Marketing has shifted its focus from outbound marketing in which businesses seek out new customers through traditional media (i.e. yellow pages, television ads, etc.) to inbound marketing in which customers find you (i.e. Google, website, etc.). The biggest advantage of inbound marketing is that if it is effective, you can spend more time working on your craft and less time finding new customers. As a woodworker, you probably find the majority of your new clients through word-of-mouth and local advertising. While neither of these marketing channels costs a lot of money, they both cost a lot of time in terms of seeking out the right potential customers and finding the best publications in which to advertise.
One of the best ways for customers to find you is through your website and/or blog. Google your industry and see if you are the top ranked business or if you even show up on page one. If not, you should focus on building content that contains keywords people are using to find businesses like yours. If you don’t have a blog on your website (which will increase your Google page rank substantially because your website will constantly be refreshed with new content), make sure you are posting content on a regular basis that is both engaging and relevant to your potential customers. Also, make sure you link to other websites. The more links and pages you have on your website, the more likely you are to appear high up on the search list.
It’s also important to consider what the goal is for each page on your website. For example, maybe the goal of your “Contact Us” page is to get more potential customers to fill out a form about what types of furniture they are interested in having made and how much they’re willing to pay. When you ask someone to complete a certain action, such as fill out a form, sign up for a mailing list, or buy a product, you are asking him or her to complete a call to action. It is important to have a call to action on as many pages on your website as possible for two reasons: so you can easily measure the number of people who are converting or completing the call to action, and because this will make it less likely they will leave your website. Be careful that your call to action aligns with your web page content. For example, you don’t want to have a “buy now” button on a page that offers information about your company. A potential customer might be turned off because that customer just wanted to find out background information about your company, not to feel pressure to buy something immediately.
The biggest disadvantage of using traditional marketing is that it is difficult to measure its effectiveness. When you put an ad in a newspaper, for example, you have no idea how many people actually saw it and how many of your new customers are buying from you because they saw your ad. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is almost always free and easy to measure. For example, if you have even a basic website, you can isntall Google Analytics, which is a free tool to measure how effective your website really is. It tracks things like the most popular page on your website, the keywords people use to find your website, and the pages that people navigate away from, which are appropriately called “Exit Pages”. The best part is, it is easy to install and doesn’t require an engineering or marketing degree to implement or understand.
Just remember – marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. So give new tools some time and informed tweaking before you deem them ineffective. The best marketing campaigns are constantly evolving!
Comments
I'd add that when you Google your industry, be sure to use a local modifier in your search. For example, a potential customer may search for "Handmade bookcase", but will quickly become frustrated with results from all over the country. Suzy web searcher's next search will be "Handmade bookcase in Atlanta" (or wherever she lives). While it would be nice to show up on the first page of Google results for just "Handmade bookcase", the chances are you won't and Suzy searcher won't search there anyway. Optimizing your pages with the types of products you sell and where you sell them is a simple trick to use on your site, that is in line with how people actually find things.
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