Four Creative Ways That Contractors Can Market Their Business Through Social Media Channels

Social media platforms are everywhere, and they aren’t going away anytime soon. When used properly, social media can be a contractor’s best sales tool. Social media presents the opportunity to engage with clients, learn about your target audience, and meet new leads. Basically, social media is the way to get your name out there digitally.

To effectively market your business through social media, you must first choose a platform or two. There are several platforms to choose from, but the social media sites best suited for contractors, home builders, remodelers, etc. are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Facebook: This platform allows you to share photos, articles, and blog-style content. Visitors can view your contact information, ask questions, and interact with your posts via likes, shares, and comments. Clients can also leave ratings and reviews on your page.

Instagram: Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, is best for showcasing the beauty and reliability of your work via pictures. Like Facebook, viewers can interact with your posts through likes, comments, and questions. It is also useful to observe other contractors’ content.

Twitter: Twitter is best for forming ongoing relationships with clients, referral partners, and experts in the field. It’s also good for industry conversation.

LinkedIn: This platform is best for establishing professional credibility. You can make individual pages to highlight your team members or business pages to highlight your company as a whole. It is useful for finding new hires as well as new business partnerships.

Once you have chosen a platform or two, here are four creative strategies to help market your business:

  1. Humanize your content

Your social media usage should be a natural form of communication between your business and your consumers that explains what you do and how well you do it. Posting relatable content is the best way to connect with your viewers while also demonstrating your passion. You could even post a real photo of the business owner to build legitimacy or occasionally post something more personal not related to your business.

  1. Excellent visually imagery

A picture is worth a thousand words – excellent visual imagery shows customers what you’re capable of. People like to see pictures. It gives them something to scroll through and even save to their feeds. At the end of the day, outstanding imagery corresponds to value.

  1. Become involved in other profiles

Becoming involved in other profiles is simpler – tweet at them, post questions and comments on their Facebook page. You could also join a LinkedIn group. Both these strategies can get your business noticed by potential customers or industry leaders.

  1. Maintain an active social media presence

While it can be busy running a full-time business and maintaining an online presence, it is critical for finding customers and showcasing your work. Some businesses have even hired social media managers or other professional marketing services. If you chose not to use outside social media assistance, make sure to allocate time for maintaining an active online presence and interacting with your followers.

Google’s Record Revenue Is Propelled By Adwords

Google (GOOG) on the Nasdaq reached record highs this week as the company reported over 27 billion dollars in revenue for the third quarter of 2017. The companies record revenue is being driven by explosive growth with the you tube platform and advertisers using Google adwords.

Google adwords continues to be the dominant revenue generator for the company and industries such as water damage have seen a 25-50% increase in the CPC or cost per click in many markets across the United States over the past 24 months. In markets like Denver Colorado the average CPC for water damage is now in excess of $85 per click. The service industry continues to feel the pinch from Google and their desire to favor ranking directory websites such as home advisor, thumbtack (a Google prooperty) and the yellowpages. With directory websites holding many top ranking positions, it reduces the potential for consumers to make buying decisions in the Organic space and further positions adwords placements in key CTR areas, helping to drive engagement and the potential for consumers to interact in these areas.

With Google holding a monopoly position in the United States in search, the likelyhood they will continue to find ways to drive revenue growth likely means that they will continue to diminish the position available to business in the organic space and make it harder for SEO companies trying to promote hyperlocal businesses against dominant directory positions.

What Tips Should Business Owners Follow Who Want to Do SEO Themselves

 

SEO optimizing your site is crucial in order to rank for any keyword on the search result. It is only when your website rank on the search result that you start to get visitors. You can save money from hiring a SEO company by optimizing the website yourself.

The basic must do on-site optimizations include adding meta title tag, and meta description. Meta title is the keyword phrase that appear on top of the web browser. Meta description should be an accurate summary of the content you are offering on the webpage. You must give a unique meta title and meta description to every single page on your website.

 

The title of the page must be emphasized with the H1 tag so that visitors can see them clearly. It will also be better if you use subheadings and numbered lists to outline your points in the content. If you include a picture, make sure to add the alt tag to make it easier for your image to show up in the image search result. The alt tag a floating tooltip description that appear when you hover your mouse above the image.

Long tail keyword should be used for optimizing your website content for SEO. Long tail keyword has more than 3 words and it is more specific compared to broad keywords. Short keywords get a lot of searches but it is incredibly competitive and only authority sites get to rank for them. Most people that search for long tail keywords are looking for something in specific and they tend to show more interests in buying the products.

