local advertising. Adwords, as we’ve talked about in previous podcast, is fantastic at getting the word out about your business but do you know that you could actually run ads on Adwords specific to a geographical location. You don’t have to just say it’s good for the entire internet, it could be good for just Southern California or only Lower Manhattan. So you can really target your ads on Adwords with local geographic. You can even put a point on a map and say I want 12 mile radius from this point. You can say I want certain regions. You can tell them you only want to run it where there’s English speakers and so that might include some European countries that speak predominantly English. There’s all sorts of ways you can build to your ad targeting.

MATT: Another thing you can do is you know just use locations in your keywords. You know, we talked about putting locations as text inside your website so you could optimize an SEO for different service that you might have. But if you’re an electrician, people are going to look for electrician Los Angeles like electrician my specific neighborhood, right? That might be Sta. Monica or West Hollywood or whatever, right? They’re going to look in their specific area for that. So if you’re targeting those keywords with the locations in the keywords then that’s another way to get that in there as well.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: Bing and Yahoo have similar sort of things so you can Geotarget with those as well so not just Adwords. Make sure that you know your entire search marketing campaigns across all the different search engines are Geotargeting properly. But another one is Facebook, right? So you did some Facebook stuff, you want to talk about that?

BRANDON: Yeah. I think Facebook is great because not only do you have the geographical location of the customers you’re trying to target but you have a lot of demographic information too you know because when you fill out a profile on Facebook, you give them your sex, you give them your age, you give them your interests, you give them your movies you like, you give them the books you’ve read, all of these comes into consideration when you want to advertise to certain people and you know it’s amazing how we all give that information up and we have little knowledge as to how it’s being used.

But at least it’s not being used against us. I don’t mind it because I’m getting ads targeted to me that are specific to my interests and that’s how Facebook actually is building an empire. They’re doing a great job of running an ad program that is so micro targeted to an exact customer profile for certain businesses. I didn’t really find that much success with it because my particular product, it was such a niche that I didn’t necessarily have a demographic I was going for. It’s not like I was selling a handbag or shoes and I wanted to target females over the age of 45.

People who owned dogs are across the board so it wasn’t as helpful or effective for me. But for certain businesses that you can target a customer both geographically and with demographics, it is fantastic.

MATT: Yeah. I mean local search advertising is just exploding right now. You know so get in it. Make sure that you’re targeting your ads to the locations that you’re in, if you are location specific business. Another area search that really kind of ties into local is Mobile search. So all those people with iPhones and Blackberrys and all their internet enabled phones, they often use Google and Yahoo and Bing while they’re on the go and you know you better believe they’re looking for local things while they’re on the go. They’re looking for restaurant. They’re looking for a store while they’re out running errands. So advertising on Mobile Search is probably a really good thing for these local businesses, don’t you think?

BRANDON: Yeah. You know it’s a growing area, it’s always been growing. I don’t know how many people are actually searching or looking at ads or so to speak on their mobile or cell phone but it’s a good platform.

MATT: Yeah, I mean, on my iPhone I’ve started using like the Augmented Reality things like Yelp amd suff, you know. If you have an iPhone and you haven’t tried out any of the Augmented Reality apps, I mean, you got to see it. You basically point your phone in the direction it shows you all the restaurants that are over in that area kind of tag while you’re looking at what’s in front of you. It’s amazing.

BRANDON: Yeah, you showed me that at one time and I was just blown away. How you can see through your camera, basically you’re looking through your phone at what’s on the other side of the phone through the camera and yet you can see that there’s a McDonalds down the road because it’s floating in space on your camera phone.

MATT: And it tells you how many people liked it and what its review is.

BRANDON: Yeah. It was the coolest thing.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: I mean that’s kind of a neat technology tool trick but it’s definitely of the future so get on it while it’s young.

MATT: And it’s kind of corky and gadgety now like kind of new and interesting but I mean this is going to get better and better. I’m sure that cars are going to have this pretty soon. So get in listing and Yelp and all the things that do this.

