Radiance Road Marketing Blog

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Or FIVE MYTHS About Marketing Online

Lakeland businesses, like small businesses in towns all across the globe today, want to grow and make more money. As a small business owner, the internet provides a great opportunity to get your marketing message to your target market. However, there are some misconceptions about marketing online that may be keeping you from getting the results you want.

1. Build Your Website & They Will Come. If you’ve setup a website expecting visitors to flock to it just because it’s there, you’re probably disappointed in the results. You may have paid a website design company to build a site for you and it looks great. But how do people find it? Are you indexed in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new BING? Why should they come? These are the major questions facing any small business owner here in Lakeland who wants to generate leads on the web.
2. A Web Site is An Online Brochure. Many owners simply put up a list of what they do and expect a visitor to be impressed. Many Lakeland plumbers, for instance, say that they fix a leak in a faucet or do toilet repair or install septic tanks. But WHY should they choose YOU over every plumber in Polk County that does the dame thing? What makes your plumbing company different? How do you benefit the customers more than any other plumber?
3. If I Submit To Search Engines, Customers Will Find My Business. Getting found by the three major search engines is important. However, it’s where you rank that makes a difference. If you aren’t in the top ten results for the term “Lakeland plumbing company,” prospects won’t be visiting your site. As a matter of fact, you are more likely to get customers if you are one of the top three sites (among other things). Search Engine Marketing is a complex process that requires more than indexing.
4. The Secret to Getting Customers Online Is…. There’s no secret. There is a PROCESS. It’s not easy and it’s not simple and it’s not over-night. Like anything else worthwhile, it takes time and effort and a proven method. First of all, it’s really like any other form of marketing. It requires a marketing plan. You have to use the basics of marketing and apply them first, then add the internet marketing techniques that work. There are a thousand books on internet marketing and all the good ones say the same things as the marketing textbooks: target your market, create a powerful marketing message, deliver the message to your prospects and motivate them to take action. It doesn’t matter if you are a plumber or plastic surgeon or a dentist or an air conditioning repair company – it works the same way. There is no magic software to get you to the top and keep you there.
5. Once You Set It – You Can Forget It. OK, internet marketing is not the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie, but you use the same basic techniques as Ron Popeil to market your business. Did Ronco make one commercial and play it once? Hardly. It takes an ongoing effort. Repetition works in marketing. Think of all the hugely successful marketing campaigns. They repeat the same message over different channels consistently over time. Marketing research shows that your customer, on average, needs to hear your message at least seven times for it to even make an impression. The internet, especially, is competitive. You can be at the top of Google one day and not there at all the next.

Don’t get fooled by companies that promise you a magic bullet to make your internet marketing successful. Many companies waste their time and resources by not having a solid internet marketing plan. They fall prey to gimmicks and scams and get-rich-quick schemes. If you don’t know how to market online, get some reliable information and maybe some help from a professional internet marketing company you can trust. Avoid the outrageous claims – like guarantees to get you to the top of Google. The only guarantee is that if you do the right things in marketing, the right way, consistently, you will become a competitor in the online marketplace.

Lakeland Internet Marketing Read More Marketing Articles

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It’s time to take a step backward and gain perspective on this whole “business” idea.

I examine several companies in Lakeland every day to evaluate their position in our economic community. Some are wildly successful in their field and very profitable. Some are struggling. And some have recently gone out of business. As a resident of Lakeland and a small business owner myself, I depend on the success of our community in order to survive and thrive personally and professionally. As a matter of fact, it’s Polk County and the State of Florida, too.

Cypress Gardens just went out of business. Closed. No more visitors. No tourists to spend their money along Cypress Gardens Boulevard shops and restaurants. More jobs gone. More county and state taxes gone. The Butterfly effect will ripple through Winter Haven to Auburndale to Lake Wales to Bartow to Lakeland and beyond.

The problem with Cypress Gardens, as with so many businesses here, is perspective. What is important to YOUR business? Go ahead – make a list. I’ll wait.

Ask most business owners this fundamental question and you’ll usually get these responses: location, product or service, management, cash-flow, traffic, the economy, employees, customer satisfaction, overhead, pricing and market share. Sure, all those things are important to achieving business success. There is a crucial factor that most of us don’t really consider and it may be the MOST basic and important reason business succeed or fail: communication.

A basic college degree generally requires a communication class and I have taught many, many classes. I always start off with a simple definition of the communication process.

Communication requires a sender to form a message and deliver it through a channel to a receiver who must provide a response. Think about it. Does any business get done unless that happens? You can’t get a location or employees or a bank account or a loan or customers or market share or profits without communication. It doesn’t matter if you are a plumber or air conditioning company or a dentist or an attorney or Wal-Mart. How and what and when and to whom you communicate will determine your business success on a very basic level. What is important to your business?

