Local Business Marketing

Unapologetic Marketing

Don’t keep acting like you are the only one with a product trying to fill the consumers’ need. That’s just plain doubtful, in most cases the consumer has the choice of hundreds of competitors, and you need them to choose you. With that in mind, are you paying into a marketing scheme that simply states the statistics about your widget and doesn’t really differentiate you on any other meaningful level?

Stop Doing That.

It is time to change course, to stop pretending there are no competitors out there, there are. How about you compete with them by acknowledging their existence, you have nothing to lose because your product is better, right? If its not definitively better, stop worrying about marketing and start making it better… then come back and pick up here.

Still Reading?

Lets create a confrontation of sorts, an unabashed comparison, be unapologetic about being better and saying it out loud. Why? Because you are better and you deserve more of the market, because consumers are sick of hearing the same old marketing messages and they are tuning them out. Nothing stands out from the crowd like a bold honest confrontation, a person invested enough to do that with a better product will gain more customers. That’s that.

Some Ground Rules

First and foremost, be truly better. Don’t fake it, the only two people that will believe you if you are not truly better is yourself, and your mom, and that’s not a big enough market to succeed.
Don’t make it personal and petty, and don’t pick a fight with a small time operation. Nobody likes a bully, be the David to a Goliath.
Have fun with it, for example: incorporate pop culture or current events into the messaging, don’t come off as a technical nerd about your comparison.
Understand the difference between hostile confrontational and proud differentiation, do the latter.

The specifics are up to you, if you want to see what I would do you are in luck. We are currently running a few of these campaigns and I will follow up with a post of the best example in a few days. Until then provide a better product than a big competitor and don’t be afraid to tell people about it.

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

Embracing Change to Improve Your Restaurant’s Business

Spiro Pappadopoulos

You don’t read about marketing to gain insight on maintaining your status quo, you read to learn how to improve your restaurant’s business. All of us seek out ideas, strategies, and technologies that can affect change on the success of our business. That success could be the bottom line, the well being of our employees, or the satisfaction of our customers. In any light it is improved success that we are after.

To get there we seek change, and must lead our teams to accept, embrace, and crave it.

This change after all is not change for change’s sake, it is based on several analytical studies, among them:

Our Organization’s Data from successful sales and failed leads.
Interpretation of Market Opportunities and unfulfilled demand.
Employee and Customer feedback from the POS interactions.

So the change I speak of is another way of saying improvement or strategic positioning.

Am I supposed to do all this for my restaurant?

If you want to improve, yes you are.

You should be using the sales data on menu items to sort through the winners and losers, you should be tieing that data into the food cost of each menu item so you can emphasize the winners and work on the losers. Also how many private dining requests came in last month, how many did you book, what was the reason that those that did not book decided to go elsewhere?
You should be looking at your city like a consumer; to decide if there is a market opportunity. Like a town that had lines out the door for Sunday breakfast might cry out for an affordable brunch.
You should be constantly getting feedback from employees about what the customers are asking for, what they are loving, and what they were not so keen on.

Yes, these things will guide you to the points of change that you need to make, to keep your business getting better, growing, and becoming more successful.

Employees often resist Change, your job is to lead them through it.

One of the hardest parts of doing something new is that it is unproven, and those who rely on a paycheck based on the current way of doing things often resist and/or subconsciously sabotage the new process. An entrepreneurial leader is one who will face the unknown, take a leap of faith in the decision that was made, and have earned the faith of the company’s employees so that they too believe and will work toward a successful change.

You must build an environment that allows you and your employees to connect with each other over the opportunity ahead of you, an environment that is sustained by trust.

Your employees are your most valuable resource, the genesis of your organization’s strength, and the greatest determinator of your success. You should engage them in the changes you make, let them take part in the determination of what ultimately is the final change, and also reap some of the benefits of the success you foster together.

In this way you are not their Boss, you are investing in them as a partner, and you engage with them on a level of mutual dignity. That should be the goal.

Next: Explain the Change to Your Audience.

Your audience, in truth, is a combination of the following groups:

Your current customers
The potential customers that exist in your market
Your employees

Some of your current customers may be adverse to change and the unknown that it brings. They may be attached to something that is changing or taken out of their comfort zone for another reason by the change. It is important to be clear and direct, avoiding ambiguities and outlining the positives of the change.

On the other hand your potential customers first need to hear about the change so that they know about this new offering that is aimed at them. When they hear about it, you should have the reasons outlined why they will love it, told from their perspective. Why is this what is missing from their lifestyle?

