B2B Marketing Promotions

Local Internet marketing is becoming increasingly important to your success on Google and other search engines. As Google continues to move toward local search results, your effectiveness at local Internet marketing can have a major effect on your bottom line.

Let’s try an experiment. Go to Google, and type in your industry or niche, and your city and state (e.g. Italian restaurant, Wichita, KS). What will pop up is a map of some of the Italian restaurants in Wichita (or whatever you typed in) that may or may not include yours. If it doesn’t, that’s a real problem, but it’s one that’s easily solved.

Optimizing for Google’s Local search is an important part of local Internet marketing. They’re the biggest search engine, so they’re the gold standard for search engine optimization. They also already have your company information in their servers, so it makes sense that they put that information to use by helping their users find you more easily.

The great thing about Google is that it also scans different review sites, like Yelp or Urban Spoon, for user reviews. So B2C businesses (business-to-consumer) may end up getting some great local Internet marketing juice if people leave positive reviews on the different review sites. These reviews also make Google map listings more useful, because people can see whether they want to visit your establishment or not.

Should Regional and Online Businesses Do Local Internet Marketing?

Even regional businesses and online businesses should optimize for local internet marketing. While most of your customers may not come to your location, this will still help improve your search engine ranking. In fact, local Internet marketing is one of the most effective and efficient forms of SEO.

That’s because you need as many inbound links to your website (links that go from another site to yours) as you can get. The more you have, the more valuable Google thinks your site is, and so the higher it appears in search results.

But you also never know when you are going to get a local visitor. While you may not want visitors at a home-based business, it’s worth doing if you have an actual office. You’re already going to do it for SEO reasons, so just consider any visitors who find you this way as a bonus.

Should B2B Do Local Internet Marketing?

Companies that focus on business-to-business should also take advantage of local Internet marketing. For one thing, a number of your customers may be local. You want them to know you’re in the area, so filling out your Google Local profile is going to be a big help.

While your local customers may only be two percent of your customer base, you might as well take advantage this. Besides, if your competitors are already on here, you want to make sure they’re not beating you. And if your customers aren’t on Google Local yet, you could be the first. Take advantage of their absence.

How Can National Chains Do Local Internet Marketing?

You’re probably thinking I’m going to tell you to manually enter in each store location on Google’s Local Business section. And while they would be a great job to give the interns, you can just upload a list of your locations, including the addresses and phone numbers, and Google Maps will place the markers for you.

Where Else Should I Focus My Local Internet Marketing Efforts?

Don’t think that Google has the lock on local Internet marketing. There are several sites, including the aforementioned Yelp and Urban Spoon, that may be worth your time. There are also the Yellow Pages, Super Yellow Pages, Yahoo Yellow Pages, and other similar directories that can help your local Internet marketing. There’s also Yahoo’s listing service, and the new kid on the block, Bing, has a local business listing you can take advantage of. Visit them and update your listing information.

Local Internet marketing can greatly help your search engine results, but you don’t have to be a search engine optimization expert. This is something you can do in a matter of minutes, and it can make all the difference in the world. But if it seems like something you don’t want to mess with, call a local online marketing expert. They’ll be happy to help you out.

Online B2B marketing (business-to-business) is a completely different animal from B2C marketing (business-to-consumer). Whether it’s the medium, the message, or even how you target your audience, online B2B marketing needs to be handled differently from your typical online B2C marketing efforts. There are plenty of similarities: you’re trying to persuade people to take an action, whether it’s visit your website, download a special report, or even buy a product from you. But there are enough differences that online B2B marketing needs some special considerations.

How online B2B marketing differs from online B2C marketing

Online B2B marketing is a lot different from online B2C marketing. For one thing, it’s more formal. In an online B2C setting, you’re going to have customers and visitors with a wide variety of interests, education levels, tastes, and even sense of propriety and appropriateness. You need to make sure your message appeals to the widest possible audience in a B2C setting. With some variable data and creative programming, you can deliver more tailored messages to your audience, but you either have to write one message as generically as possible, or write several messages tailored to each possible group.

But with an online B2B marketing audience, you can narrow your appeal. You’re writing only to the decision makers. You can reasonably assume certain levels of education, attitude, and professionalism among your customers. So your messages can be tailored to a specific group of people, without worrying too much about the non-industry crowd.

How to create the online B2B marketing message

Don’t forget that your online B2B marketing audience is someone else’s B2C audience. They don’t just stick decision makers in a closet at 5:00, and pull them out at 8:00 the next morning. Your B2B customers go home every night, watch TV, get on Facebook, and in general, still respond to the same emotional cues and language at the office that they will at home. Appealing to a person’s fears and desires in your message, showing them how to avoid pain or achieve goals, will work in online B2B marketing the same way it does in B2C marketing.

In online B2B marketing, you also want to focus on the benefits of your product or service, rather than the features. Don’t tell your customers what your service can do (“our Kick-Starter booster is made of titanium and polypropylene”), tell them what they’ll get out of it. Of course, make sure you personalize it whenever possible: “Our Kick-Starter booster will increase productivity by 20%, which can mean an additional $100,000 each year for Jones & Wells.”

Where to find your online B2B marketing customers

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of social networks and apps that will help you find your customers. But rather than trying to reach as many people on as many networks as you can manage, focus most of your energy on the best networks. We typically find our online B2B marketing audience on places like Twitter, LinkedIn, and even industry-specific networks like you’d find on Ning.com. While it’s possible to find the B2B audience on Facebook, you’re going to be spending a lot of time and money trying to reach them, while broadcasting your audience to people who don’t care. It would be like buying TV ads in a city just to reach 10 people on it.

Take a look at your online B2B marketing audiences age and technology expertise too. How do they use technology? The basic tenets of Internet marketing assume that your audience are online somehow. But where are they getting their information? Is there a niche social network for your industry? Or are the decision makers getting most of their information from email and websites? Or do they use mobile videos and texting as their primary form of communication? Your marketing campaign needs to match where your customers are, not where you want them to be.