What General Motors Doesn’t Understand—Visibility Counts

Posted on May 24, 2012 by rholmes

By the number of flyers stuck to my front door, sticking out of my mailbox, and tucked under the wiper blade of my car... I think I’m safe in saying that my local restaurants, cleaning ladies, roofers, grocery stores, dry cleaners, window washers, painters, etc, etc, etc are desperate for ways to stay in front of potential customers.

There is a way to stay in front of potential customers online that likely costs less than paying people spam houses and cars in the neighborhood. Two well known companies give you the tools to put your ads in front of targeted audiences at very low prices: Facebook and Google.

Facebook - Targeted Advertising on the Cheap

Facebook allows you to choose the people you want to target very carefully. You can select gender, age, location, and even get into what they like and don’t like. If you know your target market’s demographics, using Facebook’s simple system, you simply focus in on those people, create a very simple ad that even has an image in it, and your ads begin appearing in the right-hand column of the targeted people’s Facebook pages.

Yes, you do have to pay for these ads, but like most online ads these days, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. And, part of the reason Facebook’s stock has slid nearly 20% in two days is because people know that the only 5 in 10,000 people click on those ads. That’s potentially 9,995 people seeing your ad without you paying a dime!

Bonus Info: People burn out on Facebook ads very quickly—they literally stop noticing them because they see the same ad dozens of times a day. To prevent ad burn out, rotate your ads. Facebook ads are easy to make, so make several and rotate them regularly.

Google’s Remarketing – Visibility for Pennies

Google has a great AdWords product that allows you to put a cookie on the browser of anyone who visits your site. This is referred to as putting these visitors into your remarketing audience. When these visitors go to another site that has advertising delivered by Google—there are over 1 million websites and hundreds of millions of pages that have ads delivered by the online advertising giant—Google can see they’re in your audience and will display your ads to them.

What could be better than staying in front of people who have been to your site—they are in some way interested in your products and services. The vast majority of people do not become a customer on their first visit—stay in front of them and encourage them to come back.

Like Facebook, Google gives you some great tools to make very powerful ads. And like Facebook, they only charge you if/when someone clicks on the ad. Maybe one of the reasons Google’s stock is doing better than Facebook’s is because on average ads on Google’s display advertising system are clicked on 40 out of every 10,000 views.

Bonus Info: Your ads only begin showing up after 500 people are in your audience, so get the code on your website ASAP to begin building that audience. Don’t let creating the perfect ad hold you back. Make a really simple ad to begin with—you can build the real ads later.

Visibility Still Matters

Lemonade Stand 300x199 What General Motors Doesn’t Understand—Visibility Counts

Any kid who moves her lemonade stand to the corner of two busy streets can tell the GM geniuses, you need to be visible to sell.

The high-paid marketers at GM don’t seem to understand that staying in front of potential customers is important. Last week they very publicly announced that they were going to stop advertising on Facebook because it wasn’t selling cars.

Internet marketers tend to focus on the aspects of online marketing that are quantifiable. It’s what they love about Internet marketing—everything can be measured. This measurability tends to blind Internet marketers to the fact that visibility and branding still have an important role to play, even it can’t be measured to tenths of percents.

Thanks to Todd Bates for sharing the sandwich board photo and Geoff Sowery for sharing the lemonade stand photo via the Creative Commons license.

BIO

Rod Holmes is a partner at Chicago Style SEO, a full service Internet marketing firm. You can read more of his thoughts at ChicagoStyleSEO.com/blog/ or on Twitter: @chicagostyleseo

Can we be friends?

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Terry Myers

Coming from the financial industry, something that we were always told was to keep personal and business interactions completely separate. That meant don't friend your co-workers on Facebook, don't friend your vendors on Facebook, and definitely do not friend the investors you were working for on Facebook. I understood the reasons - there needs to be separation between the two, right? Of course, when you're attending the conventions though, what do you end up talking about? Your personal life - your children, the sports you play, and any other activities you engage in, so while I understood the advice, I always felt there was a bit of a contradiction.

