Love a Local Business with Intuit
Small business software developer Intuit is doing its bit for the community and the economy by promoting a rather special program called “Love a Local Business.” Each month during the course of the program the company will allocate five local businesses a $1000 prize, or grant as they call it, with one of those five receiving $5000 on the basis of a community’s votes. Any local business can be eligible and all it takes is a simple nomination from the program website. Small business owners can even nominate their own company.
Love a Local Business is integrated with the successful Google Maps widget and you can drill down to your locality to see the local businesses nominated close to you. Eligibility is based on inclusion within the Google Maps database, so this is another reason to get a local business registered with the service. As we know, Google Maps results often show in a prominent position within search results and this certainly helps when geo-targeting keywords for potential traffic.
It’s important to mobilize your army of fans and take advantage of your followers. Once the business has been nominated, the more people that vote for it, the better and the more descriptive and unusual comments the better the chance of it receiving that grand prize. We will surely see a lot of requests on Facebook business and fan pages and numerous tweets as votes are solicited from an organization’s followers.
Intuit has also developed a widget that you can include in your own blog or website, using simple embed code to help you build awareness of the campaign and start spreading the word of mouth. To date, the company has awarded over $60,000 for this program, which is effectively designed to encourage consumers to “shop local.” Intuit is promoting their “Weblistings” product, which for $99 per year ensures that your business information is found on major local search related sites, including Google Maps and Yahoo Local.
Some entrepreneurs are being very creative when it comes to interaction with this program and are offering sweeteners or deals to their fans or followers to gain attention. Consider making some kind of donation or giving a special gift of your services to a nonprofit organization, encouraging people to nominate you in recognition of your philanthropy. Of course Intuit also hopes that you sign up for one or more of their products, as well…
Have you used Love a Local Business?
Adam Toren
Use Your Website To Get Purchasers to Your Physical Store
As we transition more toward a virtual world, it is quite amazing to see that more than 50% of “bricks and mortar” businesses do not yet have a web presence. As potential consumers use Internet search engines to do their research before they go out into the real world, those companies without a website risk being left out. For the off-line retailer, however, it is not good enough to just throw up a portal and expect to earn riches, as the entrepreneur must pay attention to the site composition to ensure that visitors make the connection between the online site and the off-line location.
On-site optimization is often focused merely on helping the website achieve a great position in search engine rankings, so that the would be consumer can find the site in the first place. This is of course very important, but if you are mostly relying on actual visitors to your bricks and mortar store then you have to do a lot more.
One of the biggest mistakes that many retailers make when considering a website is to assume that the website should be divorced from the actual physical location for some reason. They assume that a website is only good for e-commerce and they may or may not be geared up, or wish, to sell any of their products online. They are missing the bigger point here – the website is primarily a source of information and they should do everything they can to ensure that the visitor is “converted” in one way or the other.
If the website is not to be used for e-commerce, then the page must be designed to lead visitors easily to information showing your physical location. This will require a clear link in a prominent position on every page, using appropriate texts such as “find our locations,” or “how to contact us.” Some webmasters make the mistake of including contact details within a vaguely termed “about us” section. Don’t make the visitor think twice about anything, make it obvious.
These days it is fairly easy to incorporate a Google maps widget showing in clear detail exactly where your location is and remember to include your opening hours and customer service phone lines in prominent positions. Additional phone lines are very cost effective and should be used to help you track your clients. For example, use a different customer service phone number on your “contact us” page and another phone number on each of your product pages. Remember to keep track of client paths by asking the appropriate questions at the point-of-sale.
Any marketing initiatives that you engage in should be tracked and tested. This may require a process of education amongst your staff. They should get into the habit of asking appropriate questions to determine whether visitors found your location through your website or not. Always try and get your visitors to give you their e-mail addresses, so that you can send questionnaires for more feedback.
Is your website connected to your physical store?
Adam Toren