BRANDON: Yeah, I know that there’s another app that’s similar to that. When I went to Paris you could get on the subway and turn this application on your iPhone on and basically point it to the front of the subway while you’re on the ground and you can see all the businesses flying by you as you’re moving in the subway like, “Oh there goes you know McDonalds. Oh, there goes the Subway. Oh there’s a Starbucks.” And you’re underneath them. You’re in the ground underneath them and it was the coolest thing.

MATT: Wow. So that brings up another thing is advertising on all the different maps applications. So we talked about getting listed in Google local and Bing local and all those which will have your business show up on the maps or where you can get more prominently shown in the maps by advertising in these different maps.

BRANDON: And how do you do that?

MATT: So with Google it’s basically pretty similar to how you get listed in the typical free area. You just go to local.google.com and then there’ll be two links, on the one that says “add your business listing” or “advertise as local”.

BRANDON: So when somebody searches for pizza place, it will pop up as an ad above it?

MATT: Right. So you’ll be you know listed higher or even shown with the different icon in the map.

BRANDON: And the top results were there typically paid advertisements, right?

MATT: Right. And even when certain like the actual Google maps application or the Bing maps application.

BRANDON: I could see that being really powerful.

MATT: Yeah. I mean if you’re looking the map of hundred dots on there and you’re this one different color dot or you know square or something that makes you stand out, people are going to look at that and click on that one above all the other dots.

BRANDON: You know if you think about just the effectiveness of that you know somebody is searching exactly for your type of business, and they’re on a map that’s in your area, if there’s only let’s say a handful of your businesses in your area, let’s say you’re a printing company, right, and you provide printing services to businesses and somebody is searching for printing services and they’re looking on the map and there’s only five of them on the map, and you’re the only one that decided to pay to be on there. And you’re paying a whopping 40 cents or something to be on there, and you’re going to get the business because the other four guys haven’t figured this out. I mean talk about paying for itself and you’re only going to be really paying for it when they click on you. So even if they saw you and they decided not to click on you, you won’t pay a thing, I mean, that’s really effective.

MATT: Yeah I mean and this goes back to the buying cycle thing we’re talking about at the beginning of the episode is if someone’s looking for your business in your area, they’re pretty late in the buying cycle, right? They’re not just casually interested in something and when they’re looking to do business with some company and so this is where you want to capture them. This is where you want to get your site with your phone number and you want to get them as a lead and pull them into your business.

BRANDON: Yeah. It’s a huge mindset change from the traditional advertisement.

MATT: Speaking of traditional advertisements, occasionally I still you know get this giant book of dead tree on my front porch.

BRANDON: I know. It’s such a shame. I just throw that thing away but—and I feel so guilty for it every time but it’s useless to me.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: The Yellow Pages.

MATT: Yellow pages, Super pages, Verizon, whatever they are, I mean…

BRANDON: Yeah, they call them Verizon pages now or whoever they are.

MATT: If you’re under 40, 50, I don’t know who still uses these things.

BRANDON: I know. Can you opt out of getting those now? I mean it seems like such a waste of trees.

MATT: Yeah. I wish I could. I don’t know. But they do have online sites so I mean it’s tremendously expensive to get into Yellow pages but they do have online sites and so you do get some local listings from there that people search on the Yellow Pages website or the Super Pages website or whatever pages you have around you. So I mean it is possible still to get business through it. I just think it’s not as cost effective.

BRANDON: The term Yellow pages is still very powerful trademark and people still search it millions of times a day. They go to this yellowpages.com and so you know don’t forget that.

MATT: We’re talking about demographics targeting before so maybe if you’re targeting old people…

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: ….that still use the Yellow pages, that might be a great place for you to advertise then.

BRANDON: You were saying that your electrician says that he advertises in Yellow pages and what kind of customers does he get?

MATT: Only old people call him.

BRANDON: Only old people call. That should tell you something.

MATT: Yeah, so but where he gets most of his business now is kind of the next thing we’re going to talk about is the local Craigslist. He advertises in losangeles.craiglists.org and for services and local services, contractors for your house and things like that, that’s a very, very popular and very competitive advertising space, and that’s you know free advertising.