When I started at VPS.NET in June of last year, I carried over much of this philosophy - I made some comprises; the basic premise was I would friend the person, as long I had met them in person before. Even with that compromise, I was still extremely closed off compared to a lot of people. As I built relationships with clients from VPS.NET, I realized that maybe my closed off strategy really wasn't the best move; there's a vast difference between the tech. industry and the financial industry. The age gap is no longer there - at the technology conventions we attend, like DrupalCon, the average age is no older 25. All of our clients - they're actually like us. So, the other day when the friend request from a client came in, I took a step towards a change and accepted the request.

There were a lot of reasons for the change. Some business, and some person. One of the primary lines of thought was that if I'm doing something and then putting it on Facebook that I'd embarrassed about if a client saw it, it's probably something I shouldn't be doing in the first place. Secondly, in the line of business we're in, there's not a whole lot of human interaction with our customers. There's unfortunately no way to change that completely, but Facebook can help "humanize" things, and show that despite rumors, I'm not a virtualized robot given the power of life by VPS.NET. It'll not only show my interests outside of VPS.NET but also help me learn yours, and then create the opportunity to share tips, and other ideas. Just the other day thanks to Facebook, I found out that Ditlev is a master of eating with chop sticks, something I've always wanted to learn how to do. At the next convention, I'm going to force him to share his skills -- help me become a bit more cultured.

Before you go the same route I did though, there's certainly some things to consider:

1.) Take a look at your profile. Would your clients be comfortable using your services after seeing everything on it? This includes your posts, friends posts and any pictures you might have. Would you do business with yourself after seeing everything that is up there?
2.) Take advantage of the privacy settings - maybe you want to be friends with clients, but block off pictures and videos. That be easily done by setting up a group and restricting that groups access.
3.) If you still want to live the party boy life style, yet still connect with clients, maybe LinkedIn.com is a suitable compromise.

Ultimately, the decision is up to you - there's no set in stone rule about friending clients. Your decision though can impact your business - use it right, and you might reap the benefits. Use it wrong and an embarrassing picture pops up on a client's news feed, you might want to re-consider the use of social networking.

Social Media: How we use it, what we’ve learned, and how WE can do better!

Posted on May 14, 2010 by Terry Myers

One of my favorite sites, GigaOm, posted an article yesterday "4 Social Media Marketing Tips That Work." It prompted me to start thinking about how we use social media here at VPS.NET, and what benefits we see from it. There's certainly no question that our use of social media, especially Twitter, has helped our company grow. We've landed clients, we've learned a lot about our downfalls, and we've built some very strong relationships with clients and vendors.

Transparency
The first thing I've noticed about social media is it forces you to be transparent with your actions. Both your good side and your bad side are shown to the public; if you handle the bad right, it's overlooked. If you handle it wrong, it can ruin you. What can you do to avoid handling it wrong? Being human. Acknowledge the problem, explain how you're going to fix it, and then put that plan into place.

Being Human
When we use Twitter, our goal isn't to just send PR notifications; we want to be human. We want to engage the community, replying to fun tweets, retweeting stuff we find interesting, and interacting with our customers. It gives us the ability to truly know our client as a person, and it gives our clients the ability to know us as a person. It makes our relationship much more enjoyable and it removes the traditional vendor/client relationship, which is oh so boring.

Being Authentic
I mentioned earlier about having a plan and actually putting it into place. There's nothing that I, as a client, hate more than false promises. When we put something out on our Twitter it becomes our mission to accomplish it. We know that if we promise something and it doesn't come through, we lose our legitimacy as not only a vendor, but also a person, and that makes the importance of delivering on our promise so much more important.

What can we do better?
As we grow, I feel we need to continue to improve on our ability to know you. We not only need to make our Twitter name more well known. If you don't know of our Twitter, it makes it hard for us to know you. Not only that, but there are many other social media applications, Facebook is one that comes to mind, that we don't use to the full extent. Not everyone is on Twitter, and we shouldn't force you to signup for Twitter. We need to come to you.

We also need to have more fun with social media applications. It gives us, and the VPS.NET brand personality. Now I don't mean a joke of the day, but we need to engage the community better. Whether it be discussion questions, input on VPS.NET, or even social media specific promotions, we need to give you additional value for bringing you into our social media network.

Feel free to discuss your thoughts on social media. From what I've found, it's really changed the way a lot of businesses operate, and I hope that we can continue to innovate the vendor/client relationship, and add value to our hosting services.