Business Marketing: How to get More Clients and Bigger Profits Using New Technology and Applications
February 16, 2010 by admin
Filed under General Articles
The world of Internet marketing is changing as we speak. When you can be in command of social marketing, your business will soar to the top of your market.
Finally, entrepreneurs who have been searching for methods of success within onlines business now have a better, more fair chance because of social media.
Reduced costs involved with social marketing and the ability to interact with customers easily through new technology and social media applications, make it possible for newbies to jump in and quickly become a trusted authority in a certain niche. This translates to more customers and increased profits in less time.
With social media marketing, business owners no longer need to battle their way to the top of their industry. By doing your research on social marketing, you can become a dominant force in your market.
Attract and convert customers
One word can describe the best philosophy for getting clients: relationship. You must establish credibility and solid communication with all possible leads, thus making it easy to convert them into buyers.
But how do you build these valuable relationships? The key is to follow your clients. By doing studying your target audience, you will be able to locate their prime Internet hang outs. Look at different blogs, discussion groups and social media networking sites in order to connect and form relationships with the members of your niche. When you locate these sites, participate in the current conversations. By posting thoughtful questions and valuable information to help others, you can become a part of the community.
It only takes a handful of quality communications with a group to become a valued member. Become the individual that is responsible for growing your business by establishing yourself as a industry expert. You are then permitted to share your business by promoting a link to your site or reference an article you have written.
Rather than approaching these social communities from a seller’s perspective, you approach them from a relationship perspective, which allows you to earn the right to present your products and services in time.
Create bigger profits
In order to maximize your profits, it is important to get past the mind-set of doing anything and everything for one sale. Instead, your focus should be on the repeat customer. Overall, it does take a lot of initiative to produce that one customer, so make it the best use of your time?
Customers need constant attention inorder to stay interested. A email newsletter, distributed monthly, is an effective way to stay visible to customers and keep them updated. That way, when they think of something they need, they will come to you instead of the competitor.
Your marketing communication efforts need to be more than just a sales pitch. Learn to build a presence with your customers by giving them something they can benefit from like special reports or free sample chapters. Brand yourself as a leader in your market by giving your customers the type of information and support they need. By doing this, your audience will remember your site and refer back to it when they need assistance.
Business marketing is so much more than it used to be. Use social media technology, rather than traditional advertising, to reach out to potential customers and increase your businesses bottom line.
Open or enclosed landscape trailer? – GopherHaul Lawn Care Business Marketing Forum Show
September 11, 2009 by admin
Filed under General Articles
http://www.gopherforum.com When most landscapers start up their business, they tend to start with a truck only. Then later they may add an open trailer. At a certain point you may be asking yourself whats better to have, an open or enclosed trailer and why?
Thats the question one of our new forum members asked and he quite a few responses I think will help you make up your mind as well.
Brandon: Hi everyone my name is Brandon and I am the president of my own landscape & maintenance corp. I have been in business for 9 years and hope to find continued success long into the future. I was wondering if anyone could provide me with some positive and negative attributes of an enclosed trailer as opposed to an open utility trailer to move lawn care equipment from job to job? I have an open trailer now and I am thinking of making the switch over to an enclosed one.
Keith: I can think of a few pros and cons of the top of my head.
Pros:
– Ability to lock.
– Protection from rain.
– Larger area to put name/logo/phone number.
– Looks more professional.
– Possible increased slipstreaming giving better gas milage (offset by weight, Im sure).
– Ability to put shelves/storage areas.
– Protects cargo from rocks kicked up by your truck.
– Winter storage.
Cons:
– Increased cost.
– Increased axle and tongue weight.
– Inability to load from top (leaves, mulch, dirt). This is the biggest negative I can think of.
– Doesnt air out well when mower has wet grass or fuel fumes.
– Reduced freedom of movement when you are quickly grabbing a trimmer, etc.
Chuck: I run enclosed trailers currently. It is added weight, & its like dragging an 8′ wall behind you so fuel economy suffers a bit. But I think the added security, & having a huge billboard behind you all day offsets the negatives.
I have gone to many estimates & when I pull up they say Oh yeah, Ive seen you guys all over town you stay pretty busy huh? The fact that they recognize the rig & that Ive been around a while adds instant credibility.
So many guys run trucks with no decals or only little magnets & open trailers. I pass them all day long & they all look the same. So that seems to make a big difference.
The biggest negative I have found is that here in Florida its hot. So when we run these machines for 8-11 minutes at a time & load them up, drive 2 minutes & repeat all day they dont really get to cool down. an open trailer would at least let air blow past them. I have offset this by running full synthetic oil in all my mowers to add some protection against the added heat & we usually end up throwing the trimmers in the back of the trucks between jobs.
I will stay with enclosed trailers & if not I would have my truck professionally wrapped to make it more recognizable.
I think it depends on where you currently store your trailer. If you park your trailer on your driveway at home and need to unload all of your equipment each night into a garage, that is going to take a big bite of time to load it in the morning and unload it at night. So consider these all of these factors. Constantly strive to make your business more streamlined and profitable.
If you are in need of free lawn care marketing material for your lawn care business, please visit our site at http://www.gophersoftware.com. We have hundreds of free lawn care logo, flyer, door hanger and web templates you can download and use for your lawn care business. We also have free lawn care business contracts, estimate and proposal forms. Download our trial version of Gopher Lawn Care Business Software. Gopher will help your lawn care business schedule and invoice more customers in less time, allowing you more time to grow or enjoy your life. Check out my lawn care business blog at http://www.lawnchat.com and my lawn care business forum at http://www.gopherforum.com
Duration : 0:5:28
Advertising And Branding Today
September 1, 2009 by admin
Filed under General Articles
Watch any given television long enough, and you’ll be greeted by advertisements. And in today’s ever-competitive market, the real story is behind the scenes, where companies face a constant battle to stay ahead of the competition. And with brand names offering hugely lucrative contracts for the right image, the art of advertising today is massively important.
