Reaching The Entire DFW Market

Some business owners throughout the Dallas Fort Worth region truly can serve the entire DFW market and even additional markets.  Unlike smaller services which can serve a realistic radius of 5-10 miles (or an even smaller radius), these businesses have a different vision such as:

  • there is enough profit margin in the transaction to justify the time and expense to travel to a small town across the DFW Metroplex and conduct business
  • the business is so unique, or perceived to be so specialized, that prospective customers across the region want the product, service or other benefits associated with the particular business
  • the business can ship products and/or already has representatives near to the smaller towns in DFW

One question is which types of businesses can justify marketing to a wider radius than just the regular small 5-10 mile radius which is common with many local businesses?  Another question is how to reach the smaller towns without having to become a member of each local chamber of commerce or placing ads in every newspaper or print publication across the region?

Types Of Businesses Which Qualify

Here is just a short list of the types of businesses which can pursue larger-radius marketing at the DFW level or even state-wide:

  • Corporate relocation services
  • Specialty legal and financial services
  • Industrial products
  • Higher end home improvement services (e.g. interior design, remodeling, etc.)
  • Custom home builders
  • Surveyors
  • Higher end home repair services (sewer line installation, etc.)
  • Etc.

How To Reach All Of DFW And Beyond

The first thing you need to know is that there are over 200 towns and cities which comprise the DFW region.  This is not just Dallas, Collin, Denton or Tarrant Counties either.  The neighboring counties also are included as there can be highly-qualified prospects in the small towns throughout every DFW county.

To narrow down the options of how to reach these people, and do so in a budget-sensitive manner you have a few options:

  • TV ads — obviously you must be hyper-vigilant about your budget and any tracking you can generate here
  • Same with radio ads
  • Classified ads are a great way to get exposure.  Be sure to optimize your ads to include the towns and cities which you serve; and be sure to play nice by the terms of service and posting rules for the various online classified ads you intend to use
  • Direct mail targeting specific neighborhoods in specific zip codes.  A good mailing list broker, who can highly target your prospects across the region, would be a very wise investment here
  • Paid press release distribution can be beneficial, especially if you mention specific towns in your content
  • Pay Per Click (AdWords) is a smart way to start.  You can target each specific town, but you want to send the traffic to optimized (town-specific) landing pages on your website.  Also, be sure that there is some sort of benefit easily visible to the prospective customer and a “call to action” (e.g. “call today” or “download this coupon”)
    • Note that there are other pay-per-click services besides Google AdWords, Yahoo’s advertising, and Bing’s advertising services.  Please contact us for these alternative options where your competition may not be advertising
  • For business-to-business (B2B) advertising in the Dallas Fort Worth region you may consider targeted advertising within LinkedIn
  • You can do demographic-based targeted advertising, especially town by town, in Facebook.  Just note that:
    • depending on the devices your prospects use, you may not get complete exposure on Facebook to those using mobile devices
    • you likely will have a higher conversion rate if you send the traffic to a page you control within Facebook.  Most Facebook users don’t like to be led automatically off of Facebook at first, so consider sending the traffic to Facebook page you control regularly which has consistently-updated benefit-laden content (coupons, discounts, helpful tips, entertaining videos, etc.)
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  This is one of the trickier, but possibly soundest ways to get hyper-targeted prospects.  You can have created for you a multi-niche website (or a blog which resides alongside your website) which has town-specific optimized pages.  Ideally, the content on each of the 200+ towns is unique including article content, images, any embedded videos, etc.  Just so long as the combination of text/images/videos is unique you should be good, especially for phrases people type in which may have relatively low competition in the search engines.

The latter option (the blog/website with town-optimized pages) gives you additional benefit.  For example, here is a website which has town-optimized pages for varying business niches.  Here is one for a series of highly-related niches.  And here is a site with optimized pages for just one niche.

The benefits here are:

  • That you can control specific content for each town or city in which you want to market.  For example, if you want to give coupons in one town but not another you can do so
  • You have optimized pages to which you can send your pay per click (PPC) traffic such as traffic Google AdWords.  This increases the odds of gaining a higher “quality score” for your ads (assuming everything else is done right) and possibly saving money by reducing your per-click costs
  • The optimized page could rank well in the search engines for the times when the phrase is entered alongside the specific town (e.g. “your business Plano TX”)
  • You even go “deeper” than the specific towns.  For example, if you want to offer incentives to people in specific HOA’s or parts of a town then you can do so.

