Let’s talk about marketing philosophy.
You might be tempted to look at big players on the scene: Coca-Cola, Disney, your favourite car company. These companies don’t just advertise their products, they advertise a lifestyle. They want to influence attitudes, not just behaviours.
Your ambition might be to do the same. As a small business owner, that’s almost certainly not in your budget. Large companies can do this because they buy so many ads in so many places that it’s almost impossible not to be influenced by them. You simply won’t be able to match their ad buys.
What do you do instead? Influence behaviours.
You’re going to want to focus on your marketing and sales funnel. You need to give people the basics: you exist, you have products and services that will improve their lives, and they can get them quickly, easily, and for a good price. Coke doesn’t have to convince anybody their drink is tasty because everyone has tasted it. You’ve got to get people the first taste of your services so they keep coming back.
Vancouver’s Market
There are a lot of ways to increase awareness of your business. Word of mouth is great. Advertisements are useful, from billboards to Facebook Ads. What’s the best way to advertise in Vancouver?
The answer to that question depends heavily on your budget, but we can analyze Vancouver’s market for a better idea. We know you’re a small business, so large multimedia ad campaigns probably aren’t feasible. We know Vancouver is densely populated; while the City proper has about 600,000 people, Greater Vancouver has over 2 million. We know the population of the City and Metro area are steadily growing, with the Metro population growing more rapidly. We know that much of this growth is a result of immigration.
This means that if you’re trying to advertise to all of Vancouver, you’re competing with a lot of other businesses (unless your business is very idiosyncratic in the products and services it offers).
You’re not going to shy away from this competition – you’re going to beat them. The important thing is figuring out how – one great method is to segment the market into slices, and advertise to those slices.
Instead of advertising to all of Greater Vancouver, your campaigns could target neighbourhoods in Vancouver, like Killarney and Oakridge, and smaller cities like North Vancouver and Port Coquitlam. You’ll be able to edge out your competition in those areas through hyper-localized marketing, which eats away at their share of the pie.
Population growth achieved primarily through immigration makes it more difficult to attract an audience through traditional ad campaigns. New immigrants might not be plugged in to the same cultural infrastructure as long time residents, and one-time ad buys will fail to attract newcomers who arrive once the ad buy is over. Long-term solutions that work within infrastructure used by newcomers and long time residents alike may be more profitable.
Putting It All Together
We’ve established that we want to be able to target smaller niches to establish a foothold in various markets, and we’ve established that we want to do so using infrastructure that everyone in Vancouver is liable to use.
Search engines are the place to be.
When you search for something, the search is inherently local; Google and other engines will try to find products and services near you, because that’s what people find most convenient. Search engines are used by everyone; where else do you go when you want to find something?
The great thing about search engine optimization (SEO) is that it’s a holistic, ever adapting discipline. By holistic, we mean that the good practices that improve how you rank in search engines will improve your entire online presence, from reviews and customer service to social media presence. By ever adapting, we mean that as people’s wants and needs change, what they search for will change. As what they search for changes, the algorithms search engines use will change. That means that the sooner you start Vancouver SEO services, the better – you’ll be more able to adapt, keeping you on top of your competition.
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