Local Mobile Advertising For the Green Industry

Local mobile advertising is becoming, and will be the main marketing tool in the very near future. If you haven't given it much thought, you'd better.

My husband and I own a landscape contracting business in Nashville and I know what it's like when you want to get new customers. Or, maybe you want to let existing customers know that you have a sale going on.

Maybe you have a block of trees you're willing to discount or a product or service that you want to promote that is time sensitive and you need to get the word out in a hurry.

This happened to us here in Nashville in May 2010 after our big flood. We wanted to let our customers know we were here to help with yard clean-up, brush removal, or whatever they needed.

Our problem was that there was no good way to let them all know without just calling them or emailing them.

I wish we had known about local mobile advertising then!

Before the internet, you could easily connect through newspaper, TV, direct mail, telemarketing, print ads, or through word of mouth advertising.

Now, it's all changing, and it's changing fast.

Just think, when was the last time you looked up a business in the Yellow Pages, watched a commercial, or read a real paper?

Email campaigns used to be all the rage, but with spam filters who knows if your email is going through. Or, if it's getting read if it does get through.

People are searching for you. Are they finding you?

Custom Search

Does your business show up on the first page? On the second or third page? If not, you are missing out on getting new customers.

Now try this, narrow you search down to tree growers in North Carolina or any other state or area of the country you are trying to market to. Are you there? If not, yikes…you gotta' do something now!

How will you stand out from the crowd?

We all know that we need to have a website presence of some sort.

Statistics show that 78% of households have two or more computers. We've all figured out that, whether we like it or not, we have to have a web site in order to compete these days.

In the past, that meant struggling with throwing one up yourself, or hiring someone else to do it, and then having to maintain it and update it.

Here's the good news You don't really need to keep paying someone to update your website!

Now, don't get me wrong, It certainly helps and nursery growers will need to update their inventory, but for most of us, just having a basic site is fine if you are looking for local business.

Here's the bad news. Having a website isn't enough anymore. Paying someone big bucks to maintain a website that little to no traffic just doesn't cut it anymore.

Where we're going

Did you know that more and more people are searching for local businesses online more than ever before?

Google, Yahoo, and now Bing know that most people are looking for local businesses. Businesses like yours.

And, did you know they are talking about you too? Yes you! They are talking about, and reviewing, you and your business.

On social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, CitySearch and Urbanspoon, friends are talking to friends, neighbors to neighbors (or anyone online who will listen.)

Now, you've just learned that YOU have to have a profile on these sites in order to grow your business! YUCK (unless you happen to love that sort of thing…and I bet you don't)

What does that mean to you? It means more time on the computer making comments on all these social media sites.

You may not realize it, but these reviews and your presence on these sites are very important to search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

For the past couple of years, they have been aggregating information about your business and building you your very own little website.

What they haven't told you is that you need to "claim" your page and update it with information, pictures, and videos in order to be "found" by the search engines quickly.

Since 91% of all internet users use a search engines to find information, it's more and more important to be found there.

They also haven't told you that having lots of reviews from customers helps your page come up faster in searches too.

Did you know that the more reviews you have the more traffic the search engines will send you website?

What does your mobile phone have to do with local marketing?

Of these useres, 51 Million use smart phones.

There is a fundamental shift in the way people are communicating.

Texting is big these days. It's not just for kids anymore.

Why should you care and what does it mean to your business? Get this, text messages have a 95% open rate in the first minute or two of receiving them. Now, how does that compare to your email campaigns?

And here's the kicker:

• 73% of new mobile phone buyers report that text messaging is the most important feature on their phone.
• The typical mobile phone user now sends more text messages than mobile phone calls.
• Generation Y and Z consider email passe.
• Fact is, some universities have stopped distributing email accounts.
• You can buy traffic for .02 a click on mobile phones.

See what Internetnews.com has to say about local mobile advertising.

I would love to help you start using local mobile advertising, SMS texting, and mobile coupons in your business today.

Contact me using the form below.

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