BRANDON: You know the way you can use Craigslist is I think it can be done well and it can be done not so well and really the trick is trying to get your ad or your listing to come up to the top and the only way to do that since they run their ads sequentially is to continually repost your ad again and again. So if you can do that at least once a day, maybe multiple times a day, you’re going to be at the top of the list when anybody searches in Craigslist. Now that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be coming up in a very particular or narrow search if somebody does search for your exact business, you’ll pop up even if you didn’t post for a couple of days.

But because you have to list your listing very often you got to get a VA doing it for you because if you go to Odesk and you find a virtual assistant out there, you’ll notice that about half of them have in their resume that they do Craigslist listings or they call it CL listings just for short and when you see that you’ll know what it means. Because you need to do it so often that they’ll be people willing to run your ad for you and retype, basically cut and copy, upload the pictures again, hit submit, cut and copy, upload the pictures again, hit submit, maybe once a day or twice a day.

MATT: I think he did it like 3 or 4 times a day.

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean, that’s time intensive and you need somebody that has the time and you’re not going to you know pay a lot of money for.

MATT: Yes, especially if you’re kind of like the skilled professional where you have to go off and do the work like an electrician or whatever, you’re not going to take time out from wiring up this box to go and post on Craigslist for your next project once you finish the one that you’re working on.

BRANDON: Right. Now a lot of people think that you know services are the only thing you can find in Craigslist. Clearly you can find anything but products or goods so you know a lot of people think that you’re going on Craigslist to buy let’s say an old refrigerator from somebody else in your city. What you might be surprised to find out is that there’s a lot of appliance companies that sell refrigerators that are placing ads on Craigslist.

MATT: Yeah. I see a lot of furniture companies in my area.

BRANDON: Yeah. And so they actually have somebody either sitting in their office or like a virtual assistant doing these postings every day. When I was remodeling my kitchen a couple of years ago, I was looking for some really nice refrigerator that I thought maybe I could get for a good price if it was slightly used or you know somebody just bought one or bought two you know.

There’s a lot of people that have extra refrigerators for some reason. In fact, I have a number of them that I wanted to get rid of also but the interesting part was when I got on the Craigslist, I thought I found the perfect refrigerator so I called up the person and I went to go visit him and it wasn’t a house. It was a business. And you know I was surprised to see that but at the same time he was offering me something what I wanted. You know he got me to come to his business basically and I was okay with that as a customer. I got there and I’m thinking, “Wow, at least now I get a warranty.” So that’s good.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: So you know there’s plenty of opportunity there on Craigslist for existing local businesses.

MATT: A similar site is Angie’s List which is more of a kind of local services so gardeners, electricians and plumbers and all kinds of things like that, I think they have doctors now. But that’s really built more around not so much a classified but a list with a bunch of reviews and really building on their reputation stuff we’re talking about earlier.

So you can see kind of all the reviews of the previous customers, what service they had done, kind of the prices, what they thought of the service that was provided. So that’s a really good way to look up local businesses and so you want to make sure that as you are providing services or you have a satisfied customers, make sure that they’re going out and spreading the word, that they’re posting review on Angie’s List, that they’re putting reviews into all the local sites like Google local and things like that.

That’s just huge I mean if I come and I see four businesses and one of them has 20 great reviews and the other ones don’t have any reviews, guess which one I’m going to choose?

BRANDON: Right. It’s what, $5 for the user finding the business and it’s free for the service provider?

MATT: I’m not sure if it’s free or not but if it’s not free, it’s probably somewhere priced to the users

BRANDON: They’re doing a lot of advertising I’m noticing on you know on NPR.

MATT: Yeah, they’re always on there.

BRANDON: Yeah. I don’t know how they get on there because I thought they only allowed non-profits to be in there. Maybe Angie’s List is non-profit.

MATT: No, they have other for profits. So we talked about getting your website and optimizing your website for local users. We’ve talked about getting listed in the search directory for local search and registering with associations, targeting your advertising towards local users. One other thing you can do on your website to really target it towards local things is put local content on your website. So if you have a blog or a CMS system that’s probably allows you to add articles, put some articles about local neighborhood things or local events, things that are going to maybe attract people to you website that are searching for stuff about the local area. It’s just another way to get the search engine to recognize your site for being local and targeted towards local things.

