Remarketing</H2> <P>You know how sometimes you’ll look at a product on a website, and then you’ll see ads for that very same product for days afterwards? That’s remarketing (also called retargeting). It turns a single web visit into an entire sales funnel, and that’s why we love it.</P> <P>Here’s an example of how remarketing works with local marketing. Let’s say Ellen from Sydney has set aside $20k to have her backyard redone in the January. Although it’s only October, she wants to get a sense of what her options are. She Googles “Sydney landscape architect” and starts clicking on the local business websites that come up on the first page of results. She scans each page for a few seconds, looking for something that catches her eye, and quickly hits the “back” button on her browser to return to the Google results so she can click on the next site on the list. Even though all of these businesses are among the top 10 search results from Google, they only got a few seconds of Ellen’s attention. Statistically, chances are very good that she’ll never return to any of their websites. These businesses lost out on a $20k project because they only gave themselves one shot at her business.</P> <P>Remarketing (continued)</P> <P>Now let’s say that one firm, Westlake Landscape Design, tracked Ellen with a retargeting code (called a pixel) when she clicked on their website. After searching for landscape architects for a few minutes and not finding anything, Ellen got bored and went to Facebook. As she was scrolling through her Facebook newsfeed, she was presented with a before & after video of a residential project Westlake had recently completed. Serendipitous! The following day, Ellen is on Youtube looking for instructions on how to make a coconut Thai soup. She clicks on a video, but before it starts she sees a 15 second segment of testimonials from Westlake Landscape customers interspersed with gorgeous landscape shots. A few days later, Ellen is on the Daily Telegraph website and at the top of the page there is an ad with the now familiar Westlake logo offering a free guide to the 25 most beautiful native plants for Pacific Northwest gardens. She clicks on the ad and is taken to a page where she submits her email address and downloads the guide. Eventually, after several exposures to Westlake over multiple digital channels, she signs a contract with them. This process of educating a potential client and building trust can be done easily with remarketing. Any business that doesn’t run these types of campaigns is missing out on a huge portion of potential business. If you’re not already running remarketing campaigns, you should be!</P> <H2>Reputation Management</H2> <P>Like it or not, good reviews are now essential for local businesses across almost all categories. 86% of people read reviews before choosing a local business. 57% of consumers will only use a business if it has a 4 star rating or better. The bottom line is that reviews can make or break your business, so you need to pay close attention to them.<BR/> Let’s continue our example from before with Ellen who was shopping for a landscape architect. The first thing that Ellen did when she got serious about finding someone to redo her backyard was to go to review sites. She first visited a site called Houzz because it’s focused on both interior and exterior designers. There were literally hundreds of designers in Sydney to choose from on the site, so she filtered her search results looking only for companies with 5 stars, and then she sorted by most reviews to least. As it turned out, Westlake Landscape had 39 perfect reviews and was among the top results. She also checked Google reviews and discovered that Westlake was among the top contenders on that site as well. Again, their multiple 5 star reviews set them apart from their competitors.</P> <P>Reputation Management (continued)</P> <P>How does a business like Westlake earn and keep such perfect ratings? Rest assured it’s not by chance. Many businesses now use clever review management services. Here’s how it works. Every time Westlake completes a job, big or small, the service sends a simple email or a text (or both) to the client asking them to rate their experience from 1-5 stars. If the client responds with a 4 or 5 star rating, Westlake pops up a screen thanking them for their business, explaining that good reviews are the lifeblood of their business. The screen includes a link that goes directly to a single review site. To keep a natural looking review profile, the service rotates the review sites, so Client A might be sent to Westlake’s profile on Houzz, Client B to Yelp, Client C to Google, and so on. What happens if the client only rates Westlake 1-3 stars? The screen that pops up doesn’t include a link to any review site. Instead there’s a form that asks how they could have done a better job. Each time that Westlake gets an unsatisfactory response, a customer service representative is notified and contacts the client within hours to follow up. Reputation Management greatly increases the number of reviews you have on the internet and practically eliminates bad reviews by handling complaints before they become negative comments</P> <H2><A href="https://searchenginesoptimisation.com.au/google-remarketing/">Google Maps Optimization</A></H2> <P>Most small businesses have no idea how to harness the power of Google Maps. Done properly, Google Maps marketing can double or triple your business, and that is not an exaggeration.</P> <P>There’s something called the “Google Maps 3 Pack” that’s triggered by certain words related to local searches. Google will display the 3 Pack at or near the top of the page every time maps trigger terms gets searched. The 3 Pack is important for both consumer focused businesses (B2C) and businesses that sell to other businesses (B2B). Let’s modify our example from earlier to a B2B scenario. We’ll suppose that Westlake Landscape has as much business as they can handle at the moment, and they need to rent an excavator for a few days because all of their heavy equipment is in use on other jobs. Below is an example of what happens when you type in “excavator rental Sydney”. Three businesses are shown, seemingly at random, related to the topic you’re searching for.