Your business depends on your ability to send the right message to the right audience at the right time in the right way to get them to take the action you want. Who is going to be more successful in business: an owner who communicates well or one who does not? How well you communicate is going to determine your sales and your profits (or losses). If you’re not satisfied with your profits (I’m not), then maybe you need to take a look at that.

Easy question: What is the fastest growing means of communication in human history? You’re right – the internet. How important is THAT to your business? Is your competition taking advantage of internet marketing? Are YOU? Are you getting the response you want from your website? What can you do today to communicate better to improve your business?

I’d be glad to take a look at your website and offer three ideas for improvement at no charge. No strings. The only condition is that your business has to be headquartered in Polk County. Email me at info@radianceroadmarketing.com or call me right now at (863) 668-1086. You may not qualify to be a client, since I only work with a few, select companies, but your business is important to all of us here in Lakeland. I want to help you to succeed.

Lakeland Internet Marketing

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On Friday, I returned to the Lakeland Chamber of Commerce to turn in my membership form and fee. I only had to pay half the yearly fee upfront, which helps cash-flow and makes it easy to do. Since my account exec, Amy Wiggins email her, wasn’t there, Terry Ottinger, Vice President of Membership Development, took my application and we chatted for awhile. Apparently, Amy had already briefed him on my business, which was a nice surprise.

Anyway, I told him one of the reasons I am joining is because I learned about chamber membership results from Milburn Drysdale . He was a member of the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce and landed the multi-million-dollar Clampett account. That’s my earliest memory of chamber identity and it’s stuck with me.

Seriously, membership has its advantages. Through my involvement in several chambers during my more than twenty years as a businessman, I’ve learned firsthand how it can help build your business. Here are a few reasons I join and participate:

1. Chamber membership brings creditability. Studies show that consumers place more trust in chamber partners and are more likely to buy if they know a company is in the local chamber of commerce.
2. The Chamber offers networking opportunities to gain clients. Radiance Road Marketing serves Lakeland businesses. There are regular and special events designed specifically for b2b contacts.  As a local company providing internet marketing for local companies, it only makes sense to look for clients in the chamber because that’s where most of the successful business will be involved..
3. The Chamber offers unique advertising and promotion opportunities. I get my business listed on their online and print directories I can place ads in them, as well. I can also sponsor and leverage their local events.
4. The Chamber is an advocate for local businesses. Politically, the more small businesses that band together, the more power we have. It’s important to protect the interests of entrepreneurs like myself!
5. The Chamber provides opportunities for professional development. We learn from the experience of our fellow small and medium businesspersons as we interact and at specially-designed events. It’s important for me to learn to grow my business.
6. I have always advised my clients to join and participate in the local chamber of commerce. That’s hard to do if I am not a member myself. I advise them to do it because it works. My clients’ success is my success.
7. It strengthens our community. Since chambers build businesses and business hire workers and everybody pays taxes (ok – everybody with an income is supposed to pay taxes) – we all win. Lakeland businesses success is in my personal and professional best interest.

Joining is the first step. It’s an investment. I add my willingness to participate, eagerness to help the chamber and my fellow chamber members, and devotion to building our community. I know from my experience that my business will grow and profit. I will probably build some personal relationships, as well. And, I know that I will continue to grow as a person from doing the right thing for the right reason at the right time.

If you have a chamber success story, let me know by leaving a comment here or call me at 863 669-1086 to share. Thanks

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When people are ready to buy something or need a service, like a

plumber, they will generally use a search engine like Google, Yahoo or

Bing to find a company in their local area. Unless your company shows

up in the first page of the results for your industry and city (such as

“Lakeland plumbing” or “air conditioning repair Lakeland”), they don’t

find your website – they find your competition. To land in the top

results, you need to optimize your site for the search engines.

Two types of SEO

The two types of optimization techniques are onsite and off-site. By

on-site optimizing, we mean that your web page has the proper elements

that the engines are seeking to rank you high on the results list. This

involves marketing research to choose certain keywords (like your

industry and city). Then, you make sure that they are included in your

page title, description, tags and page content. Off-site SEO involves

getting links to your website from other web pages. The better the rank

of the referring page, the more weight it carries with the major search

engine. Google, the largest and most-used search engine, relies heavily

on referal page rank.

The Problems with Optimizing Your Website

The first major challenge is knowing what to do with each type of SEO.

