Now whatever type of advertising you do to catch the attention of new customers, there is without a doubt one technique that is simply the worst. That's advertising that practically never gets seen.
Computers became a significant productivity tool in the 1980's long before the "Internet" or "World Wide Web" manifested itself in the late 1990's. The internet started out with a flourish that gradually blew up as the dot com bubble. Now not everything was horrible about that particular experience. But one of the most common results for a large number of small businesses was a flock of websites that few or no one ever saw. (Besides maybe your mother and you when you took the time to look for it.)
I've often called many of these small business internet sites as electronic brochures as useful as a "billboard in a pasture that only the cows read." As of 2010, around fifty percent of all small businesses in the United States had web sites for their own businesses, and the other 50% steadfastly refused to take action. It's sad for me to say so, but in many aspects the guys who choose not to play the internet game may well have won on their bet.
Whether they paid lots of money to a pricey web designer, or got by on the cheap by employing the son or nephew the problem was the same. It was one thing to have a website and another one entirely to have one that was worth beans from an advertising perspective.
Now there were many things wrong about many of these internet websites that goes well beyond the purposes of this particular report. I detailed most of them in a guide I wrote several years ago called, "Why Most Small Business Web Sites Stink!" But the particular salient point for our conversation today is that these internet websites in general were not easy to find by customers trying to find a supplier to meet their particular needs. As such, they were mostly useless, from a purely marketing point of view.
Now if your prospective customer already knew your company name, or the domain name of your website, they could find you. They could probably check your hours, phone number or address, which was not all bad. But if they were looking to purchase a left handed pipe wrench that you actually sold, the odds were not so great. The net result is that most businesses did not draw in many new customers because of their web site. They had to drive traffic to their internet sites by other forms of advertising before they can potentially provide any real advantage.
I mention all of this because, Times Have Changed. Sadly, lots of local businesses having been once burned and/or disillusioned about the benefit of the internet are now slow to pick up on the new reality. The new reality is that small business people need to learn how to get on Google maps.
When people look up a service provider to meet their needs these days they do it on the web or on their cell phones. Google shows a map with up to seven local businesses they think can fill that need. If you want those customers you have to know how to get on Google maps to be seen when customers search.
The good news is that it's free of charge. The simplest way to learn
how to get on Google maps is to do a search on Google for just that term.
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