Moving companies provide a very important service that you may not fully appreciate unless you have had reason to move, especially over long distances. Regardless of how important a service is, they will remain largely unknown and inaccessible to those who need their services unless there is a deliberate effort to publicize them and what they do.
Advertising or marketing, as we can see here, is a very important aspect of business. Someone said “doing business without advertising is like winking in the dark. You know what you’re doing but no one else does.”
It is one thing to have a great product or service but an entirely different thing for people to know that you offer these services or products. This is why advertising and marketing are very crucial.
Since everyone knows how important it is to publicize what product or service it is you are offering, what we will be looking at in this article are the specifics of a particular type of marketing. We are referring to what is now commonly known as digital or internet marketing.
This simply refers all marketing endeavors that are initiated and executed online for an online audience.
Let’s take a closer look at this.
Why Online?
If you have heard the statement “the world is a global village” it is because of the invention of the internet. This single invention has practically removed the barriers in communication created by distance.
You can be communicating seamlessly with someone on the other side of the world from you. You can collaborate on projects, share stuff and practically do everything in spite of being worlds apart.
Simply put, the world is now closely connected.
What has this got to do with what we are discussing?
As of mid-year 2020, about 4.57 billion people use the internet. Of this number, about 313.32 million users are from the United States of America. You can check out more stats here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/262966/number-of-internet-users-in-selected-countries/.
If you understand how advertising works, then you will know it’s about the numbers. Advertisers pay premium fees to put their product Ads where more viewers will see them.
Given that there are 313.32 million internet users in the US, what other platform can provide this amount of people? The answer is – none!
It gets even better…
With traditional advertising, a lot of money is spent to achieve any result. When it comes to its more recent online variation, you decide your budget. You can start as small as you want and build from there. At whatever level you start, you will get some result if you go about it right.
There’s more…
There’s something called “targeting” which is more or less a game changer with internet marketing. With traditional advertising, the best you can do is to choose your target audience based on time belts, publication type and type of program.
Online, you can decide the exact kind of person who will see your marketing efforts. You can decide if your Ads show only to males, females, specific age groups, and folks with specific interests and more. With this level of targeting, what you get is a much higher conversion rate.
We can round it off nicely by saying that you will spend far less to get good results when you market online. Of course, the trick is in doing it correctly because if you do not, you might just as well be throwing your money away.
We will now look into how to ensure that you market that moving company effectively online.
Setting Up Your Website
While you do not really need a website to market online, if you are really serious about making an impact with your efforts, then you need to not just have a website, but to have a very effective one.
What is an Effective Website?
Do you know the number of websites online today? While this number is always changing, going up and down, as at the time of writing this article, there were almost 1.8 billion websites online. Yeah, you read right.
If someone were to ask you how many websites you knew personally, you may have a hard time mentioning up to 100. Why is this so?
There are many reasons for this with the main ones being that most websites are not meant for everyone and most websites are either badly marketed or not marketed at all.
Given the above, an effective website will have the following characteristics. It will be:
- Well built
- Easy to use
- Clear in its messaging
- Clear in its target audience
- Optimized for search engines (this includes a lot of sub-features)
- Responsive
A lot of the points listed above do actually overlap in practice. We just decided to break them up so as to give you an under-the-hood peek.
Before we even begin to build a website, we must know what the purpose of that website is and who it is targeting. Having this clearly stated is important because it will affect a lot of other aspects of the process.
Your website is a critical part of your online marketing efforts. You can consider it your online office and where all your efforts at marketing online should culminate. This is where your final sale or conversion should take place. It should therefore be ready and able to deliver the desired outcome.
Important Steps to Effective Online Marketing
It’s now time for us to breakdown some specific steps you will want to adopt as you market your moving company online. Though this guide is targeted at moving companies desirous of promoting their services online, any other business can use these same principles and steps to market their products and services.
Let’s quickly discuss some important concepts that you will need to embrace.
SEO Strategies
This is probably one of the most important points we will discuss here. SEO, which is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, is something you need to pay particular attention to. This is what will make your website visible to your target audience.
