Who is doing stuff in smaller and/or rural towns?

I'm in a small town situation, too. It's hard to get these "old codgers" to even listen to you!

But, I have picked up a little work here & there. However, due to a doctor's visit yesterday, that's all coming to a screeching halt.

Most of my work is helping small real estate offices get their web sites up there where the search engines will see them. You wouldn't believe the number of their sites that have a page title of "home".

Having said that, there's still some money out there, you just have to work it.

Pete

I have vacillated back and forth about the whole "internet marketing" and "offline" {gag... hate the term} niche. There are so many quick buck opportunity seekers and kids who want to do business with their monitors only. I've been pushed over and over to come out with the "second level" approach to B2B consulting... and I've had a couple of false starts... mostly because I end back up in major consulting engagements that take all my working time. So it comes down to an ROI equasion for me on time spent really... because I'm not hungry per se, and I won't sacrifice time with my kids.

But I have actually coached a few warriors one-on-one in some stuff, and not even charged a red cent for it. I consider those who actually reach out to be serious vs. the get rich quick seekers who don't want to put any effort into something.

I don't want to detract from the "small town" topic here. If someone wants to engage, they can always hit me up.

I have and I do from time to time.

The first step is to take a holistic view of all marketing and sales functions within a business and create a strategic system, front-to-back.

Michael Gerber so eloquently talked about how most entrepreneurs aren't good at marketing or actually operating a business. They're technicians that are good at whatever specific trade got them into business -- I'll even contend marketing people fall into that. They're good at marketing, but service and delivery? BLEH! Marketing focused businesses are the WORST at delivery and follow up. Check the BBB ratings to confirm what I am saying. Heavy marketing and sales focused businesses are the worst.

When you can demonstrate a system approach to building a complete marketing and sales system that tracks every function and activity along the entire way, business owners resonate because you can address specific issues of operational pain. Getting new leads isn't necessarily a big pain... yet that's what the entire idea behind SEO and traffic building is all about.

Okay, so you sell a businss owner lots of SEO. What if their site sucks? What if they have no unique selling proposition or marketing story? What if they have no systematic approact to capturing lead information and following up inside the business?

It's a sequential chain of activity that takes a person along the road from a suspect, to a qualified prospect, to a repeat champion customer.

All of the activities along that chain, the "touches", or the value-adds in the marketing and sales process, these all culminate to create the customer's experience... or the "brand".

Yes, I said it... the BRAND. Direct marketing activities on or off of the web is part of the customer's experience, and actually falls under the bigger idea of branding.

These discreet activities can be online things... like PPC, SEO, article marketing, etc... or they can be offline... like newspaper ads, YELLOW PAGES (Yes... people still use Yellow Pages... a lot actually), direct mail marketing, etc...

How does a business owner fit all of these things together in a successful, efficient sequence to educate a prospect and turn them into a raving fan customer?

That's what I do. Build strategic level marketing and sales systems that reduce a business owner's cost of customer acquisition, increases profit margins, and increases sales while simultaneously reducing the total number of customers required to meet the same level of gross sales and net profit (repeat business from better, more qualified buyers).

When you take this approach to marketing consulting, you speak the language of finance and operations, not the language of computer nerd specialists (the view that most business owners have of SEO and web people).

I actually do more business with medium-sized companies ($10 million to $500 million) in smaller towns because there are a lot fewer marketing firms hammering on them. Their business is also usually not geography-specific as well - meaning they have the things in place where I can work to create high value returns... sales forces, distribution reseller/dealer networks, etc...