Get Internet Marketing Results That Count

A business colleague forwarded me an email last night from a social media marketing “expert”  in my area.  She’s started to social media workshops and internet marketing presentations similar to those I’ve been offering for the past 16 months on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Canada. 

Her press release was impressive citing how she’s attracted nearly 7, ooo people to her Facebook pages and 3,000 Twitter followers in just a little over a year.  For a local small business owner, that’s significant.

But followers and fans are only one measure of social media marketing success.  If you’re using social media for business, then website visitors to your main business website and ultimately sale conversions are the real metrics every small business owner should be tracking.

How big of a threat will this business be?  How effective is her internet marketing strategy? 

Here’s a lesson for every small business owner.  It’s now easy and free to check out how competitive you are compared to your competitors…and vice verse. I simply pulled up two website traffic analyzers - Compete and Hubspot’s Website Grader - to evaluate how effective the hub of my internet marketing strategy – www.super-solutions.com – was compared to hers.  I was pleasantly surprised.

When I searched Compete.com, her sites did not index at all.  That generally occur when a site’s traffic is too small to evaluate.

I then compared our sites using Hubspot’s Website Grader. My score was 89; her Website Grader score was 75. That means that only 11% of websites are doing a better job than mine at marketing effectiveness, while  1/4 of sites were more effective than my competitors.  While I still have room for improvement – a continual process, I’m pretty pleased as a small business owner how effectively the combined strategy of traditional internet marketing with social media allows me to compete.

Even more significant was my Alexa ranking.   My site ranked in the top 2.74%; her’s fell in the top 22.37%. 

Other metrics of note:

My blog – 78.5 vs. Her blog – 14.29

My indexed pages – 470 vs. her indexed pages – 140

My inbound links – 2,467 vs her inbound links – 161

And giving credit where credit is due, she did outrank me on Twitter according to Hubspot – 98 for me compared to her Twitter page, 99.

While I admit to be gloating a bit, the real lesson I’d like to offer to small business owners and managers is this:  effective marketing on the Internet, especially for B2B, isn’t all about Facebook fans and Twitter followers.

An effective use of social media marketing should be to drive traffic to your business website.  Using tools like Compete.com and Website Grader are excellent tools to evaluate your internet marketing effectiveness and how effective you are compared to your competition.

The results can be revealing and rewarding.