My partner and I have been working for the past year and a half developing a marketing system to help promote local businesses in a certain niche market (sorry wont say what the niche is). But when we go to pitch our service we are running into problems. First this is what we do:
Basically we have developed a website much akin yellow pages which only caters towards this niche, over the past year and a half we have become highly optimized for almost every category in the niche ranking in the top 3 spots in Google Yahoo and Bing (MSN). (outranking even yellowpages, yelp, yellowbook and others)
However we are not only offering a subscription into the directory (which gives the clients more exposure). We build each client a website, they get to choose their domain name, we create a custom classified advertisements to use, and we promote their businesses through Google Adwords, (this is done by having adwords drop the click through onto their listing page on our site.) In addition we give the clients access to a backend where they can track how many impressions their classified ads recieve, how many clickthroughs to their website, and a host of other statistical tools.
This is above and beyond yellowpages, in fact many clients we talk to say they spend 150-300 a month on yellowpages and recieve NO results.
We have a few clients who are very satisfied with the service, and it has helped them land additional business. In fact for most of our clients, only 1 job from a lead covers a months charge or more, and we only charge /mo promotional rate for 6 months then it goes to /mo from there.
Now here is the problem we face when trying to get new clients…. Many of you may have been cold called and pitched by some internet search engine optimization company that promises that they can get you on the front page of Google for a fee.. Most of those companies are shady and provide no results. For some reason when we start talking to people this is what they think we are doing… when in fact this is NOT what we are doing at all!
I’m kind of at a how I can effectively market our service without being confused as one of these shady businesses. Since this is not what we are doing.
