On April 27 (that’s this Friday!) small businesses will have the chance to understand how they can leverage the world of online marketing for their business at GetListed.org’s “Local University,” a full-day workshop featuring local and national online marketing gurus.
Shameless plug: Register using the promo code “GSI” and take $50 off your registration!
We posed some questions to a couple event hosts, including Ed Reese of Sixth Man Marketing – a GSI member and local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and online marketing company – and David Mihm, President and CEO of GetListed.org.
Here’s what they had to say about the event and what small businesses can take home:
What is Local U?
David Mihm: Local University is a day-long crash course in the basics of internet marketing–and especially Local Search.
I’m sure a lot of conferences that come to Spokane say this, but we truly do bring in the top experts in Local Search, who speak all over the world (New York, San Francisco, London, Munich, Sao Paulo). All of us on the faculty share a strong commitment to bringing this world class information to business owners at a price point that is as affordable as we can make it and still break even on our travel costs. Thanks to your own Ed Reese of Sixth Man Marketing, in 2010 we kicked off this series with our very first event in Spokane, and you guys have propelled us to success in 10 other markets around the country–and by June we’ll be at 15!
How can a small business benefit from attending?
David Mihm: If you have been thinking about doing any kind of online marketing, or if you’re currently doing online marketing (or paying someone to do it for you), Local U will set you down a path of success. We will help you identify overall strategies for your business (should I put a ton of time on Facebook? What are my opportunities at Google for free exposure? Are there other sites like Bing that could get me more targeted traffic?) and specific tactics for how to achieve success in each of these three areas: Organic Search, Social Media, and Local Search.
It’s so important to educate yourself, so that if you are a do-it-yourselfer, you’re not just spinning your wheels, and if you are hiring an agency, that you know exactly what you want them to do for you and how much it’s worth.
What will a small business learn at the workshop?
Ed Reese: They’ll learn how to take full advantage of all of the changes in online marketing. This conference changes every year with the updates from the search engines (more than 500 in the past year). We boil down the most important changes and let business owners know how they can take full advantage for their business. This means that we’ll show them how to rank much higher in the search engines, have their business show up in Google Maps results, take advantage of paid search and social media strategies. This is a great way for businesses to learn how to immediately improve their business by taking advantage of these online marketing techniques.
I’m the only employee at my small business and I have a very limited budget. What’s the value of this conference?
Ed Reese: We do our very best to make it a huge value for small businesses on a budget. For example, we’re giving $100 Google Adwords coupons for all attendees (Courtesy of Unleashed Online Marketing GSI note: another GSI member!). We also have a session dedicated to helping small businesses prioritize their online marketing efforts. It will help them decide what online marketing activities can produce the most impact based on their resources (time, staff availability, and marketing budget). We’ve also seen some amazing achievements from past attendees. An attendee from two years ago was able to shift from zero online sales to more than 5,000 unique orders in a single season while a HVAC owner was able to increase leads from his website enough to be able to reduce their traditional marketing budget by $50,000/year. This information really puts the power of online marketing into the owner’s hands.
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We seek to give our members the best opportunities possible to enhance and grow their business. This event is a great way one GSI member (Sixth Man Marketing) can work with other GSI members (Unleashed Online Marketing, to name just one) and the greater public.
Register Here – and use the promo code “GSI”!
