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What's possible with Local Advertising?

by ProfitwithAdam
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
This may not be the right place to ask this question, but it sounds like it might be. My cousin owns a landscaping company and I've been talking to him about doing some PPC marketing. Something i know little about, but know enough for what he wants to do. He is going to be selling $500 of landscaping for $250 on his website as a big mid-season landscaping push. In theory the customer would buy that and redeem it for the whole $500. He asked me how to market that online. I said the best and quickest way is thru PPC.

I told him that if he had a good ad that the people who click on it would mostly be people interested in his offer and that we would only use specific geographic keywords. He asked me how many would buy. I have no idea. What I told him was to expect 10% would buy, the rest would be checking your offer out but not buying. Is that estimate close? I would think with it being more targeted and the offer is upfront, that it would be higher.

I figured that since we are targeting localized keywords and being clear what the offer is on the ad, that window shoppers should be less because they would know the offer going in. Is that sound advice or am I way off the mark on this?

Its my cousin, so I don't want to let him down.

Thank you,
#advertising #local
  • Profile picture of the author tryinhere
    without any testing it would be foolish to guess any numbers for your cousin, rather than expect a windfall, allow a marketing budget or seed campaign money that is non reliant on outcome, that way if all else fails it was an expected or not an outcome that affects his business.

    so lets say you budget $250 as an example set it up and run that, then only after that can you look at numbers and make a call as to if you continue or not.

    with the doomsday out the road yes you are correct, you should expect some returns / sales with highly target ads on a good presented website as to the conversion rate ? who knows but there are those 2 variables alone / a good land page that converts connected to a well prepped ad campaign thats focused.

    all in all the very first point of call would be to do some searches for the keyword / s you think people would use when looking or describing this service and see if there is a market, next look at the amount of local traffic and lastly from there look at the cost of marketing that campaign or average max cpc you will need to pay for a click.

    once you have done that work on a low base such as a 1% or say 5% conversion rate and see if the sums work for you.

    yes i agree the conversion rate should be a lot higher and probably will be but you must form a worse case base to work from, then if you get a 10% conversion or higher your all for happy chappys.

    once the test is done adjust it all up to go from there.
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  • Profile picture of the author ProfitwithAdam
    Thank you for the Advice Tryinhere! That sounds like a great way to test this out! I can envision this being like a Groupon thing for him, except he doesn't lose 40-60% of the purchase price after he already discounted it 50%. He would only lose the advertising cost as I'm not charging him to help him out.
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  • Profile picture of the author uniquemarketer
    There are other online marketing methods he can use to promote his business, which costs very little or free.

    -He can try advertising on Craigslist
    -Get his business listed on Google Places
    -Setup a blog and blog about different topics on landscaping and optimize it for local keywords.
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    • Profile picture of the author Leads4Builders
      Don't waste your time or money with PPC. Get him ranked on the first 7 map results on Google. His business will explode.

      I have a couple of landscaping clients and both of them doubled their revenues from last year..all because they are ranking for multiple keywords in their area. I used to do PPC and traditional SEO for small businesses, but it's more expensive, more work, and less effective. If you need help...send me a PM. I'm glad to help where I can.

      John
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      Killer Local SEO and Google Places Service. Amazing Ranking Proof
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      • Profile picture of the author Social-Media-Marketing
        Originally Posted by Leads4Builders View Post

        Don't waste your time or money with PPC. Get him ranked on the first 7 map results on Google. His business will explode.

        I have a couple of landscaping clients and both of them doubled their revenues from last year..all because they are ranking for multiple keywords in their area. I used to do PPC and traditional SEO for small businesses, but it's more expensive, more work, and less effective. If you need help...send me a PM. I'm glad to help where I can.

        John

        This is dead on. Getting in the 7 pack is not that difficult. I would target things like "landscaping services <insert city and state>" or "lawn care services <insert city and state>" or "lawn mowing services <insert city and state>" depending on the services he actually offers. Not all "landscaping" services do the same things.

        And if you don't know a LOT about PPC then you'll most likely be pi$$ing his money away trying to run an ad campaign. Expecting a 10% conversion rate is VERY agressive in most industries, but that all depends on how how good the ad and landing pages are. Companies spend months or years tweaking and testing both (not to mention lots of $$$) to find the right ad/landing page combinations to make PPC profitable. The chances that someone who knows a little about PPC just happening to create a PPC ad campaign and landing page that is going to be even the slightest bit profitable out of the gate is slim to none (probably much closer to none than slim).
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  • Profile picture of the author David
    Leads4Builders is right on the money,
    we get $2500 a year to do this for small businesses:
    what you want is a top Google Places listing AND a couple in the organics
    most of my local SEO consulting customers are reporting 20% to as much as 50% increase in gross sales.
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    David Bruce Jr of Frederick Web Promotions
    Lawyer Local SEO - |

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  • Profile picture of the author ProfitwithAdam
    Wow! Thank you all for the great advice! I did his Google LBC campaign, but didn't know that i left out a few steps. That has gotten him over $30K in business this year according to him. I also do videos and article writing for him too. I agree that PPC may not be a great idea. I also have set up an opt-in on his website so that he can stay in touch with his customers better. Thank you all for the great advice!
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  • Profile picture of the author russells
    I've got a client who's a builder and he wanted to to build his online presence locally. Here's what I did.

    I setup a website that ranked for keywords simialr to the following:

    Builders in Cornwall
    Cornwall Building Company
    Quality Builder in Cornwall
    Building Firms in Cornwall

    ETC, ETC.

    I did this and within one month he was on page one for these terms (UK Google).

    He had his first job come through the site 6 weeks later and has had mutliple enquiries and work since.

    Forget PPC, do SEO initally and if the offer works scale up to PPC.

    That's my 2 cents anyway!

    Russ
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