Long tail keywords bring lesser traffic but these traffic can add up to a decent traffic when you optimize several webpages. There are lots of keyword research tools that you can use for doing research on the keywords including WordStream, Wordtracker and KeywordSpy. Paid keyword tools are better than free keyword tools and you should sign up if you can afford it.

You must not forget to set up an account at Facebook and Twitter to spread word about your products and services. After you have set up the account, you must start to get a lot of followers that are relevant to the niche. In addition, you should also write a short biography and include the complete contact information such as address and telephone in Linkedin. People who are looking to visit your store will usually think of going to Linkedin to find your address and telephone number.

You must constantly update your website with new content so that the search engine will keep coming back to crawl it. Search engines like sites that have lots of activities going on so you should consider incorporating a blog to your company site or online store. You can write the content ahead and schedule them to publish if you don’t have time.

 

There is no need to write a new post every day but make sure you update your blog at least once a week. It is not necessary to write text in your blog post, for example you can publish photos of your a home design if you are a home interior design company.

Keeping On Track With Your SEO Goals In 2016

The technical bits of SEO change every day. Everyone that I talk to that is trying to wrap their head around SEO is intimidated mostly by the rapid change in the industry.
However, there are a few basic rules you can bet money on when you’re dealing with Google.

Nothing Easy Works for Long

If it’s easy today, it won’t be tomorrow. Google’s actively looking for ways to improve the quality of their search results, and that generally means eliminating loopholes.As soon as you discover a tactic that produces amazing results for little effort, watch your back. Chances are you’ll find it’s not as effective.

Diversity is Just as Important as Quality

When in doubt, balance it out. An abnormal concentration of high-PR links can be just as damaging as a high concentration of low-quality links. An abnormal amount of keyword-rich links can signal spam, but using only “click here” and branded links gives you no relevance to specific keywords. The key is diversity. It’s dangerous to hang out on either side of the spectrum, and this is what tends to get new sites in trouble; they can get a lot of links from the sites of their peers, but they all tend to be in the same authority range. .

Consistency is Critical

Whether you’re talking about blog post schedules or link building, consistency is just as important as quantity. If you get a huge mass of links all at once, it can look like spam to the engines. If you blog only when the “muse” strikes you, you’ll never build a consistent audience.Be consistent. Here-and-there tactics produce spotty results. You’ll only experience true success once the winch is tightened consistently.

Half Your Job is Education

Whether you’re a consultant, an in-house SEO, or just a small business owner learning the ropes, at least half of your time will be spent telling people what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, why it’s worth it, and why everyone else should be doing it too.More often than not, you’ll find yourself educating your co-workers and clients on the ins-and-outs of SEO, so you better know your stuff.

Spread Them Eggs

Don’t put all of your traffic eggs in Google’s basket. Whether that means paying for advertising, investing in social media or growing your email list, you’ve got to diversify your traffic portfolio. If the Google gravy train derails, you’re going to have a bad time.
Whenever you can, take advantage of other sources of traffic.
The world of internet marketing changes constantly, but can you think of any other rules of thumb for SEO? Let me know in the comments!

Grow Your Referral Base and Attract Customers With LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the leading professional social media platform available today. Earlier this year, LinkedIn had 364 million subscribers. Each one of these members is a potential customer or referral for your business. To get some better insights in marketing with LinkedIn, we reached out to Justin Fishaw with High Level Marketing to get some tips for growing your engagement level.

To maximize LinkedIn’s potential, you have to know how to effectively use the benefits that lie at your fingertips.

Tip #1 Join Groups to Broaden Your Network

One of the many benefits of joining LinkedIn is the fact that you can join groups with like-minded individuals. By participating in these groups, you can network with people who may lead you to your next customer or your next referral. Additionally, using LinkedIn helps you have a conversation, which positions you to become a thought leader within your industry.

Tip #2 Position Yourself as a Thought Leader

Thought leaders are those individuals many people look to in their respected industries. Whether they are commenting on current events or little-known data, many people within the industry and customers highly anticipate their responses. When you share information on LinkedIn that you’ve gleaned from your customer data, you position yourself as a thought leader. Make sure you share information on your corporate page and within group settings to trigger conversations. With this information, you can learn more about the needs and wants of your potential customers, and direct them back to your website for solutions—bringing everything full circle.

Tip #3 Build a Following
Leading potential customers and referrers back to your website is critical to building your business. You want to make sure that they are visiting your site on a regular basis, not just one time. So, you have to keep sharing and posting industry information that is compelling. Building a following increases your profile ranking on LinkedIn and drives traffic to your website, which generates more leads for your business.