The employees are your ambassadors, they will be face to face with customers when they are asked what the Change is all about. If you do not give them the information they need, your change will be a muddled mess of interpretations not based on anything other than speculation. This is a major fail on your part.

Here is an example of how I addressed a major Change at my Restaurant to all these groups: http://andolinisrestaurant.com/brunch/

In Short, Change is a Challenge which when conquered results in Success.

What does your business need? I would love to talk about it.

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

The Online Presence of a Local Business

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Businesses may feel more helpless than ever to control the conversation about their brands. People speak their minds, and it is shared and presented and there is nothing that a business owner can do to stop it.

An Actual Business Discussed on Facebook Today:

Now obviously the sentiment is not what Joe’s Crab Shack was looking for, and there is little they can say in this situation to repair it. In fact if they entered into it they would either seem like they were pandering or making excuses.

So what can a business do to build positive commentary about their brand online?

Engage people, be present, shine the attention on people making good comments. (If there are none that should tell you something else) Those are all great ideas, and you have heard them before.

What I really want to tell you is if you believe in your product or service, be the star that champions it. If you are willing to put your face on it, do the same online. If you wont say something good online about your own product who the hell else will?

What we have as small business owners is a world where we must do the same things, convey the same feelings, take the same responsibility, and deliver the same quality as we always have. We just have to do it via a different set of tools.

Yes Social Media is one of them, so is your website or blog, and so is your email list. They need to go hand in hand with the rest of your business communications. This is not hocus pocus, it is just the way things get done right now.

This Technology is just a more efficient way of doing things, efficiency is good if you are the one using it.

Too often we dumb it down, take away 90% of its power so that we don’t have to learn it. Examples: RLS2000 for Realtors or another is Tumblr for Bloggers…

RLS2000 for Realtors: Every realtor needs to have a website right? I think so. This is the deal: YOU ARE THE BRAND. You are selling your name, not houses, you are selling your service, not condos, you are selling your knowledge/experience/connections, not land. So what does that mean for your website? You need to do a series of things for the people that are going to be checking the agent they (theoretically) are giving 5-6% of their home to.

Things a Real Estate Agent must do Online:

Demonstrate your knowledge of the market, activity in the market, and results in the market.
Be the real you that people will get to know through what you share online.
Market the homes you sell in ways that people would want for their homes and that others are not doing.
Make it easy for them to see more, and learn how to contact you.

Which of these things does RLS2000 make it easy for you to do? Not 1,2, or 3 and a partial on 4… ok so 25% and that one is probably the easiest of them all to accomplish.

The fact is when you have a website that is virtually identical to 500 other agents in your state, one that makes it a chore to add a page, and impossible to craft modern looking blog posts, you are not standing out for any good reason. Not when you could be creating content like this example from one of my client’s blog.

TUMBLR for Bloggers:

TUMBLR for Bloggers is like the hearing the best album you have in a long time and making a copy of it, then handing that copy to your friends and telling them that you wanted them to hear YOUR new album… it still sounds amazing but it’s not really your music right?

Your TUMBLR is not your blog, its your TUMBLR, and to use a service that homogenizes the style and content you have, hosts it on their servers, and makes that collection subject to them going under, being bought by Apple or Google and being shut down, or simply just falling out of favor to a newer cooler platform is silly for your blog, cause its not your blog, its your TUMBLR.

Takeaways From All this?

You have to be comfortable in your product or service, you have to be present to support it, and that means online too. If you are missing in those conversations who is going to be building positive relationships around your brand? Reasons people don’t do this that I want to shoot down right now:

If you are too worried about who might be looking at your Facebook to use it to propel your business forward you are letting that fear take one of the most powerful marketing and communication tools out of your hands.
If you don’t want to learn how to use Twitter and therefore give up on the best way of getting the attention of the press today you are missing out on that free exposure too.
If you want to take the easy way out and make a cookie cutter site like RLS2000 for realtors or TUMBLR for bloggers, or the myriad of others, you will end up blending in and being a prisoner of a platform that by its very nature creates uninspiring homogenous online brochures subject to the whim or profit motive of its owners. You are a tenant without a lease.
Small Business = Your Business, Your Name, Your Brand

Unless you are hiding from the law, in which case its really cool you are reading this, you should be confident enough in your skin and your business to represent it online (social/site/email) as yourself.

If you are not, please tell me what are you afraid of?

Join my email list at the top, leave a comment below, or shoot me a note on twitter @spirocks. Much love for reading this far.

