St. Louis Missouri (MO) Small Business Social Media Marketing

Most of us are probably not in a position to throw caution to the wind when it comes to our own marketing budget. Most of us want our marketing programs and strategies to work well the FIRST time we try them, and as we know, that’s always a gamble. Postcard mailings aren’t what they used to be. Direct mail doesn’t have the same impact. Seminar and workshops are expensive when food is served, and there’s never a guaranteed ROI on any of it.

Today there are other ways to market to your local community without spending tons of money. I will be the first to say that “in person networking” can never be replaced. The handshake and the ability to look someone in the eye is still just as important as ever. However, with a little web savvy, you can start those conversations a lot sooner, and educate a lot faster than ever before. Your reach has been enhanced by the power of the internet.

I’ve written about this before but the truth of the matter is that this method of marketing is not only the latest trend, but it is one that I expect will last. If you aren’t on this bandwagon yet, get on fast.

The important part of understanding today’s marketing techniques is that total transparency and relationship building with your target market is the key to success. Long gone are the days when we can hide behind our websites.

Transparency does not mean writing on Facebook, Twitter, or your blog about the latest fight you have with your spouse, or what the neighbor’s bad kids are up to. What it does mean is that you are willing to share enough about yourself and your value system to build a level of trust with your local community that is unmatched. The more “accessible” you are online, the more accessible your prospects will be and the more credibility you will gain. Talk about yourself as the owner, add a picture, talk about your personal experiences that lead you to this business, or to want to work with seniors. Be real. Be honest. Depending on who is reading this I would suggest that most seniors have lived longer than you. They have made more important decisions about their lives than you have, and most can spot dishonesty or half-truths a mile away. Transparency means earning the trust of a skeptical customer.

Social media marketing is free, and it works if done correctly. Plain and simple.

More baby-boomers and seniors are on the internet than ever before. Suddenly there are tons of articles out there talking about Grandpa on Facebook and MySpace. You need to be where your target market hangs out!

I’m about to give away my secret formula that will transform your business into a marketing machine. Yes, it takes a little time, sort of like a weekend painting project, but once it’s done, the time you spend updating your information takes just a couple of hours a week. (But you will be addicted to it, so I know you will spend more time than just 2 hours a week!)

Equipment

The equipment needed for a project like this is minimal- you might want to invest in a good headset with a microphone for your computer so that you can record audio or video if you like. Amazon carries a wide variety of headsets at a reasonable price.

Step 1: (The longest step in the process)

Setting up your online accounts may take a bit of time, but well worth the investment.

Here are the initial accounts I recommend for the fastest and most sustainable results:

* Facebook Personal Account (using your own name, your picture, etc, no logos). Connections on Facebook personal are “friends”.

* Facebook Business Page (this is where you use your logo and other business related items. Connections on your Facebook business page are “fans”.

* Your Blog. Use Wordpress to create a fast and easy blog that lets you get the message out about your area of expertise. Be sure to use their tutorials to learn how to use categories and tags to your advantage. Remember that when you post on your blog use titles that identify your location and your product or service. For instance, instead of a title like “April Events”, use “April Reverse Mortgage Seminars in Miami, FL”. See the difference? The search engines will play their hand in your favor with the second title.

* Set up your Twitter account. I know, you aren’t really sure WHY you need twitter, but believe me some amazing deals go down every day because of good Twitter Posts (called tweets). Once you have your account set up, go to twellow and type in a search for people in your area. Start connecting with your local community by “Following” people in your town. They will follow you back.

* LinkedIn is next. This is an important website for professionals because unlike Facebook, Twitter, and other places, LinkedIn is for the true business to business networking. Many connections that you make on LinkedIn will turn into in-person meetings down the road. Use it to your advantage. Be sure you use the “Wordpress” feature to add your blog posts directly to your LinkedIn profile instantly. (Automation at it’s finest!)