If you would help on any of these topics then you are welcome to contact us with your specific needs.  Thank you for your time and consideration to share this post.

Next Best SEO – Presentation From McKinney Texas

I want to thank Debra Pope for the invitation to present to her Networking University members who attended the workshop. It took place in the area of McKinney and Allen Texas on May 14 2013.

During the presentation I covered what is known as “Next Best SEO”.  This is where business owners, who simply want the phone to ring with prospective customers or clients, have additional options besides just attempting to rank their respective websites in the search engines.  What many of the attendees didn’t realize is that their websites, or ones given them by a corporate office, may – in fact – be violating several of Google’s best practices.

We covered many of the ways in which a business can grow through the use of internet marketing, of which SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) were just a part.  We briefly reviewed other online marketing techniques such as video, pay-per-click, press releases, online classified ads, etc.

The attendees also learned that each major search engine is, or is part of, a publicly-traded company; and each wants to make ITS quarterly figures!  The goal, then, is to give each search engine’s users the best possible content in a way which is user-friendly, is authoritative and relevant.  One way to accomplish this is to rank OTHER web properties – in addition to the companies’ websites – in order to help get the phone to ring.  Several examples were included in the presentation.

Four (4) action steps were given at the end of the presentation to help any business begin to improve the chances of receiving a call, e-mail or walk-in from a first-time customer or client by SEO efforts on other web properties.  These were labeled also as “promote the promoters” strategies.

Feel free to download this PDF from the workshop:

If you are interested in getting help to promote your website or other web properties which mention you favorably (or otherwise give authority) then you are welcome to contact me.

Thank you again to everyone who attended!

Collin County Lead Generation Companies – Questions To Ask Yourself

Collin County Texas is rather unique from a marketing perspective.  With a population over 3/4 of a million people, it has a mixture of high technology, local service businesses, agriculture, families who have lived in the area for generations and people moving to the area everyday from all over the United States and other countries.  There is a major problem however for many businesses in the area…

… how to reach most of those people easily and quickly!

I Have A Problem Reaching More People In Allen, Frisco, McKinney, Plano And The Rest Of Collin County.  I Am Just Too Busy Running My Business!  How Do I Just Get More Leads And Referrals?!?

If you have sentiments similar to that statement then you may have considered using a lead generation company or service to help you.  There are local-specific companies, internet marketing companies with a pay per lead or pay per appointment model, some will generate leads based on revenue sharing (much like a commissioned sales person), and there are national companies which can generate leads in your industry.  Before you choose one of these there are some questions to ask yourself.

I will get to those in a moment.  Before addressing those questions, please take a look at some of the “big picture” or “birds’ eye view” elements specific to Collin County Texas versus the rest of the Dallas Fort Worth area.

Challenges For Collin County Local Businesses When Attempting To Get New Leads And Prospects From Within Collin County

Unlike Dallas County and Tarrant County – which both have established television, print, radio and other dominant sources to reach a good percentage of the county’s population – Collin County is behind in that regard.  This is not to knock on the hard work of those who work in Collin County media establishments.  The challenge they face everyday, just like the local business owner attempting to reach those in Collin County, is fragmentation of trusted sources of information.

All you have to do is talk with people in Frisco, McKinney, Plano, Allen, The Colony, Prosper, Princeton, Fairview and other Collin County communities.  Ask them one simple question:  “Where do you go first to find out good resources in the local area?”  You would be surprised at the breakdown of what people trust.  Here are just SOME of the replies you will get, assuming you ask a broad range of people across different demographics:

  • their friends and family
  • the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.)
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Craigslist and other classified ad sites
  • the newspaper
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • Pinterest
  • Yelp
  • Daily deal sites (Groupon, Living Social, etc.)
  • online coupon sites + coupon books
  • Restaurant.com and other restaurant review sites
  • Google/Yahoo/Bing maps with the reviews
  • local radio station
  • upcoming event and “things around town” websites
  • chamber of commerce
  • a specific DFW online directory
  • an ad on a local website
  • a particular mobile-friendly (smart phone friendly) website or application (“app”)
  • many others

As you can see, the result changes depending on what is being sought in addition to the demographic/psychographic traits of the person you are asking.  Going forward into 2013, you will see a greater emphasis on review-based information.  This is a change going forward to start to “weed out” the businesses who rely on image rather than results.

