Successful small, local businesses thrive when they carve out their niche by catering to a local group of loyalists, develop deep relationships, and create customers for life.

Social Media has the potential for large companies to feel small and make each customer feel valued like local businesses have been doing for years.

My local dry cleaner

Each week when I drop off my dry cleaning at the local dry cleaner, the owner greets me by my first name. I’ve even seen the owner working out at the local gym and he still referred to me by my first name.

Making me feel valued and worth remembering

It’s one thing to see a customer’s vehicle pull into your parking lot giving you have a few moments to recall their name, it’s another to see the customer out of context and still remember their name.

It’s hard to explain how this feels as a customer to be remembered both in and outside of the business.

I have yet to feel this way after visiting or purchasing from a website.

Which is your social media strategy?

That of my local dry cleaner? Or something else:

There’s little in the relationship and loyalty department to be gained when your business’ Twitter account is for posting your cheapest products, your Facebook page is about acquiring the most followers, and your blog is filled with content designed for search engine rankings and not people.

Build a relationship, not a campaign

The point of Social Media is not to “build a list,” “go viral,” or “get impressions/mentions.” Social Media is not a campaign.

Social Media, done correctly, enables your business to intelligently connect with your loyalists to build deep relationships over time.

Online marketers, brand managers, and channel marketing managers: Why are we in business?

• To build our mailing list?
• To “get more traffic” to our site?
• To increase average time spent on our site?
• To increase average pageviews per visit on our site?
• To get more new users to visit our site (no matter how qualified)?
• To get more followers on twitter?
• To get more fans on Facebook?

None of the above.

These are by-products of a marketing campaign. In fact, these are not even indicators to suggest positive or negative performance of a campaign. Why? Because they are not relevant to a consumer/customer. If these are listed as goals of a campaign then this is “marketing for the sake of marketing.”

What is relevant to a consumer/customer?

Growing your mailing list by 10% does nothing if that 10% never buys your products. Increasing time spent on your website does not suggest you’ve tapped a resource for new brand advocates, either (it may however suggest you’ve created additional roadblocks preventing site visitors from completing desired tasks in a short amount of time).

Meaningful messaging that triggers action leading to a conversion — this is marketing and it’s why we’re in business. Anything else is just noise that makes your brand irrelevant to your target audience.

In January this year I was doing an analysis on the traffic sources to the hobby-based site I run (SuperMotors). Since we run the site as a hobby, it must pay for itself via direct subscriber fees and advertising revenue (on a CPM basis). From ad revenue standpoint, more traffic to the site equates to more revenue. Simply increasing the pageviews that existing traffic is already making is not enough in a CPM environment because ad networks will optimize ads to show less frequently to visits/sessions that have already seen their ads. Instead, we needed to look at creative ways in drawing in more visits to the site.

Referring search traffic is a significant driver in website traffic

What I found over an 8-month period — I knew it was the leading referrer in traffic, but it was surprising to see that it was the leader by a clear mile — was Google Organic search was driving over 37% of traffic to our site. The next closest traffic referrer was only at 11.7%.

Google’s search index of our site (in January ’09): 56,800 pages

Perform a Google search on your site index with this query: site:www.yoursite.com . In the case of SuperMotors, the 37% of traffic being driven by organic results in Google was a result of 56,800 pages in the Google index for www.supermotors.net. Not bad, but when compared to competing enthusiast sites who had indexes in the several hundred thousands, it was substantially low.

Bottom line: we were missing out on revenue opportunities by having a small natural search index.

Google Webmaster Tools: Adding Sitemaps

Sitemaps are the single most cost-effective way at increasing search visibility for your site with Google and getting additional, free organic traffic driven to your site. The premise is simple: the more content that Google indexes from your site, the more keyword hits there will be for your site. Rankings of these pages are another story altogether, but long tail search can account for a substantial portion of traffic being driven to your site. Here’s the link to Google’s webmaster tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Here is a screenshot of one of our sitemap indexes (for photos posted by our members), there are 11 separate pages each with 50,000 records each:

Even 8 months after submitted this Sitemap, of the 529,979 unique URLs submitted, Google has still only indexed 339,578 or 64% of them. Over time, this figure will continue to grow as the Googlebot absorbs more and more pages out of the Sitemaps.