If you were to carry out a search right now on any search engine for the search term “moving companies” a list of companies will be shown in order from 1 to about 10. This will continue on hundreds and even thousands of pages.
It is SEO that determines what site comes first and which one will be 10th. Of course, you want your site to be top because few people bother with the results on the lower end of the page. They only look at those if the ones at the top do not give them the answer they seek.
SEO can be approached in two ways. You can go for the regular kind which targets the entire world or you could go for what is now called “Local SEO”.
As a moving company, your best approach may be going the “Local SEO” route. Let’s see why.
Local SEO refers to an SEO approach that targets specific locations. That is, visitors in a location are targeted usually because the product or service is for that locality.
For example, a baker’s shop located in San Diego has no business advertising to people around the country. Given that it is a baker’s shop in a specific location, its primary customer base will be located in that same location.
When such a shop therefore decides to carry out some SEO strategies, they will need to focus on Local SEO for greater results. This includes among other things choosing keywords that are location specific. An example will be “bakers in San Diego”, “San Diego baker’s shop” etc.
For moving companies, though many of them can operate nationwide, the journey will always originate from a specific location. They will also have offices in fixed locations around the country.
What they should therefore do is focus on locations where they have existing offices and carry out Local SEO campaigns for those areas.
If you want to know more about Local SEO, you can read this article: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/local-seo/.
Social Media Presence
As part of a general online marketing strategy, having a strong social media presence is very important. Social media provides you a point where you can easily interact with your existing customers and new ones.
It also allows your customers to interact with themselves. If you’ve done a good job with the services you provide, you will find that customers who have enjoyed those services will be quick to promote you and defend you if someone tries to malign your brand for any reason.
For the importance of social media presence to really sink in, below are some stats you should be aware of.
- Number Active Facebook Users: 2.7 billion globally, 240 million in the USA.
- Number of Active Twitter Users: 330 million globally, 62.55 million in the USA.
- Number of Active Instagram Users: 1 billion globally, 130 million in the USA.
Simply looking at those stats above will show you how powerful these platforms are and why you must maximize your presence there.
Targeted Advertising
Advertising online is essential to your success. However, what is more important with your advert is proper targeting. If you sell ice-cream and you target Eskimos, regardless of how much you spend, you are likely not going to make much sales.
You must target the right demography and also use the right keywords to ensure that your Ads will show only to people who are likely to need the services you provide.
Customer Feedback
Getting customer feedback is as important for you as it is for your marketing. While you may need these feedback to improve your services, your potential customers need these feedback to decide whether or not to engage your services.
You must therefore do two things: ensure the services you render are top notch and then ensure you get each satisfied customer to leave a review on your site or social media account for others to see. These will act as recommendations.
Third Party Review Sites
Some marketers do a lot of under-handed things to get visitors. This includes creating fake reviews. To therefore ensure that your customers do not doubt the authenticity of the reviews you show, link to third party review sites. This will assure your visitors that the reviews are from real people and not fake ones written by the website builder.
Consider a Referral Program
We’ve decided to include this at this point because it can be a very powerful tool in any marketing effort. This is why network marketing is still regarded as one of the most efficient forms of marketing.
If you create a program where an individual can earn some money if they recommend someone to use your services, you will most certainly get some folks to provide you with free adverts. The truth is that if you are doing a good job, you will likely get recommendations from people.
However, by attaching a reward to the recommendation, you make it more worthwhile for people to recommend you. Some folks will now even go out of their way to ensure they push the services you offer as part of their own business efforts.
Conclusion
There is a lot of competition in practically every business field and the moving industry is not left out. As more and more businesses are established, the competition gets stiffer. The businesses that will succeed are those that can master not just their direct area of business but the art of effectively promoting the services they offer to the right audience.
Online marketing provides the most effective and affordable way of doing this. There are many different components to achieving the perfect online marketing campaign as we have seen above. All of the different components must work together to achieve the final outcome.
You can either take some time to learn how to implement these strategies or you can employ the services of experts to help you with them. Either way, your business may not be in existence for much longer if you do not quickly take advantage of all the marketing opportunities that are now available to you online.
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