Tip #4 Harness Other People’s Expertise and Connections

LinkedIn allows you to connect with other people within your industry. Once you have a connection, you have access to their connections as well. With access to additional connections you can hire talented recruits or partner with leaders in your industry, which helps you propel your business to the next level.

Tip #5 Promote Your Events
With so many members on LinkedIn, you can access more people than you ever thought you could. LinkedIn comes in handy when you are having an event you are hosting or attending. By spreading the word about your event on LinkedIn, you can increase your event’s attendance without breaking your budget. Additionally, the people that come to your event are all potential customers and referrals that can help grow your business.

Source


https://online.citibank.com/US/JRS/pands/detail.do?ID=CitiBizArticleLeverageLinkedIn

http://quickbooks.intuit.com/r/marketing/how-to-leverage-linkedin-for-your-business/

Utilizing All Available Tools To Maximize Your Online Marketing ROI

Online marketing is far from a perfect science. Helping customers generate and track leads is often an area of ambiguity when small business owners interview media companies to help define goals and roi. One of the key differences that we are able to offer our clients is full transparency. We are able to accomplish this by utilizing a full spectrum of tools to help our clients manage their ad spending and lead generation results. We set up tools to monitor traffic (Google Analytics or Statscounter) are both good options. We create custom forms to capture online inquiries that are both mobile friendly and easy to navigate. We also use call tracking from Hosted Numbers, which offers a bevy of online options for call tracking including recording customer phone calls, tracking all phone calls, length of time customers are on the phone, what areas customers are calling from etc. The ability to listen to you customer phone calls (there is a whisper prompt to make sure that anyone who calls is aware of the call) is a great tool for all small business owners.

The amount of information you can gain by listening to how your phone calls are answered, your level of responsiveness in handling both customer service issues and potential sales inquiries is very important towards finding areas of improvement for your organization. For online marketing this data is pure gold, we can correlate visitors to conversions to better understand what messages are working and what keywords are bringing you the right types of customers to ensure that we are helping you achieve your goals and manage your marketing budget as effectively as possible.

Our team works hard to create the right strategy to help you achieve your marketing goals. What sets us apart from our competitors is that we are constantly monitoring our results with a focus on constant improvement. You can learn more about lead generation and online marketing by contacting us today for a free evaluation.

Email remains critical to online marketing success in 2015

Many internet marketers and online marketers fail in two areas, building a email list and then capitalizing off of it. Your email list is your most important asset bar none save for the products you sell in which you own 100%. Many online markets feel that RSS, Twitter and Facebook are more important to build a relationship with their customer base, but this is flawed logic. Why? There is still no better way to engage and build your online community and relationships. But why don’t RSS, Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools trump your online list? Lets break it down simply shall we?

RSS feeds:
While this is worth doing, and may be well worth your time, most people do not even know what RSS is today. You are going to reach an older crowd with this tool. There is also the fact that most people subscribing to your feeds do not even read them, most people at best simply scan through your feed. Everyone uses email, how many people actually use RSS? Very few that’s who.

Facebook:
While Facebook is heavily used and is the Goliath of social media you need to ask yourself, how many of the brands that you have liked on Facebook do you actually visit their pages or keep up with their news? Friends of people who like your page or brand may indeed also like it spreading the word about your brand, but as far as getting time sensitive information out Facebook fails for marketers unless you go the paid advertising route via PPC adverts which is another beast altogether, in which case we would be talking PPC and not Facebook.

Twitter:
While people may “follow” plenty of people and brands on Twitter, how many people actually truly “follow” these people or brands on Twitter? You might read the tweets from 20 to 50 people and brands. Some people follow hundreds if not thousands of people and brands. Very few actually read these tweets, I mean we only have so many hours in a day right? If you are deluded into thinking their are legions of hungry people eagerly awaiting your every tweet you fail at online marketing. The chances of anyone reading your tweets even if they “follow” you are pretty low. You can always try services such as Bit.ly too start tracking your clicks on your links if you doubt me, you will be surprised at how low the click through rate actually is.

So why then does an email list trump the above means of connecting with customers and potential customers? For one when someone signs up to your email list they are giving you consent and permission to contact them, indeed they actually want you to contact them! It is also a huge sign of trust on your customers part, as we are already flooded with emails for the most part and they are asking you to be yet another item in their inbox. People also check their email daily if not hourly, but most people will not visit your website every day. You can easily ignore tweets, status updates and the like, but it is harder to ignore an email with a catchy eye drawing title from someone you opted into.

