Even Blue Collar Businesses Benefit from Online Marketing
Everybody has a computer these days. Even my 90-year-old grandpa uses one. You can expect most people to not only have a computer, but know how to use it, and use it for just about everything they can. This makes digital marketing more important for business, even ones that aren’t computer related. Blue collar businesses like plumbers, electricians, and mechanics can benefit from a good online marketing strategy.
Customers Expect an Online Presence
These days, so many people make use of the internet for so many things that they just expect you to have some kind of online presence. If you don’t at least have a website, people are unlikely to ever consider you. If that website isn’t well-designed and modern-looking, people will assume that your business is unprofessional. Not looking professional is a good way to kill your business.
Online Reviews Are The Primary Way People Choose Businesses
People have become a lot more wary of marketing and advertising strategies in the past decade. If people pay any attention at all to ads they see, they’ll often be quick to distrust claims. You can pretty much say anything in an ad, after all. On the other hand, they’re far more likely to trust reviews of your business. As we’ve said many times, online reviews leave a huge impact on any business. If you have no online presence, you won’t be able to take advantage of this.
What Online Marketing Can Do For Your Blue Collar Business
Just having a website can get your foot in the door, but there are so many ways you can use your website to further your businesses marketing goals.
1. Educate Customers About Your Business
A website is a great way to expand on what services you offer. With an ad, you have limited space to get across what you’re about and usually have to cover the basics. With a website, however, you can expand on what makes your business stand out from others. When you’re in a business with lots of competition, as most blue collar businesses tend to be, standing out is a must. With a well-designed website, you can have different pages and sections that allow customers to read through what they want to know quickly, in a way that’s easy to find.
2. Communicate Directly With Your Customers
When it comes to getting customers on board for a trade industry, most customers want someone who’s knowledgable, but also able to put it in simple terms for them. There are ways you can use a website for that purpose, even beyond just the text on the site itself. For example, built in chat systems can connect you directly with customers, allowing you to talk to them quickly.
If you’d rather have them call you, they can do that right from your website, too! Most people will use mobile phones to look up businesses. You can put buttons right on your website that will have the person’s phone call you without them even having to leave the website to dial you up.
These give you multiple options for how you can communicate with your customers, giving you control over how they see you and your company.
3. Show Reviews And Get More
With reviews being so important, you want customers to see them. There are apps you can install on your website that will display your online reviews right on your homepage. Furthermore, you can use these apps to encourage happy customers to leave reviews. The more reviews you get, the better your business will do.
Online Marketing Is More Convenient
A lot of methods of traditional marketing are going the way of the dinosaur. Already, most people are dropping TV; just last year, 5.3 million people dropped their cable or satellite tv services, up from 4.2 million the year before. So, what good are expensive tv ads? Ads on youtube tend to be skipped as soon as the option comes up, and nobody ever liked banner ads. How long has it been since anyone picked up a phone book? Why go to the trouble when you can hit Google and type in “business near me”?
That’s why effective online marketing is so important. You can’t fall back on the old methods anymore. Your website and how you use it to interact with customers is the most effective marketing tool you have. It’s cheaper for you than buying ads, and it’s easier for your customers to use. Furthermore, if they go looking for you, they’re more likely to be interested in what you have to say than when an intrusive ad is interrupting their regular browsing.
This means that what’s on your website, the online reviews your business gets, and how you communicate with customers who visit your website is the biggest determining factor for whether or not they decide you’re the business they want.
SEO (Or How To Be Found Online)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the next biggest thing to worry about with online marketing. Your website can be fantastic, but if nobody can find it, it does you no good. Most people won’t look past the first page of search results, so if you aren’t good enough to rank on that top page, you’re not going to find a lot of success.
You need to be found based on how customers are searching online. Some blue collar businesses will be do well through social media, others won’t. In some circumstances, an ad campaign can work, but other businesses will suffer. It requires a fair bit of understanding.
To that end, your site needs to be built around optimizing the search keywords for your local area, your business, and terms important to the ideal customer. Google offers a whole suite of tools to help with this, mostly for free.
Are There Any Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Do Online Marketing?
We would say there isn’t a good reason not to do online marketing, but we might be a bit biased. Nevertheless, there are some reasons why businesses might decide to skip it. We wouldn’t say these are all good reasons. A lack of expertise and inconsistent results in the past, for example, come down to people not knowing what they’re doing and doing it wrong. They might be hiring up marketing agencies without having a proper plan, so the efforts don’t fit for the business model. Other reasons, such as a limited target audience, might allow you to do without under certain circumstances, but that’s a call you have to make with your personal knowledge of how your business runs.
But if a lack of knowledge and experience is all that’s getting in your way, then you don’t have to worry!
We Can Help
While you probably have a good idea of who your ideal customer is and how you want to approach them, the ins and outs of proper online marketing, especially the constantly evolving landscape of SEO, might be outside your expertise. Not to worry, though! That’s where we can help!
Atlas Internet Marketing has years of experience in this. We know the best tools to analyze your website and your web traffic to maximize results. We’ve also developed efficient systems for building your reputation and acquiring the all important good 4-5 star online reviews you need to make your business succeed.
Get in touch with us today to schedule a free consultation. With our help, you can take your business to the next level.