* Use FriendFeed to link everything together. FriendFeed ties all of your accounts together. Once you connect your accounts to FriendFeed, you will notice that when you make a blog post, it automatically shows up on Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo, and many other sites. This is another great lesson in automation. Once this step is completed your BLOG becomes the center HUB for all of your information that you want to share.

* Squidoo is important because it serves as another “web page” about you and your business. You can link Twitter, Facebook, and your blog to your Squidoo page for extra backlinking and content.

* Scribd is an odd little site that pulls a lot of punch. Turn all of your print marketing material into online material that works in your favor. Anything you have in your marketing arsenal that can be scanned or uploaded to Scribd is worth taking the time to load. When you place a document on Scribd be sure to title it the same way you would a blog post- make sure your business (plumber, elder care, home care, etc) and your location (St. Louis, MO) is in the headline or title area.

* MerchantCircle- one of my current favorites! This group has done a really good job of creating a system that gets you noticed by the search engines FAST. Open a free account. They try to upsell you at every turn, but I dare say you can do just as well with a free account. The key to MerchantCircle is to make sure the name of your company portion is filled in with your line of business and your location. So instead of “Tom’s Financial Services and Loans”, a better business listing would be simply, “Reverse Mortgages, Findlay OH”. Another tip on MerchantCircle is to make sure that you put your blog posts on from your main blog right on to your MerchantCircle blog. The more content you have the faster you move up website page ranks.

* Ideamarketers is a website where you can post articles about your niche. There is no waiting time for approval. Keep the same rules in mind- article titles should reference your location and your line of business.

* GoArticles is a similar story. Post your articles, make sure they are over 500 words. Check for spelling errors etc.

* Finally, type in the words that you would use to search for a Reverse Mortgage provider or plumber in your area on Google. Who comes up first? What websites are showing on the first page and can you get listed on those? If so, go for it.

Step 2: This step is super important.

I’ve written about this before. If your website is homegrown, old, outdated, and has no “call to action”, then you will never have good lead conversion results. Spend the money or the time to update your website.

* What is a “call to action”? A call to action means giving the viewer of your webpage one simple task that he or she

Valerie’s motto and favorite saying is: “Impact is not created by big budgets, impact is created by innovative marketing ideas!” Valerie VanBooven is President and CEO of LTC Expert Publications LLC., a company devoted to empowering small business entrepreneurs and senior service providers with the tools to enjoy thriving businesses and freedom-based lifestyles.

Great information for all business owners- as our population ages, they also learn more about online information!

Original Article Posted Here: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/six-million-more-seniors-using-the-web-than-five-years-ago/

Six Million More Seniors Using the Web than Five Years Ago
December 10, 2009

While people 65 and older still make up less than 10 percent of the active Internet universe, their numbers are on the rise. In the last five years, the number of seniors actively using the Internet has increased by more than 55 percent, from 11.3 million active users in November 2004 to 17.5 million in November 2009. Among people 65+, the growth of women in the last five years has outpaced the growth of men by 6 percentage points.

Not only are more people 65 and older heading online, but they are also spending more time on the Web. Time spent on the Internet by seniors increased 11 percent in the last five years, from approximately 52 hours per month in November 2004 to just over 58 hours in 2009.

“The over 65 crowd represents about 13% of the total population and with this increase in online usage, they are beginning to catch up with their offline numbers,” notes Chuck Schilling, research director, agency & media, Nielsen’s online division. “Looking at what they’re doing online, it makes sense they’re engaged in many of the same activities that dominate other age segments – e-mail, sharing photos, social networking, checking out the latest news and weather – and it’s worth noting that a good percentage of them are spending time with age-appropriate pursuits such as leisure travel, personal health care and financial concerns.”