The last reason to use email marketing is that every single successful online marketer uses it. The ones pulling 6 figures plus per year all use it and would trade their social media in a heartbeat if it meant they could keep their hard earned email lists.

Simple Tips For Managing Social Media In 2015 For Small Business Owners

Social media can be a gamer changer for any marketer, yet it is often misunderstood by the very marketers looking to harness its advantages. Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest), if used correctly can bring remarkable success for your online or brick and motor business. First things first lets examine what SMM or social media marketing is at its core, it is a form of internet marketing communication and brand awareness. Social media marketing almost always entails the sharing of content either articles, images or videos that hopefully the customer or potential customer will find engaging and share with his or her friends or network. The best SSM is accomplished when a piece of your content goes viral, meaning it is viewed, shared and liked by many people spreading via word of mouth.

Now lets discuss what social media is not. First it is often not free, you have to invest in it. That investment could be money or more often than not time, which leads us to the second thing that social media marketing is not, social media marketing is not instant. It can take weeks, months or even years for social media to help build up your brand or your offer but certainly it will not happen over night. Any agency promising you instant results is more likely than not lying. SMM is not complicated, anyone can figure it out, it is not rocket science. Lastly social media can not make up for having a poor website, poor SEO or a bad product or service. For social media marketing to work your website needs to be top notch both looks wise and ease of navigation as your goal will be to get traffic from social media to your website where your products or services are fully detailed. That being said there are some keys to success with social media which we will discuss in greater detail.


Key to Social Media Success #1: Engage and respond to your customers and leads!

Between 60% to 70% of all companies online do not respond to their customers on social media. When you fail to respond to customers and leads comments or questions your brand is now just another faceless brand in a sea of competition. When you respond to your own leads and customers and even in some cases your competitions leads you create a relationship. You can even take a negative and turn it into a positive by responding, such as to a complaint. Now most of us do not like complaints and many of us would get the urge to delete a complaint off of our social media pages, but answering a complaint publicly in a helpful manner can do wonders for your business, it shows you stand by your product or service and put customer satisfaction in the forefront.


Key to Social Media Success #2: Listen!

You can learn a lot about your customer base and even your competition by listening. I once ran a sound streaming service where customers could lunch their own online radio streaming. I thought I had all my customers and potential customers needs served, until I visited a rivals Facebook page and discovered that quite a few people were using the service to stream in online video games and needed a higher stream rate and varying sized streaming packages, which my competitor was ignoring. I went back to the drawing board and relaunched my service and aimed it at the video game crowd and increased my overall ROI, all by listening and then responding to my competitions customers, who became my own customers. Listening to your client base can and does reap dividends!

Key To Social Media Success #3 Leads are there for those who merely look
You can easily use social media to find new customers just using social media engines search tools. For example on twitter if you are a DJ simply do a search for “need a dj”. Your customers are out there asking for your services! You merely need to look then follow through on those leads, the success of landing a new customer depends on your sales skills or pitch and the quality of your service.

Key To Social Media Success #4 Share do not hard sell!
Social media works best when you share. Use it to tell your stories, about you, your customers, even how your product or service helped someone. Make it personal make it human, not bland or faceless or filled with “we are the best blah blah blah in the industry”. You can make use of webinars to reach customers live, you can do fun videos, you can write fun or light hearted stories. Inspire your readers to share your story. The key to a good story or piece of content is to ask yourself “Would I share this content with a friend?” If the answer is yes then you are on the right track.

Key To Social Media Success #5 Highly targeted PPC
Social media networks like Facebook know all the little details about their users thanks to massive data mining. With Facebook it is not about having your add seen by 10,000 people a week or a day but being seen by the right 100 or 1000 a day or week, the people who best fit your demographics. With Facebook you can target your ads using details such as age, location, sex, job title, education level and even interests! This means that you can reach a much higher ROI than traditional PPC advertising. Whats even better is like minded people often associate with like minded people so the chance of your product or service being spread word of mouth to their network of friends and family is also much higher.

Key To Social Media Success #6 Give stuff away

With social media you can gain customers for life by giving away value. If you give a small discount of say 10% to 20% you are marketing, if you give 50% to 60% off you are giving away true value. If you give your client base something for free, even just good content and information you can gain customers for life. You can give away samples, content, webinars, articles, and ebooks. If you provide good information on a regular basis you will have return visitors that while they may not buy your goods or services today, they may very well convert to paying customers later on. A good thing about return visitors is that your business stays on their mind, even if only in the back of it, waiting for a time when they do need what you offer!