On-site optimization requires research, such as using Google Keyword

Tools to find the search terms your clients use and selecting the ones

to prioritize to give you the fastest results. Once you have the

keywords, you must know how to use them in your meta tags, page

description and content. Even search engine experts differ on the proper

formula to use for this aspect. Offsite optimizing requires getting

links on other websites. Where do you want your links? This requires

more careful research because you want “good links” and avoid “bad

links”. And then there’s the question of why the other site would want

to post your link. You can see that the SEO portion of internet

marketing is complicated and this is just pointing out the tip of the

iceberg!

The second major problem, in addition to having the expertise, is the

incredible amount of time it takes to get your page ranked. The effort,

once you have done solid marketing research, to perform the individual

tasks is more than most local business owners can afford to spend

themselves. It’s really a big job that takes many hours of tedious

effort. Small business owners don’t have their own internet marketing

department to handle this. It costs alot of money to have a staff to

handle your marketing.

The Rise of the Search Marketing Company

Because of the expertise and time involved and because the rewards of

effective internet marketing are HUGE, most businesses need a

specialized professional to do their search engine marketing for them.

SEO firms are popping up everywhere. Some companies guarantee to get

you on the first page of Google. Beware of them. They don’t CONTROL the

search engines. Some sell software programs that promise to automate

the process. The right programs can help and experts use them to save

time, but it just isn’t that easy. It still requires knowledge, skill,

ability and time.

What’s the answer?

The best choice for your business depends on your particular situation.

First, get some good advice from an experienced professional in your

local market. Choose someone who is willing to take a look at your

company in-depth and can focus on you. At Radiance Road Marketing, we

provide personalized attention because each situation is different. Not

all companies will profit from online marketing. That’s one reason why

we only work with a few, select local businesses. You want a local

expert that focuses on local companies and asks lots of questions about

your business and customers. Make sure that they have a marketing

background and some solid marketing experience, not a newbie or

career-changer. Most of all, you need someone you can trust. Remember,

if it sounds too good to be true – if it’s not reasonable – forget it.

Good SEO delivers Profits

Search engine optimizing helps drive qualified traffic to your website.

Once they find your website, you need to move them through the sales

process. To get the sale, you not only have to get their attention and

get them to listen to your marketing message, you have to get them to

take action. SEO is one very important part of the online marketing

model. If you can get your best prospects to visit your website, you

still have to get them to buy your products or services.

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Does Internet Marketing work for your business?

Looking around the wild world web, I see countless stories about internet marketing. Most give generalities about how cost-effective it is and that you need to be doing it. Some, especially in the trade magazines online, give actual success stories of positive results from online marketing efforts.

I recently was doing some research on the remodeling industry and the effects of internet marketing to write an article. Two stories caught my attention in Remodeling magazine. One talked about how a construction company doubled the number of leads from its website over the last year and how marketing online is more cost-effective than traditional methods. The other company invested $12,000 and is now getting more business from its website than from past customers or referrals (their former leading sources).

These successes don’t happen overnight or without a focused effort and a willingness to invest. Certainly more companies are taking advantage of new technologies today and reaping the rewards. Some of them, like the ones above, have taken advantage of the current situation to GROW.

Lakeland businesses are my concern. As you know, a lot of local companies are struggling right now. They are laying off employees because of a lack of work. Undoubtedly, there is less work because of the economy. However, it also means that you have to get aggressive in your marketing to get the work that’s out there. Unemployment is bad for all of us here in Lakeland. It affects every business, consumer and organization in Polk County and throughout Florida. What can we do?

Working smarter has always been the answer. It was in the last challenging economy and it will help us now. However, the technology continues to change and the shift has left many local companies at a huge disadvantage. Today, more consumers rely on the internet for information. Has your website changed? Can your prospects FIND you online? Are you using social media? What about email newsletters? What are you doing to gain a competitive advantage online?

I’d really like to hear from some local businesses and the projects that are working – or not working – for YOU. You can reply here or give me a call at 863 668-1086.

You can also read my article mentioned above Internet Marketing Creates Opportunity for Lakeland Businesses

Thanks,

Jack Duncan

Radiance Road Marketing

Lakeland Internet Marketing

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When blogging first came on the scene, I asked myself: “Self, this blog stuff is cool, but what’s the point?”

It really took me awhile to come up with an answer. As a marketing, advertising and public relations consultant, I had generally gone with traditional media and even websites didn’t make a lot of sense for most businesses until the new millennium. With the growth of the internet and the adoption of web searches for local business information, more and more revenue was being generated. Blogging has turned the same corner and offered some serious advantages for internet marketing.