</P> <P>These 3 Pack results display on both mobile (image previous page) and desktop devices (image above). The mobile results have one key difference: they have a “click to call” button. When a 3 Pack is triggered, the 3 businesses that are featured receive more than 91% of the clicks and calls attributed to that search. Going back to our discussion on reputation management, here’s another point: the business with the most and/or best reviews gets the lion’s share of the action from 3 Pack calls and clicks. In the example above, there is one business with 4.5 stars and 16 reviews, while there are two 5 star businesses with 6 and 7 reviews. Since they are all in the 4.5 to 5 star range, the business with the most reviews (Pacific Rim) will likely win the majority of calls for that query. So how does one go about getting into the 3 Pack? It’s all centered around your Google My Business (GMB) listing, and optimizing it in specific ways. In fact, there is an entire discipline of search engine optimization (SEO) dedicated to getting businesses to show up on the 3 Pack. The best part about GMB 3 Pack optimization is that all of your traffic is free! You’ll pay a monthly fee to an SEO firm to get your listing ranked, but in general that will cost a fraction of what you’d pay in PPC fees for the kind of traffic you get from the 3 Pack.</P> <H2><A href="https://searchenginesoptimisation.com.au/google-ads/">GAINS PPC</A></H2> <P>Our official name for this service is GeoCustomized SKAGs with Local Inclusion, but one of our clients referred to it as “that Google ads insane ninja sh*t” so we started calling it G.A.I.N.S. for short.</P> <P>GAINS is simply a technique for advertising on the Google search platform, but it blows away any local pay-per-click (PPC) campaign strategy we’ve ever used in the past. We’ve easily doubled click-through rates for most local ad clients using this method. Improved metrics increase your quality scores and substantially reduce your ad costs. This one’s a little bit complicated so we’ll give you the cliff notes since we have limited space. If you want to do it yourself just Google “skags” and “geo ads customizers”. And of course if you’d like to hire us to do it we are happy to oblige! We actually use 3 main tactics rolled into one campaign for this method. The first is geo-customization. Borrowing from our earlier example, if somebody in the Queen Ann neighborhood in Sydney Googled “landscape architect”, using geo-customizers we would return a search ad with geographically specific ad copy, e.g. “Queen Ann’s #1 Landscape Designer”.</P> <P>GAINS PPC (continued)</P> <P>We set things up so that every single neighborhood in Sydney gets its own ad, as do nearby cities like Alexandria, Parramatta, etc. Geo-specificity, especially at a neighborhood level, skyrockets click through rates. The second part of this approach is using local search ads. Remember how we talked about the Maps 3 Pack earler? Well you can actually pay for inclusion, where Google shows your business at the top of the maps listings with 3 businesses below you. Sort of a “4 Pack”, if you will. While Google doesn’t guarantee your ad presence on maps, we have a significant advantage because we already know exactly which terms trigger maps results! The third technique we use is Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs), meaning we only include exact, phrase and modified broad match terms in a single ad group for each of your main terms. This super-granular approach to ad groups allows us to closely monitor variants of each search term, split out high performing variants into new groups and quickly identify negative variants for suppression.</P> <H2><A href="https://searchenginesoptimisation.com.au/social-media-advertising/">Messenger Marketing</A></H2> <P>Although gaining in popularity, Facebook messenger ads are still relatively uncommon. Most marketers haven’t quite figured out how to leverage these ads, which is a shame. As a local business, you should take full advantage of this powerful medium before it’s inundated with advertisers!</P> <P>The power of messenger ads is that once you’ve interacted with a potential client once, you can send messages via Facebook whenever you want. Why is that important? It gives you an ondemand, interactive, direct channel to an individual user. It’s like email, except you’ll achieve 98%+ open rates instead of the average 21% that most email campaigns get. And, in many cases you’ll get an instantaneous response. It gets even better! Instead of a random list of people, you can build interactive campaigns with very specific targeting. For instance, let’s say you have a landscape design company and you specialize in incorporating container vegetable gardens into your designs. You could specifically target homeowners in the greater Sydney area that are interested in both organic food and gardening, and are in the top 10% income bracket for the area.</P> <P>Messenger Marketing (continued)</P> <P>So how would all of this work? You could run an ad offering a report “17 Tips for Container Gardening in the Pacific Northwest” with the call to action “Message Us To Get Your Copy” and a button that says “Message Now” . When somebody responds you can use automation to send them a copy of the report. Now you have the ability to directly contact a high income homeowner in your market that has an interest in vegetable gardening whenever you want.</P> <P>How do you leverage that? Well, the following month you could run a webinar on how to incorporate vegetable gardening with landscape design and blast it out to all the people that downloaded your guide. Or you could send them a link to a video of a recently completed landscape design with an incorporated garden. The possibilities are literally endless