So, you know, once you kind of have a customer, you want to keep them engaged and so that’s where communicating with your customers and using social networking to maintain that customer relationship comes in. You know in LA, the Taco Truck is just part of the culture. And so we see kind of some interesting ways that these businesses that are mobile are using some of the social network existing contact with their customers. You want to talk about that?

BRANDON: You know when you can offer a unique way of being engaged in your business, people are drawn to it. You mention the Taco Trucker that green barbecue truck that’s here in LA. You know what they do is they Twitter to their fans or their customers which intersection they’re going to be at today at lunch. So anybody who loves this Taco Truck follows them closely and they’re just excited around you know 11:30 to get the Twitter saying that they’re going to be on Fairfax and Melrose or whatever.

And so yeah, it develops a following and that’s just another way of getting your business message out there and getting customers to really grab hold of your service and become an avid fan. The other one I really like is you know my favorite Mexican restaurant down the street here offers the ability to basically text message your order. You know you can do that on your way in or you can do that you know from wherever and it’s there and ready to be picked up within 15 minutes and I like that. I mean it’s not real cutting edge. It’s a simple way of getting the order but just them offering that you can do something to save a little bit of time and in some sort of hi tech way.

MATT: I think the more advanced kind of side of that is in a Triple Way which is like one of my favorite little Burrito places, not really little I guess, they’re national chain now…

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: … but they have an iPhone app that you can put your order in the iPhone app and they will be there when you pick it up.

BRANDON: Pizza Hut does that too. You can get a Facebook page that you know you can have fans subscribed to or say that they’re fans of.

MATT: That’s a really good way to let your customers refer their friends to you. So you know if they can become a fan of your Facebook page that’s going to go onto their stream and their friends are going to see it that, hey they were a fan of this company and maybe I see that I got an electrical service and Brandon goes, “oh, I need to get this switcher place,” you know, “that sounds like a good electrician. I’ll use him.”

BRANDON: Right. Or you know Facebook is also good for you know listing events so if you were let’s say a restaurant or bar, you could say you know Tuesday night we’re having salsa night or something and you know all your fans would know that you’re having salsa night because they’re following you on Facebook.

MATT: Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of coffee shops that do that with the kind of speaking engagements or you know local musicians that might be coming in.

BRANDON: Yeah, it’s just another way of engaging with your customers and it’s a good way to get the word out for anything that kind of comes up like say that you’re throwing or something like that.

MATT: Okay, well, that’s definitely good ways to keep your customers engage and link them into your social network or your business’ social network. So I guess one thing that we haven’t talked about yet is just generating raw leads so this is kind of low on the quality scale of getting tem late on the buying cycle. This year getting them very early in the buying cycle but maybe they’re interested or they’re somehow qualified or they’ve some contacts around them that makes them more qualified. What are good sources to get local leads?

BRANDON: Well, you know, you can buy lists of businesses or consumers that are in your area and you know this isn’t also new. I think businesses have been doing this for many, many years now. But what is new is the amount of leads you can get for very little because of the digital nature of it, there’s the ability to really hone in on what the leads list is going to be. It’s going to be exactly what you want. You only have to buy leads specifically that you’re looking for the type of customer, the customer profile. Little bit like I talked about in Facebook where they know exactly who you are. They’re targeting demographics and location and geographic location.

MATT: Yes, a good example of this is all the stuff that surf from public info so once you move into a new house, anyone that’s bought a new house then knows that you get tons of mail about remodeling your house and you know keep on this little home depot and the local Chinese restaurant’s menu, all these things saying you know, “Welcome to the neighborhood, you know, here’s the local businesses. Get involved and come to our business and establish a relationship because we’re your local business of choice.”

BRANDON: Right and so what used to take a lot of work to go and find these stuff you know, you’d have to go to public records and find out who moved in and when they moved in and all these, this is all digital now. It’s all become aggregated into single list providers. Infousa.com is a good one. I’ve used them in the past to find businesses that are particularly what I was looking for for that particular promotion. Goleads.com is also good and you know it’s just an easy way to generate leads, again not the most effective way because you’re getting people on their early curve of the buying cycle but it is going to generate lots and lots of people to contact.

