Local internet marketing is a curious side-field of traditional internet marketing. Localization — the technique of taking a competitive keywords and adding location terms to it in order to focus on the relevant customer base — seems at first to be the sole element in local internet marketing, but the truth is a bit more complex. That’s because it only addresses the SEO part of internet marketing — but there’s more to the game than that.
Nowadays, major social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google Plus move huge quantities of traffic. If you’re not using some form of social marketing — social bookmarking on the low end all the way up to Facebook ads on the upper end — you’re not really marketing, you’re just doing small-business SEO.
One of the most effective ways for a small business to utilize social marketing is by adding social buttons to their content. Every time you put up a webpage, write a new blog post, or otherwise put anything branded online, you should include buttons. In order of popularity, the major social buttons are:
- Facebook’s “Like” button
- Twitter’s “Tweet” button
- Facebook’s “Share” button
- GooglePlus’ “+1” button
- Any of AddThis’ plugins
- Pinterest’s “Pin It” button
- Any of ShareThis’ plugins
- TikTok’s Share button
Of the top 300 e-commerce sites online, 71% of them use social buttons to drive traffic — and why wouldn’t they? It’s a snowballing effect: the more people that pimp your page on their profile, the more people come to your page to check it out. It creates a driving need for your page to be perfect and your product to be penultimate, but isn’t that a good thing in the first place?
Social buttons quickly divide the market into ‘interesting and good enough to tell your friends about’ and ‘not’. If your business falls into that first category, social buttons will drive traffic to your site and people in your doors. If it’s not, social buttons will tell you that it’s not so you can try something different. Either way, the end result is that your business improves — and the more it improves, the more social buttons become a great way to market your business.
If you’re not currently using marketing automation, it’s time to start. Here’s a quick read on the Three Benefits of Marketing Automation and how just like social media buttons, marketing automation can help take your business to the next level.