Let me just clarify the difference between advertising and PR. Advertising is paid placement of a marketing message. In public relations, you don’t pay for the placement. PR is not ‘free”, because there are costs to running a PR campaign. However, public relations campaigns are a different means to getting people to notice what you do and understand the advantages of your business. Blogs are PR tools to create awareness and interest in your company. Done right, public relations does generate leads and those leads can be converted into sales.

Blogging leverages your reach with minimal additional cost. Since you don’t add much overhead, most of the revenue from those leads goes straight to your bottom line. And that’s what business is about: increasing your profits.

Blogging has the following advantages:

1. ENGAGES YOUR PROSPECTS – Since blogs, unlike websites, are truly interactive, you potential clients can get involved in the dialog.
2. COMMUNICATES DIRECTLY AND INDIRECTLY – You can speak one-on-one with you potential customer and let others listen in to your conversation.
3. PROVIDES RAPID FEEDBACK – Your prospects can post messages that are seen immediately and you can respond quickly. How often do you update your website? Your blog gets updated in real time. Sooooo much more effective!
4. CREATES COMMUNITY – With a blog, you see and hear the participants and it allows you to have a gathering place for people with the same interests. People enjoy being ‘a part of’ rather than ‘apart from’. We are truly social animals by nature and gravitate to crowds.

The point is that blogging is a highly effective way to generate buzz and you can convert that interest into sales that maximize your profits. The proof is in the results. Large corporations like Disney, Microsoft and IBM are all increasing their bottom-line through their blogs. Now, small, local services companies like remodelers, plumbers, dentists and attorneys are catching on and seeing conversions to sales from their blog sites.

What about Lakeland businesses? I don’t see many getting involved yet. We do suffer a bit from the lag we usually see in trends trickling down to local business. Those businesses in Lakeland that become early adopters of technology usually benefit the most over the long-term. It’s alot harder to play catch-up. Fortunately, blogs are new enough that local companies can enter the race now and get great results. There are real low barriers to entry – it’s simple, straightforward and inexpensive. What are YOU waiting for? If you need help, just ask….

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So you have a blog success story? Please share it with us…..

Thanks

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Many small business owners in Lakeland (or Anytown, USA) ask: Why blog? As an internet marketing expert that lives and works in Polk County, FL, I ask: Why NOT blog? There are certainly many more reasons for me to create and maintain a blog than there are NOT to be an active blogger for my own company.

Here are my thoughts, as I am starting to write this blog for Radiance Road Marketing today…

Why NOT create a blog?

The first reason to avoid the whole web-log thing is that I am lazy. Some days, it’s all I can do to get up and put on pants. That’s part of the reason that I started to work in marketing, advertising and public relations.  We marketing guys have days that we don’t have to get dressed. Or go anywhere. We can work from home. With the growth of the internet, more and more business owners are not getting up, putting on pants (or panty-hose) and traveling the morning rush-hour to earn a living.

OK, I am not actually lazy – I like to work. I just like make working as easy as possible. For me, internet marketing consulting is the easiest way for me to earn money doing something I enjoy. I get to stay at my home here in South Lakeland (actually between Highlands City and Bartow), get on the internet (which I do anyway) and have an opportunity to apply my knowledge, skills and abilities marketing online.

Second, the whole thing seems complicated. I mean, do I really want to learn more tech-stuff? No. Back in the late ‘80s, I saw a fellow student in college creating a newspaper column on an Apple MacIntosh. I was amazed. I remember learning to use that funny mouse-thing by watching him and then trying it myself. Not hard at all. I learned basic electronic publishing that year as managing editor of The Springhillian. I was hooked. The next year, in graduate school, I took Electronic Publishing as one of my first courses. I was amazed at how far we had come from Gutenburg and the printing press and how we were transforming the power of the people to communicate. I even bought my first Mac, toted it around in a backpack and started my first marketing consulting firm.

Later, the internet came along and I worked for Matrix Information Systems where I learned more than I ever dreamed possible about the world wide web, computers and software. I published a website and maintained it for the first time. When I went back to consulting, I had my first internet connection at home and used it to communicate with clients and my internet mentors. Finally, two years after moving to Lakeland, I learned how to create a blog. After all, I am an internet marketing consultant now. It was simple. I read for a few days abut blogging (cause I have to know A LOT about something – the whys and hows – before I try to do it myself.

Really too easy.

In about fifteen minutes, I had downloaded and installed WordPress on my website. Another half-hour to install some plug-ins. Another ten minutes to edit a blog post and make sure the thing worked. Today, I’m a blogger! For me, it took twenty years and an hour and a half to get here. Only the hour and a half were really billable hours. If you haven’t tried creating a blog yet, WHY NOT? Lemme know….

NEXT TIME: Blogging for profit!

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