Facebook Posting Tips To Ensure You Are Maximizing Your Opportunities

When it comes to Facebook merely posting is not enough. Many clients ask me when is the right time to post to Facebook? It’s an age-old question dating back to the date marketers first started to make Facebook pages to promote their brands, services or products.

I had one client who had been posting to Facebook like 5 times per day, which was way to much. Especially given the quality of his posts. With Facebook much like Reddit, the quality of the post matters the most. If you focus on quantity you are going to alienate your followers. Guess what no one wants to read 5 posts per day about your business unless perhaps your in the entrainment business and your posts are truly engaging. Focus on quality posts rather than how many posts you can pump out. There is no minimum number of Facebook posts needed as the goal of posting is to draw interest in your products and brand awareness.

Now that we know quality matters more than mere quantity we need to get the most bang for our posts as we can. Did you know that the days on which you post and even the time that you post can have a reaction from your viewers? Engagement rates, or days when viewers view and act on posts the most on Facebook are higher on Thursdays and Fridays than any other day of the week. Those two days of the week will net you the most bang for your posts. The next best day believe it or not is Mondays, due mostly I believe to the Monday blues. No one wants to be in work after the weekend, people log on at work and at school.


facebook

The time of the day that you post also matters greatly. For most content the following rule applies: Posts by 1 PM will net you the most shares socially, posts by 3 PM to get you the most clicks and posts generally between 9 AM and 7 PM. Again this also depends on what business you are in and what type of post you are doing. If for example you promote local bands then you could do a post at noon then one more post at say 8 PM reminding your target audience on what time the band is playing, where they are playing and what if any cover they are charging. it all depends on what Niche you are doing.

Lastly did you know that Facebook only shows 5% of your followers your posts? You have to pay for the other 95% of your followers to “see” your posts. The term seeing only means that it shows on their timeline / feed, it does not guarantee that they will even see the post. With that being said you have two options here, you can either pay to play, which in my opinion is a losing proposition as it merely appears in a very off place as compared to where your users focus on when logging in or you can focus on posting something unique and/or interesting once a day. Why the latter? When you post something very interesting people will share that content which is 10x better than paying Facebook for your post to show in a little looked for spot on your target audiences page.

Don Marks has been covering online marketing and lead generation since 2006, do you own a small business in Michigan and need some SEO or Lead Generation assistance, consider MarketingRelationship.com to jump start your 2015 business goals.

Implementing Schema and Analytics To Rank Better In Google

SEO has sure changed over the last year, but that is a given and should come as no surprise given that Google changes its algorithm 500-600 times per year. What worked just one month ago could tank your site today. Yet there are quite a few things that still hold true and there are quite a few things you can count on working over the next year to improve your search rankings.

In today’s SEO climate you need to focus on how people interact and engage with your website. Keeping track of and understanding your website statistics is vital to success. Google provides the tools needed, but many webmasters lack the knowledge and skill to apply it, especially when it comes to evaluating the performance of site content. Google Analytics can help you with your analysis. Yet this same tool so many webmasters under utilize or have difficultly gathering enough information about their content into Google Analytics for a through analysis. Google schema and Google Tag master can easily help you achieve this.

Which brings us to the topic of Google Schema. So many webmasters do not even know what this is. Schema is a way of marking up your content for not only Google, but also other search engine providers. When you use Schema you are helping the search engines to better understand not only your content but also it’s context, which helps the search engine to better deliver your pages to people searching for the content in the search engines. Schema helps you to deliver targeted organic web traffic to your website. If you do not have Schema consider hiring a coder to add it, or if you have a word press site there are plugins that can have you up and running in minutes. Schema is pretty much the modern day equivalent of meta data tags of yesteryear’s gone by. Why is Schema important for Google Analytics? Simple it can break down content by Author, date updated, keywords, categories, genre, article id the publish date, and more. With this tool we can look at for example all articles on say SEO written by Jack Smith in Google Analytics.

Inside of Google Tag Manager you can set up custom macros to grab all itemprop schema by creating a single macro.

function() {
var metas = document.getElementsByTagName(‘meta’);
for (i=0; iExamples of custom dimensions to enter into Google Analytics:

{{userId}}
{{metadata – datePublished}}
{{metadata – author}}
{{metadata – content group}}
{{metadata – keywords}}

By entering this into Google Analytics you can pull up tons of valuable data about your website with the click of a button.

Steps:

1) Add Schema
2) Create custom Macros via Google Tag manager
3) Port them to Google Analytics as Custom Dimensions or as Content Groups
4) Pull any needed information in Google Analytics via the custom macros we created.

So not only will this help your search rankings it can also help you to pull up any information about your websites content in an instant that you want to take an in depth look at.