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

Local Business Marketing Plan

Spiro Pappadopoulos

When you are marketing a local business online, you may feel like you are a tiny company fighting huge rivals at a disadvantage. It is true, you can not compete with a national company’s budget and resources… so what you need is an online marketing plan that leverages your advantages to put you on top.

You are Local and that Matters.

When you are marketing a local business online you can show off things about your company that the national guys can not offer. Things like the local employees and owners that live in the community and understand it, their passion and personality should be front and center in your marketing plan.

Example: I often talk about Realtor Marketing Online, because one of my clients is a local broker who has set out to dramatically reshape his company’s presence online this year. To do so, the marketing plan we created for him focused on sharing his company’s amazing skill set through online content.

This online content takes the shape of blog posts, data driven market reports, informational videos, and sharing it all through social media. When you are talking to a real estate broker who wants to take his business to the next level, what type of marketing plan would you suggest? Real Estate is a VERY local business… the product never moves, so it is clearly a local marketing plan that leverages the fact that they know the community and the market that is needed.

For this account we demonstrate his employee’s ties to the community and why his brokerage is the number one brokerage in both homes sold and average selling price. We don’t just send out every home he lists and call it a day, we make online content like this video:

And we create compelling online content that brings value to his customers and potential customers, like this:

What this online content does is accomplish a few things that are crucial to the success of marketing a local business online:

Demonstrate your expert status
Let people get to know you and identify with you as a person in their community
Show that your knowledge leads to results
Offer them information for free that helps them understand your business

Your Business Can Compete

The game has changed but you are still positioned to come out on top as a local business, so many industries have been turned upside down by the ease of connecting online. Instead of suffering from this change I encourage you to take the opportunity to share your skills, knowledge, and ability to help people with the business they do in the markets you serve.

Whether you sell Instructional Seminars, Chicken Parmesan, Million Dollar Homes, or Designer Jeans.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to shoot me any questions, comments, or ideas. Plus please subscribe to my updates above in that BIG orange box. You can find me @Spirocks on Twitter.

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

Local Business and Google Search Ranking

Spiro Pappadopoulos

So What Can You Do?

Make sure your website or blog is optimized for local search results. Focus on the terms that people will use when they search for you locally, broad and general terms will likely leave you ont he 90th page. Use the local area you are in, whether it is SOHO in New York City or the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. That is your Ace in the Hole.

Content Creation. You may think that it is obvious since you are a restaurant located in a particular town that you are catering to them. But to Google it is not obvious unless you spell it out. So when you are crafting your messages that means you are writing to both the reader and to Google. Mention your location. One of my restaurants, Evenfall, does a lot of private functions like rehearsal dinner and such. So we strive to be a top result in our area by targeting search terms like Rehearsal Dinners Haverhill, Rehearsal Dinners Merrimack Valley, as you can see we fuse the service with the location in the search terms.

Take Advantage of the HTML Code that Google Checks. Each page should have focus keywords that it is designed to be found for. Each page should also have a carefully considered title as it is a major part of the indexing process and then it is what the searcher will see when he/she comes across you in google search results. Finally the Meta description should be a clear and concise summary of what the page contains as that will be the text that is weighted heavily in search rankings and the text that will be displayed in results.

Submit Your Site to Google via SiteMaps and URL Submissions. Your website should have a sitemap to take advantage of the XML Sitemaps protocol, which will allow you to submit every page in your site to Google and Bing. Google also just realeased a URL submission tool that you can submit URLs to get crawled. It is a good idea to do both.

What do I do for Clients?

I talk to them about their business, and ask them which terms they would love to get to the top in. Then I take the time to make sure everything above is taken advantage of, and I try to create content for them that will be ranked the highest in their niche for those terms.

I also try and think like a customer, easier for me then someone running the business, and work to create keywords that i beleive would be searched for. I create content that will be found for those keywords too.

Then using Google analytics I track the ‘Organic Traffic’ generated from search engines and look at the best performing keywords. Those are the ones that generate the most traffic that leads to a conversion page (point of purchase, Email list sign up, etc). Those become the focus of a second round of content creation that is aimed at bolstering the site’s results for those keywords and the conversion rates that we are after.

If you are interested in talking about your business, seeing what i would do for your site, or just getting more info don’t hesitate to comment here, on twitter @spirocks, Google+ top right, or call my office (617) 379-2430. I am always happy to talk about these things whether you want to hire me or not.

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I am Spirocks on Twitter.