How do they Keep Busy on the Web?
Online visitors 65 and older partake in a variety of activities, from e-mail to bill paying. With 88.6 percent of seniors, checking personal e-mail was the No. 1 online activity performed in the last 30 days. Viewing or printing online maps and checking the weather online were the second and third most popular online activities, with 68.6 and 60.1 percent, respectively.
Top 10 Online Activities Performed in the Last 30 Days by People 65+ (U.S.)
RANK     Profile Point: Internet Activities in Last 30 Days     Audience Composition Percent
1     Personal E-mail     88.6
2     Viewed or Printed Maps Online     68.6
3     Checked Weather Online     60.1
4     Paid/Viewed Bills Online     51.2
5     View/Posted Photos Online     50.1
6     Read General/Political News     49.2
7     Checked Personal Health Care Info     47.3
8     Planned Leisure Travel Trip Online     39
9     Searched Recipes/Meal Planning Suggestions     38.4
10     Read Business/Finance News     37.8
Source: The Nielsen Company, Nielsen @Plan Fall 2009 Release, Adults 18+

The No. 1 online destination for people over 65 in November 2009 was Google Search, with 10.3 million unique visitors. Windows Media Player and Facebook were No. 2 and No. 3, with 8.2 million and 7.9 million visitors, respectively. Interestingly, Facebook, which came in at No. 3, ranked No. 45 just a year ago among sites visited by senior citizens.

Overall, the number of unique visitors who are 65 or older on social networking and blog sites has increased 53 percent in the last two years alone. 8.2% of all social network and blog visitors are over 65, just 0.1 percentage points less than the number of teenagers who frequent these sites.

Top 10 Online Destinations Visited by People 65+ in November 2009 (U.S., Home and Work)
RANK     Site     Unique Audience (000)     Unique Audience Composition (%)
1     Google Search     10,253     7.7
2     Windows Media Player     8,241     10.9
3     Facebook     7,946     7.2
4     YouTube     7,668     8.4
5     Amazon     5,679     9.3
6     Yahoo! Mail     5,638     7.8
7     Yahoo! Search     5,583     8.7
8     Yahoo! Homepage     5,383     6.8
9     Bing Web     4,510     10.1
10     Google Maps     4,397     8.4
Source: The Nielsen Company

Originally written by Michelle MacPhearson on her blog at: http://www.michellemacphearson.com/internet-marketing-and-social-media-2010-predictions/

As 2009 winds to a close, we look to 2010 with antici…….pation and enthusiasm. It’s a whole new year with a clean slate. And with the new year comes a reflection on where we’ve been and where we’re going. The web has changed drastically and that changes the way we, as internet marketers, do business.

2009 Predictions: 4 1/2 out of 5 Predictions

Before rolling into 2010 predictions, let’s establish a track record – how well did I do with my 2009 predictions? Let’s see!

1. 2009 Prediction: With the “down” economy, opportunities in “make money online” will be even bigger. TRUE! The business of teaching others how to do internet marketing has grown exponentially. Ed Dale saw the biggest number of 30 Day Challenge participants ever in August while my own Crowd Mountain launched and grew exponentially in February. Big product launches, once again, broke sales records. But even folks new to the game were able to break out and do big business. There’s still more room than ever in this market.
2. 2009 Prediction: Data portability becomes more a norm rather than an exception. TRUE! You’ll be hard pressed to find a new social service these days and not have it integrate with Facebook, Twitter, and/or Gmail to port your current contacts into your new profile.
3. 2009 Prediction: Using video as part of the sales process will become a necessity. TRUE! I’ve continued to run tests, and a salespage with video has outperformed a salespage without video every time. Simply put, if you’re not using video, you’re leaving money on the table.
4. 2009 Prediction: People will bring more focus to their social media marketing efforts. FALSE! I wish this were true, and I could probably call it true without any arguments from readers, but it’s just not. I still get messages nearly every day with people overwhelmed by the vast array of social media sites, and while I think many folks “get it” there are still many who don’t. So I’ll shout it from the rooftops one more time: Pick 2-3 social media sites that are active in your niche and focus on them rather than spreading yourself too thin across every available network!
5. 2009 Prediction: As a product owner or a niche leader you’ll be expected to be available, responding and engaging with your “tribe” more often than not. TRUE! People want to know you’re available to them more than ever, and those that are tend to rise to the top.

