After last week's Nuggets about marketing funnels and determining a funnel cost, I received an email from a reader wanting to know my current recommendations for a marketing funnel.
Here are my recommendations for monthly online marketing, in this order:
1. Targeted Facebook Ads
I'm putting Facebook in first place because it's the easiest to target and deploy. Facebook gives you the ability to create a target audience of all the people within your surrounding towns who don't yet know who you are. You can also include targeting for age, gender, and financial income.
In rural areas of the country, this might be a list of several thousand people, in urban areas, this will probably be in the tens of thousands. Those people will get used to seeing your ad real quickly so make sure to change it regularly to get their attention.
2. Yelp
As of this writing, the minimum you can pay Yelp every month is $375. Their paid service will help support your store because it's location based. Once set up, you have no further need to actively participate.
What I find interesting about Yelp is that users seem to be more interested in reading reviews about businesses that provide good, quality services. I rarely see any reviews that mention how good a company is because they had low prices. It makes a lot of sense to advertise in a system where the users are not worried about price.
3. Google AdWords Express
This is pretty easy for any small business owner to set up. You have to pick a few keywords to target, a target area of towns or a radius, and write the ads yourself. The only targeting you have is broad by location and targeted keywords.
4. Google AdWords
A few years ago, I would have recommended AdWords as my first choice, but they keep changing the interface too often and people always have to relearn things.
The targeting setup for AdWords is more complicated than Facebook, and you need to keep on top of it more frequently. Usually this means you need to hire an agency to assist you.
I've seen each of these methods attract quality customers to retail jewelry stores, but once you get them in the store, you need to continually remind them that you exist. That's where the email blasts come from.
The new generation of customers is highly distracted by all the activity presented by their phone. With all the Facebook push notifications, Tweet, text messages, and shared videos, it's easy to forget that they recently found a local retail jeweler that they loved.
Your emails will remind them. If they eventually decide to unsubscribe, well, you can still reach them through your targeted Facebook ads, Facebook Retargeting and Google AdWords Remarketing.
Even though today's Nugget focused on different digital marketing methods, I feel that print ads, direct mail, and billboards are all still an important part of your marketing mix.
