Facebook doesn’t care about your small business. Influencers are a bad bet for most marketing plans. Google has sprouted digital eyes and ears. And, it turns out you can just pay Google to have people call you. This year has brought seismic change to internet marketing.
THE FACE OF SOCIAL
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know the name of your business. He doesn’t run a charity and he’s got shareholders to think about. Facebook doesn’t owe your business anything and expects you to pay if you want to reach a wider audience. They’ve given humanity one of the greatest websites in history and if Zuckerberg has to spend time testifying in front of congress, then you better believe they are going to profit from their efforts.
Don’t boost posts, it’s a waste of money. If you haven’t already, sign up for a Facebook ad account so you can dive into the dystopian nightmare that is being able to serve ads so specific that people have been able to target their roommate. On the bright side, if you are clever, you can deliver meaningful ads to those who are interested in what you are selling. Unless you are willing to shell out, at a bare minimum, a few hundred dollars a month in Facebook advertising, don’t expect growth from Facebook.
INFLUENCERS
Try to imagine an influencer on Instagram trying to promote a local defense attorney or a self-storage unit. #Ridiculous. Marketing industry leaders can’t stop talking about the rise of the influencer, and if you are a clothing company, the cannabis or music industry, then, of course, influencers matter. But for the vast majority of small businesses, there remains little room for influencers regardless of their services becoming more affordable and their audience growth. Furthermore, there are countless “influencers,” who have purchased likes and followers and are scamming people.
If you choose to engage with an influencer, make sure you have conversions set up in Google Analytics and track, track, track the number of visits, where they came from, time on site, phone calls and obviously sales. Use your data. The influencer will try to make their service look as glowing as possible if you ask them for their data.
PICTURES ARE WORTH A 1,000…
If you haven’t gone here http://cloud.google.com/vision, go there. Do it, now. Drag an image into the box in the center of the page and you will see the massive, and somewhat disturbing, amount of data that Google is now able to understand from a photo. One of the seismic changes in internet marketing in 2019 includes Google’s spooky ability to “see” photos. This means that websites with thousands of pictures are being looked at through Google’s new eyes and this spikes their probability of ranking higher.
THE VALUE OF VIDEO
Every word spoken into YouTube in English will have captions automatically created for it three to four minutes after it’s uploaded. Because Google’s parent company, Alphabet, owns YouTube, you can bet that Google and YouTube now have ears, metaphorically speaking. Because the average highest-ranking YouTube video is approximately 15 minutes, the ability to be a captivating public speaker just became more valuable. If you think a 1,000-word blog post might jump your rankings, consider what adding a 15-minute YouTube video to your website with 2,000 words in it would do.
CALL ME
Instead of paying per click from an ad, imagine you paid per phone call. These are called Call Only ads and Google is selling them as you read this. If you want absolutely minimum risk, then this is the path you can go down. If you want excellent call tracking metrics download the incredibly popular and effective CallRail on your site. Both Google Ads and CallRail have excellent customer support for paying customers, so there are few relevant excuses left to not spend money on Pay Per Click in 2019.
In summary, don’t be greedy when it comes to Facebook, if you are going to post, make sure you have a budget. If you own an insurance brokerage, good luck finding a suitable influencer. If you are releasing a new music record, you can’t live without influencers. Google hears the words you are speaking and sees the photos you are posting. If you want leads today, pay for call only ads. And, yes, the good old days of just placing your business in the Yellow Pages and running radio and TV ads are dead. Advertising complexity isn’t going to slow down any time soon.
Kellen Kautzman is the founder and operator of Send It Rising Internet Marketing , a Las Vegas-based internet marketing agency with more than 30 local and regional clients. Kautzman is a well-regarded expert on growing small business with digital marketing and SEO, a public speaker and published author of the book, “Everybody’s Doing It - Advertising Redefined by SEO Expert Kellen Kautzman,” which initially launched as the No. 1 new release on Amazon.com in the SEO category.
