I recently found some things that are just completely baffling me. I can not imagine how these businesses could do what they are doing.
A few weeks back I received one of the bulk mailer packs. You know the envelopes that have a stack of about 20 – 30 ads in them.
I went through all the ads and pulled out the ones that did not have a website shown in their ad so that I could contact the business owners about developing a website for there small business.
The first thing that I found was that several of these sites did in fact have very good websites. But yet they did not tell anyone about them in their ad. These businesses were missing a huge chance to make contact with potential customers. If they mentioned their website in the ad, and then captured visitors email addresses once they came to the site, they could have continued to market to these people long after the print ad was in the trash.
The next thing I found blew my mind. In this one mailing I came across 5 ads that mentioned the companies website, but the site itself did not exist or wouldn’t come up. They paid a whole lot of money for the ads, but didn’t even think to check their website.
The final site was the icing on the cake. It was an ad for a home remodeling company. The website was advertised. Only problem was, the website was actually the site of a competitor of theirs. The domain name was sort of kind of similar, and the ad got it wrong.
A small business website can be a very economical way to reach future customers or clients. Give them something of value when they get to the site in exchange for their email address so that you can stay in contact with them. Use the site to entice your visitors into contacting you for more information. Just be sure that you check to see that it is up and running before you go and advertise it to the whole world.
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Tags:internet marketing,laurel maryland business website,local business marketing,small business advertising