Yikes! My Customers Are on Google and I’m Not — What Can I Do?
October 5, 2008 by Kristen King
Filed under Business
a guest post by Kirsten Mangers
(www.bizchicksrule.com) — Have you ever searched for your business on Google or Yahoo! and couldn’t find it? Or even worse, you found your competitor? If you’re like most business owners you’ve had a moment when you’ve shouted, "Yikes! My customers are online and I’m not." You get flashes of losing potential business to your competitor and vow to do something about it, but what?
Previous to 1990, there were 6 forms of advertising in most business owner’s marketing toolbox:
- Direct mai
- Telephone solicitation
- Television commercials
- Radio ads
- Print ad
- Display ads
In the 90’s, marketers saw the introduction of websites, search, email, online banner ads and instant messaging (commonly known as IM). The marketers toolbox continued to expand throughout the 1990’s and really exploded into the new century with mobile email, SMS, local search ( ie: search engine marketing or pay-per-click), landing pages, online video, webinars, blogs, RSS, wikis, social networks, mobile web, and podcasts. Today, business owners are considering MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, widgets, and GPS devices, and realizing the massive opportunity that presents itself for the modern business marketer.
Clearly, you’re going to need a bigger marketing toolbox.
From Intuit’s 2007 Future of Small Business Report: "Leveraging the emerging digital infrastructure, inexpensive and easy-to-use Web services and tools will extend the ability of small businesses to build complex online applications and create, communicate, and share information. The emergence of the Web platform – in both the real-life physical world as well as the emerging virtual landscapes – will drive small business formation, operation, and innovation."
Wow, that’s a mouthful. A little scary? Yes. Can small business handle it? Absolutely.
Put the daunting complexities of your many advertising options aside for a moment and focus on the problem: Your customer is on Google and you’re not. How many of you use Google or Yahoo! regularly to find movie show times, local restaurants, or local places of interest? Chances are most of you do. But as a businesswoman, maybe it hasn’t occurred to you that consumers may be searching for your business online as well.
Try these two brief exercises to evaluate how your modern advertising efforts stack up to your competition:
Exercise #1
Search for your business on Google or Yahoo! using keywords that a typical consumer might use when searching for what you sell. Look for the ads on the right-side column of the search results page. Are you listed here? Are your competitors? If you are listed there, then congratulations – you’re ahead of the pack. If you see your competitor or a major national advertiser, then you’ve discovered exactly what they didn’t want you to know. They got there first.
Exercise #2
Search for your business by name and see if any of your competitors are using your business name as a keyword to take your customers. Try it a few different times on a variety of search engines. It is quite possible that consumers are searching for your business and your competitor is getting the new customer because you’re not listed in the search results.
How did you do? The fact is, business owners are moving online faster than ever before. In fact, look at these statistics from a recent Nielsen//NetRatings & WebVisible study:
When shopping for a product or service, consumers say they use the following sources to find a local business from which to buy:
- Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, or MSN 73%
- Yellow pages telephone directory 65%
- Internet yellow pages 50%
- Your local newspaper 44%
- White pages telephone directory 33%
- Television 29%
- Direct mail 20%
- Consumer review Web sites 18%
- Radio 15%
- Entertainment coupon book 10%
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com are now the #1 resource used by consumers looking for products and services from local businesses. According to a the same study, nearly 9 out of 10 people use search engines to find local businesses from which to shop – more than 1 billion local searches every month.
Behave like a modern marketer and surprise your competition. Spend an evening with a glass of wine and your friends Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Click the "advertise with us" link at the bottom of the screen and familiarize yourself with the options available for small business marketing.
You will be in the best position to sustain and grow your company and meet the competition head on. Embrace the modern marketing tools that are available to you and watch your business soar.
***
An entrepreneur and philanthropist, Kirsten Mangers was born and raised just miles from where the corporate headquarters of her Orange County, CA.-based software company, WebVisible, Inc., now stands. A self-proclaimed small business advocate, Kirsten was an early innovator behind the localization of online advertising for small-to-medium sized businesses, in what will become a $13 billion industry by 2010.
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