Google’s search index (8 months later) of our site after adding Sitemaps: 1,200,000 pages

For the past 8 months, the Googlebot has been methodically inhaling more and more pages from our various sitemaps to increase our searchable index for SuperMotors.net in the Google Search index. Our search index increased from 56,800 to 1,200,000 — a 2100% increase in indexed content free of charge.

Your results will vary — we have a lot of user-generated content and the 1,200,000 million pages represents forum messages, pictures, sounds, and videos posted by 10′s of thousands of members over several years. For sites without user generated content, indexed content will probably be much lower — and this is OK. Apple.com for example, has approximately 115,000 indexed pages in Google at the time of this writing.

Referring organic Google visits have increased 5.76%

As the result of simply adding Sitemaps and telling Google about them via the Webmaster Tools page, we have seen a 5.76% increase in organic visits from Google. All other things equal, when you increase site visits by any percentage free of charge, this will result in increased revenues from CPM advertising programs. Or in the case of e-commerce/retail sites, this should increase online sales provided that you’re converting these visits at the same rate as other visits.

Look at some of your favorite websites in Google’s search index — impressive results or not really? When you have a big brand name, you may not spend as much effort in the Sitemaps arena. However, organic search is highly qualified traffic because someone has searched for a keyword that you have on your site. Increasing your search index size is the first step in taking share away from your competitors online. Optimizing the content on those pages is another tactic altogether — but content optimization won’t matter if Google doesn’t know the page exists on your site.

In light of the recent iPhone 3GS announcement this week at Apple’s WWDC conference, I investigated pricing and navigated through the “upgrade” steps made available on Apple’s site. My wife currently has an aging Nokia phone that is eligible for an upgrade and the 8GB iPhone fits the bill for her needs.

Abandoning the purchase funnel

Having said that, I went through the multi-step validation process on Apple’s site, but it was unable to retrieve our account information from AT&T, to which I was prompted to search for a local Apple Store. Not needing to do this, I simply abandoned the purchase funnel with a mental note to “visit the store this weekend” since I hit a dead end on the site and wasn’t going to be able to complete the upgrade online.

Automated follow-up to purchase abandonments

About 15 minutes later, I received the following, automated email:

Very impressive — an automated follow-up recognizing that I abandoned the purchase funnel for the iPhone upgrade. I must say that I am not used to this type of marketing where the website acts like a true salesperson.

Technically speaking, it’s not difficult to implement this. It’s a perfect blend of leveraging technology to solve a business problem: how do you capture the consumer’s attention after they’ve left your site without making a purchase?

I was floored when I saw the following article in a recent MarketingVOX daily newsletter:

Frustrated by Difficulty, Half of Marketers Forgo Analytics

Marketers will continue to invest significantly in online marketing this year, but less than half (47%) actually use analytics to measure their campaigns, and one-fifth only have a ‘basic’ website, according to the sixth annual marketing survey from Alterian (via MarketingCharts).

A marketing department can be a competitive advantage, but only if marketers understand how to measure campaign effectiveness.

Marketing budgets are usually the first to get trimmed in difficult economic times and it’s no surprise with over half of marketers not being able to tie a return (in revenue, customer satisfaction, brand awareness, etc.) to marketing dollars invested. A CFO at any company is going to quickly zero-in on this spending and cut what they don’t understand and certainly what isn’t being measured.

Are you measuring the effectiveness of your website with web analytics?

Free analytics tools readily available from Google and Yahoo! allow you to jump right in. But, it’s not just the access to the technology that will help derive value from marketing investments; ultimately, it’s accountability and the desire to continually improve your campaigns. Without either of these two characteristics, then you’re just viewed as an “expense” that can eventually be cut.