The actual art of advertising and branding is a lot more sophisticated and in-depth than the consumers they target may realize. Long before an advert even reaches the screen, or print, it has been subject to pain-staking research, focus groups, marketing surveys, and many other methods of determining the current state of the target market. Without this information, releasing a product runs the risk of commercial suicide if the consumer isn’t ready. There’s no such thing as luck where advertising a brand, either established or new, is involved. It takes a lot of hard work, grueling hours in meetings and highly skilled teams of creative minds to finalize a concept.
Part of this process, and a way of determining whether a new brand and accompanying advertisement has succeeded or not, is actually one of the simplest. By providing a group of consumers with either an image, a tag line, or even just a combination of colors and sounds, and they recognize the brand behind the advertising, then the hard work has paid off.
This is where the advertising and branding of a product is so important, by firstly ensuring that consumers will recognize a given product or brand. The next important factor is actually persuading consumers to associate certain attributes with your product. These can range from reliability, pricing, value for money, etc. This is one of the most difficult, yet most intrinsically important sources of advertising and branding success. An instance of this is if you mentioned mouthwash – is there a brand that springs to mind immediately? How about favourite destinations to go on vacation – does one resort receive more recommendations than others? Even if that particular resort hasn’t been visited by everyone who mentioned it, just the fact the advertising of that resort makes it sound so enticing that they perceive it’s the destination they should go to, is a sure sign of successful brand advertising.
Yet if successfully advertising a brand is difficult enough to begin with, it can be even more so trying to reach out to new markets with the same product. The stronger the brand and the more successful the initial advertising campaign, the more difficult it becomes to find new avenues. Despite possibly having the number one product on the market, any new advertising still needs to go through the whole process again from scratch. After all, what worked for one product is not guaranteed to work for another.
And this is where the true power of advertising and branding becomes apparent, and is the strongest proof yet that it’s one of the most important in determining whether a company succeeds or fails.
For more articles on this topic, go to www.tavs.co.za/branding/
Lawn Care Business Website Search Engine Optimization Tips – GopherHaul Podcast
August 25, 2009 by admin
Filed under Search Engine Optimization
http://www.gopherforum.com Search engine optimization 101 for lawn care businesses. – GopherHaul Podcast
You can put together a great looking site but people need to find it when they are searching for lawn service. How do you get your site to appear when a potential customer is looking for lawn care service? You need to know what they are looking for and you need to give them what they want. The keyword here, is keywords!
What are your keywords? Well say for instance you lived in Denver, Co and offered lawn care. A potential customer is most likely going to be looking for Denver Lawn Care or Denver lawn maintenance. If you are unsure of what your keywords should be, ask your friends or family, what words they would search for to find a local lawn care business online and go with the words you hear most often in response. I would think you would want to keep the keyword count to a minimum, maybe 4 or so.
Your ideal keyword count should be between 10% and 20% of the total word count of your site, so ask yourself, where are you ranking?
To figure this out do the following.
* Right click on your websites main page and then left click on select all.
* Open up your word processor and then paste the text into a new document.
* Use the word count feature of your word processor to show you the total word count of your webpage.
* Then do a search and see how many times each of your keywords appear.
* (total word count) divided by (keyword count) will give you the percentage.
Try this out and see how you are doing.
Now lets see how it is put to use. A new forum member posted an introduction and asked a great question I used a Gopher lawn care business web template from this site to create my lawn care company website and just got it on the net earlier this morning. How can I attract potential customers to my website?
You are not going to believe this example I am about to show you but its real. Matt has done such a great job with key words and having other sites link to his lawn care website that he appears in 7 out of the top 10 search results. Thats right! You heard right! In fact, if you were competing with him in his area, the chances of a new customer finding you are next to nothing because most people will not go beyond the first 10 results to their search.
Matt: When people to a search for lawn service or lawn care in my area I am usually have all 7 slots out of 10 or sometimes 8 slots out of 10 on the search engine. Do a search for lawn care in dothan on google and you will see.
You will see a bunch of J & M Lawn Care links. Also I am located in the local business directory.
This is just so outstanding! If you are going to have any chance at all attracting customers on the internet, you need to visit these sites that are linking to Matts site and then fill in your business information to have them direct to you in your area. Also review your key words and let us know how all this works out for you. Join in on the discussion at the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum here.
If you are in need of free lawn care marketing material for your lawn care business, please visit our site at http://www.gophersoftware.com. We have hundreds of free lawn care logo, flyer, door hanger and web templates you can download and use for your lawn care business. We also have free lawn care business contracts. Also download our trial version of Gopher Lawn Care Business Software. Gopher will help your lawn care business schedule and invoice more customers in less time, allowing you more time to grow or enjoy your life. Visit our lawn care business forum at http://www.gopherforum.com
Duration : 0:8:4
Internet Marketing 4 Steps To Success By Derek Gehl
June 5, 2009 by admin
Filed under Internet Marketing
http://www.marketingtips.com/reality-101/t/825916
Discover the #1 FATAL mistake
most online entrepreneurs make
when first starting out…
And how YOU can avoid it!
Duration : 0:6:22