MATT: Alright. Those are all great tips.

BRANDON: Yeah. We’ve covered a lot of things. If you’re a local business and you’re having to find new ways to get customers to get that competitive advantage over your competitors near you, I’d have to say, if you used any of these tips or tricks, you are going to definitely be ahead of the competition because it’s surprisingly sad how many businesses are still not using these. They’re totally still offline.

MATT: And pretty soon I mean in a couple of years or sooner, it’s not going to be a competitive advantage to do it, it’s going to be a competitive disadvantage if you’re not doing it. So get a jump now.

BRANDON: Yeah and we’re almost there. I think it’s almost to the point where that is the case. If you’re not doing this, you’re just going to go out of business basically and if you’re not on your way out, you’re going to be out of business in five years. It’s gotten to that point where you have to be text savvy and know how to use the internet and all these methods to get customers coming to you instead of spending all your time driving to a customer or getting customers or putting billboards up and trying to get them to come to you, it just doesn’t work that way anymore.

People are going to the internet. I mean you have to ask yourself if you’re going to search for a business or if you’re going to search for a product, where are you going to go? You’re going to go to the internet. It’s just the way it is these days. So if you can take advantage of that shift in the consumer’s habits, you’re going to be all that much better.

MATT: Yeah and if you have customers that are really excited about your product, make sure that they’re sharing their excitement on the internet. I’ve talked about the electrician I had, I’ve been really excited about the products he serve. He was Connect to Electric and so if you’re in LA and you’re an electrician, you know, I’m a rating fan of his and I want to make sure that he gets all sorts of good business and so you want to get customers of yours that are that excited about your business and share on the internet and link to your site and tell their friends through their social networks about your business. That’s like the biggest thing you can do to get more business, right?

BRANDON: Right. You know I think that’s exactly true. So if we’ve missed anything or you think we could have expanded more on some particular topic there, let us know. You can catch us on our website automatemysmallbusiness.com. We’ve just kind of added some new things on the website so go check it out. I think you’ll be happy to see that.

MATT: Yeah, we have a newsletter that you can sign up for and when you sign up for the newsletter, you’ll get a list of all the websites and tools that we use in our business to automate stuff.

BRANDON: We’re about to release our video library here shortly that we a lot of how-to in depth videos to see how to go about doing this step by step. So if any of this seems kind of too out there for you or it just seems too hard to understand, watching the video step by step will make it really easy to help you out.

MATT: Absolutely and always you know follow us on Twitter. My handle is mattdot.

BRANDON: And mine is innovateforfun84. You can check us out there and if you want to post something up on the website, send us a text message or email and if you want to ask us a question that we can use on the next podcast, there’s a phone number we have on the home page that you can call and leave a voice mail.

MATT: Yeah, if you want to get your question played on the podcast, we have a new voice mail number that you can call. It’s 785-288-6672, easy way to remember is 785-automsb.

BRANDON: Yeah. you know we’re rolling this out, this is kind of new for us. We’re excited to offer all these ways to contact us and we kind of think that’s going to be fun if you can leave us a voice mail on our voice mail service. We’ll put you on our next podcast and we can answer questions that you might have.

MATT: Yeah. So thanks for listening. We appreciate it and we made it to 10 podcasts and we’re really excited about the support we’re getting and all the different people that are listening, so thank you, guys.

BRANDON: Alright. Until next time, we’ll talk to you later. Thanks. Bye.

You’ve been listening to Automate My Small Business. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To get a list of the links we’ve just talked about or download more episodes and How-To videos, go to automatemysmallbusiness.com. Thanks for being with us and catch us next time on Automate My Small Business Podcast.

Podcast music features, “Nothing’s Got Me” by Big Bad Sun, distributed by Magnatune and licensed under Creative Commons. The Automate My Small Business podcast is engineered by Vincent Furlong and transcribed by Flo Umali. And licensed under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivative Works license and may be freely distributed to share with friends, co-workers and strangers.

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