Drumroll please…. Here are my 2010 internet marketing and social media predictions:

Location, Location, Location

Many folks are claiming location based services, like BriteKite and FourSquare will be the breakout hits of 2010. I disagree. Location WILL become increasingly important in 2010, but for mass adoption, these services will have to be rolled into existing, already adopted platforms, like Facebook and Twitter.

My mom lives in Oakland and works in San Francisco (two areas where loacation based services have really great data from their users). Would she EVER use something like FourSquare? No. Would she use it if it was integrated into Facebook? You betcha.

I live in a little mountain town of 900 people. I can’t really even use these location based services – my town is literally not on the map! Would I be interested in my local Facebook friends (most of the locals I know are on Facebook exclusively) location info? Absolutely! Can I get it anywhere else? Nope.

The digerati and web wunderkinds aside, most folks don’t have the time and interest in creating and maintaining another social profile.

After recording this prediction on IMTW last night, rumors started flying that Google was in talks to buy Yelp, a local business reviews site. It’s speculated that Yelp data could be integrated with Google Maps.

And this is where I predict successful location based services will go in 2010: merged into already existing products that have been adopted by the masses.

The Death of Software Downloads

We’ve already seen it with services like Google Docs and Gmail – why keep files or email on our harddrives when we can keep them on the web and access them anywhere?

I made the switch in 2009 to storing as much of my data as possible online, so it doesn’t matter where I am or which computer I’m on, I have access to everything I need.

It makes sense from a user standpoint in terms of being able to work with the software wherever you are. But it also makes sense from a business standpoint:

• Updates are server-side and seamless for the user, no re-downloading a re-installing (which inevitably leads to customer support issues)
• Web based applications work on Mac or PC – you’re not leaving a giant segment of your market behind
• It’s easier to find web developers
• Less compatibility problems with different operating systems and conflicts with already installed programs which leads to less customer support issues
• Allows for a recurring access charge

We’ve seen some movement in this direction in the internet marketing space in 2009, and in 2010 web-based software (aka “cloud computing”) will become the norm.

Link Popularity Gets Social

While simply having links on social media properties was once enough to boost your search engine ranking, in 2010 the popularity of those links will become a bigger ranking factor.

Consider this scenario:

Two blog posts on the same topic. One is retweeted a gazillion times, is linked all over Facebook and has a ton of comments. One gets little traction in the social media space. Which one do you think *should* rank higher in the SERP’s? The one that people shared the most!

The easiest way to achieve this is…. producing great content that people will want to share. You can also encourage people to share your content by using the tips in The Three Pillars of Social Media Marketing.

Social Media Marketing Matures

In 2010 social media marketing will mature in a variety of ways.

Firstly, we’ll move away from conversations about why one should be using social media in your marketing towards *how* to use social media in your marketing. It will be assumed that a social media presence is necessary, and we’ll see more instruction on exactly what to do.

We’ll also see more focus in how businesses use social media. Rather than using SM “because it’s the thing to do” we will more strategic at moving folks from social media into our sales funnels. Social media marketing will be less about “joining the conversation” and more about specifically growing your business (the “conversation” is still important, but our joining of it will be more purposeful).

Finally, our collective psyche’s will move away from a “bigger is better” mentality. Rather than valuing social media by the number of followers or fans, we’ll look more at those followers’ and fans’ engagement. 100,00 YouTube views or Twitter fans does not sell products if those folks are not engaged.

Wordpress As a True CMS

We love Wordpress, and it’ll just get bigger and better in 2010. With products like Affiliate Theme and Squeeze theme, and more flexibility with offerings like the Thesis Theme (used on this blog), Wordpress is moving more towards a true CMS that can be used for anything, without custom coding.

Building a membership site or a review/rating site or even a salespage exclusively with Wordpress has picked up steam in 2009 and will be even simpler in 2010 as developers create more plugins and themes to do so.

Products in this space will grow and our adoption of them will follow.