How far will this go in 2013 at the Collin County level?  It depends on the audience.  With more tech-savvy people moving into the area everyday, play it safe and generate reviews as much as you can on multiple places – not just your website.  Getting favorable reviews, ideally with actual results within a short period of time, will be a terrific asset.  Get these on your Facebook page, Twitter timeline, YouTube videos and channel, Yelp page, LinkedIn profile (and company profile), Google Places, Google + Local business page and more.

Sadly, many local business owners and executives feel overwhelmed that they have enough on their plates just focusing on running their businesses, managing cash flow, dealing with employees and trying to have some semblance of a life outside of work!  Ideally, they would love get referrals and non-referral prospective clients and customers everyday; but the reality is that it just doesn’t work that way for a respectable percentage of businesses in the area.

Going outside of your business and paying for qualified leads can be a smart move.  There are some pitfalls, though, and those pitfalls have hurt other businesses across the country.  The first step is to ask yourself a few basic questions in order to achieve “wisdom” instead of “experience” — so that you can learn from the mistakes others have made instead of paying a “tuition cost” to gain the same knowledge!

5 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Hiring Any Lead Generation Or Commission Sales Generation Outside Company/Service

Let’s keep this simple.  Here are 5 questions to ask yourself, although you are welcome to ask yourself more targeted questions in order to help you grow your business across North Texas in 2013:

  1. How many leads and prospects generated from an outside company or service can I handle in a given day or week?  Also, what is my current conversion (closing) rate on inbound calls or e-mails from people who were not referred to me by friends or my clients?
  2. How are the prospects “qualified” and tracked?  Am I going to pay only for qualified leads which are transparent to both sides?
  3. Is the service I am thinking about using offering exclusive leads or non-exclusive leads?  If “exclusive”, how much exclusivity do I get and do I have to pay a premium for it?
  4. If the service is providing me non-exclusive leads, how difficult will it be for me to reach the prospective client/customer in a timely manner to have a meaningful discussion?
  5. Do I have a way to follow up with prospective leads even if they do not use my service or product after the first time I become aware of them?  Do I have enough to convince them to join one of my lists (e.g e-mail newsletter, LinkedIn, Faceook page) in case they are dissatisfied with the service they first choose in order to get them to use my service the next time?

Obviously, there are more questions.  Many business owners in Collin County who have used lead generation services, however, when asked these questions have told me that it was the first time they have ever thought about those questions.  They just stampeded into a paying for a service which might not have cared enough to make sure that those questions were addressed properly.  Since the deal has to make sense for both parties, the lead generation service requesting that the local business owner pay for leads should care enough to make sure that everyone’s best interests are covered and are as transparent as possible.

What About A Daily Deal Site? I Love Using Those Coupons And Would Love To Have All Of Those People Calling Me To Do Business

This is a great point many local business owners have made.  To get even 80% effectiveness from a daily deal site, though, you need to be EXTRA careful.  Since you only pay on the purchase of the discount, and not just pay for leads, this should be a “no brainer”, right?!?

Not necessarily.

There are many factors which come into play here, including:

  • Is a daily deal site the best way to reach your prospects, or are there better ways?
  • Will such a deal, once thousands of Collin County residents know about you, actually “cheapen” your image and take you further away from a “trusted advisor” status and more toward a “commodity” status?
  • Do you have any of the 8+ ways to maximize the likelihood that a daily deal site customer will become a long-term customer, paying as close to the regular price as possible?
  • Is your staff trained to handle the influx of new customers should it work?
  • Do you have methods to maximize the odds that you get more positive reviews than negative reviews once you gain the greater exposure?
  • Do you have a unique tie-in with a news story or other event that “dovetails” with the daily deal promotion in order to get even greater exposure across Frisco, McKinney, Allen, Plano and the rest of Collin County and DFW?
  • Do you have any strategies to get images, videos or audio from the daily deal and use it for further marketing purposes?

As you can see, by taking a few minutes to think things through properly you can make an educated decision about generating more leads and prospects.  Again, Collin County residents are fragmented when it comes to how they make buying decisions due to its relatively unique situation unlike most U.S. markets.  By asking these questions you can put yourself ahead of some of your competition and take high-odds actions in 2013 to grow your business.

Should you want any help with the topics addressed in this post then you are welcome to contact me with your questions about your specific situation.  With over 60 methods to reach people in Collin County, we should be able to customize a plan of action which makes sense for everyone and keeps the risks to minimal levels.

I hope that this helps you and your colleagues and friends in some manner.  Please let me know if you would like to see more content on this topic.  If so, I will add it to the queue of upcoming topics regarding local business marketing in 2013.