Additional 2010 Predictions

As is our tradition, Lynn Terry, Paul Colligan, Ed Dale and I recorded our 2010 predictions show last night for Internet Marketing This Week (that podcast will be out shortly). Watch the @IMTW Twitter feed or subscribe on iTunes to listen.

http://www.michellemacphearson.com/internet-marketing-and-social-media-2010-predictions/

Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media are catching up to traditional websites as a marketing mechanism for small businesses. That’s the takeaway from a just released survey of 2,000 small businesses by research firm Internet2Go. That could be bad for Google (GOOG), which has a virtual monopoly on small-business online advertising, and for Adobe (ADBE), which has a real monopoly on software tools used to build websites.

According to the survey, which ran in mid-September 2009, 45 percent of small-business owners have Twitter or Facebook accounts. That’s astonishing considering that today only 44 percent of all small businesses have websites, according to some surveys. Remember, the Internet is over a decade old, but social media is really only two to three years old, if that.”We’ve known anecdotally that small businesses are using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, but these numbers are surprising,” says Greg Sterling, an Internet2Go senior analyst.
What’s going on here? First, the survey covered small companies that are active online, so they’re more likely to be early adopters. But I believe something deeper is happening. Plainly put, social media offers most of the benefits of a website with few of the headaches.

Business owners can easily float offers on Twitter that are quickly searchable. They can also easily interact with their customers and spot trends that could be useful in marketing. Facebook’s small-business users can build a fan page that provides most of what they get with a standard brochure website, but at a tiny fraction of the typical $500 cost. Contrast that to building a website. You can either do a very cheap one that costs $50 to a few hundred — and looks like it. Or you can pay at least $2,000 to have a designer build one for you that’s really good and includes a minimal amount of functionality.

Then you need to deal with a content management system to update the site, hosting costs and other time-sinks. “biggest complaint” small businesses had regarding online marketing was that it was “too costly” (26 percent). In the survey, 80 percent of the companies reported having marketing budgets of less than $5,000. Of course, the difficulty small business has with traditional websites is no secret. Google, Local.com, MerchantCircle and numerous other companies offering online marketing services to small businesses provide simple online placeholders that contain key company information and can serve as landing pages for online ads.

That said, 90 percent of survey respondents also had their own websites. Also, respondents didn’t claim to be overly satisfied with social-media marketing mechanisms versus other types of online marketing.

And a competing survey by Citibank found the opposite result: that small businesses are largely uninterested in social media. (Of course, that was a telephone survey, and you know how Twitter and text users feel about actually picking up the phone.) Therefore, the jury is still out.

I personally think that verdict will come in shortly — and social media will be a big winner. In doing research into Facebook advertising, I tracked a small but growing number of small businesses that were skipping websites entirely and going exclusively with Facebook, Twitter or some combination of the two for online marketing. Others just put up blogs rather than websites and used that as their web presence.

In fact, Sterling himself is a case study. He became self-employed several years ago and started to build a website. He had problems finding a designer he liked at a price he was willing to pay, so he launched a generic WordPress blog instead. Now that blog has become a key part of his online presence, and Sterling has no interest in building a site that costs a lot upfront and requires serious care and feeding.

So what does this mean? For Google, which has long held a hammerlock on Internet advertising, this could mean far more competition for marketing dollars as social-media marketing grows in acceptance and begins to encroach on text-based search advertising and display-based contextual advertising.

Google beat Wall Street’s earnings estimates on Thursday and wowed analysts with 14 percent year-over-year growth in search-based advertising. But that growth is very low compared to several years ago and suggests a rapidly maturing market in Google’s search-ad stronghold.

For companies that make software tools to build websites, such as Adobe, the message could be even more dire. The death of the pretty-but-useless brochure website may be close at hand. That means less work for Web designers catering to small busineses and less demand for Adobe’s expensive site-building tools. But for small businesses, it creates a more level playing field and lower barriers to entry to online publicity and marketing.

Alex Salkever is Senior Writer at AOL Daily Finance covering technology and greentech. Follow him on twitter @alexsalkever, read his articles, or email him at alex@dailyfinance.com.