How to Advertise a New Computer Business

In this episode of the Technibble Computer Business Podcast (with transcript below) I talk about ways to advertise a new computer business. I see a lot of new business owners who aren’t quite sure where to start advertising to clients. There are so many things you could be doing but people tend to get a little bit overwhelmed. Here are some of the first step you should do to get your advertising up and running.

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Discussion

00:26 – Get a website up and running first
01:40 – What you should have on your website
02:42 – Make your website mobile friendly.
03:08 – Look into Google Adwords for instant traffic
03:27 – Offline marketing that focuses on wealthy areas of your town.
04:47 – Make your ad stand out in print advertising
05:45 – Tips to always remember when doing advertising
07:02 – Find events in your own area or to wealthy areas.
07:34 – Join events of hobby specific events that you have knowledge in

Show Notes:

Tech Site Builder Review: https://www.technibble.com/tech-site-builder-review/
Tech’s Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising with Rachel Logan: https://www.technibble.com/techs-guide-to-pay-per-click-advertising-with-rachel-logan/

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Transcription:

In this podcast I talk about ways to advertise a new computer business. I see a lot of new business owners who aren’t quite sure where to start advertising to clients. There are so many things you could be doing but people tend to get a little bit overwhelmed. Here are some of the first step you should do to get your advertising up and running. First, get a site up and running but don’t spend a ton of time on it. I have seen people spending months getting a site just right but not actually starting their business. I highly recommend Matthew Rodela’s Tech Site Builder to get up and running really quickly. It does have a monthly cost but it’s not much.

I actually have a review about it on Technibble which I’ll link to in the podcast show notes. The reason why I recommend getting a site up fast and quickly is that it adds instant credibility on day one and it looks professional which is actually again also why I recommend Tech Site Builder. Getting clients from the search engines does take time. The effort that you put into SEO won’t pay off straight away. It can actually take quite a few months, but by starting now and doing it first it starts the clock ticking and it can become a very inexpensive way to get clients. You do need to put in the hard yards first.

People always look for ways to gain the system but Google is very wise to it and it simply won’t work. A well-designed site that loads fast and is mobile-responsive and has good content will always win. SEO is its own topic and I can spend hours talking about it, but the quick and dirt of what most technician websites should have is:

Have your area name in your page titles. For example, ABC Tech so we’re seeing whatever and wherever areas in California.
Have a page for each of yours services, and again have your service and location serviced in the titles of the page. For example, “Virus Removal Orange County, California”. Have someone have your keyword in a few headlines in the content using say an H2 or a H3 HTML tag.
Use words that your customers will be searching for in your content but don’t overdo it. For example, if you mother wanted to find a computer technician on Google, what would she write into the Google search box. For example, you may not want to use the word adware Spyware and removal as your main search terms. To the uninformed pretty much everything is a virus. If you do virus removal as a service, make sure that your keyword is virus removal and not something like malware removal.
Also make sure your site is mobile responsive. If someone is searching on Google from a mobile device, Google will display non-mobile optimized sites lower than mobile optimized ones.

As I mentioned before, SEO does take time. You probably won’t see much search engine traffic for at least three months but I suggest this first to get the process started. Start living in the domain age and use it as a form of early credibility. Once you have your site set up and you have the funds, looking to Google AdWords advertising to get instant traffic. Like the SEO, this is a really large topic in itself, but I interviewed a Pay-Per-Click expert, Rachel Logan in a past podcast which I’ll leave a link to in the show notes.

Once your website is sorted, start looking to offline marketing. Think about what kind of customers you want to have. Whoever they are make sure they have money. If you’re doing residential work, I strongly recommend focusing on the wealthy areas of town. It’s a real uphill battle trying to make money from people with no money that is why I recommend the wealthy areas. A side bonus of targeting the wealthy areas is that many of the people in the wealthy areas got wealthy because they were business owners. It’s a good way to get your foot in the door for business clients.

So how can you reach these people? Do they read a certain magazine or newspaper? Do they attend certain social gatherings? You need a way to get in front of them. If it’s a magazine or newspaper, make sure that has a decent distribution and they get in front of enough people. For example, I’ve seen a lot of text advertising places like school newsletters which go out to all the parents but what is the school distribution of that? Probably no more than 300. You can actually expect a very small percentage who will actually call you based off a newspaper ad but if it has enough distribution it can be totally worth it.

Make sure enough eyes are going to look at whatever ad you create. In print advertising where there are many other ads, make your ads stand out. If someone else has white background with black text, ask the magazine if you can do a black background with white text. Scan the page that has the ads in it. What existing advertisers are standing out for you and why is it standing out? Emulate that. I know a lot of techs fear paying for any sort of advertising. A lot of the time the mindset I see is that they don’t have enough clients to pay for print advertising, so they won’t, but that’s like a negative feedback loop.

You pay for advertising to get clients and put some of the money away for the next week’s advertising or maybe more advertising elsewhere. You generally have to put the money in first, get the money and then do more advertising. When doing outbound advertising like newspapers and mail ads, always track where the people are coming from otherwise you don’t know what ads are working and which of those are not. When you know what is and isn’t working, drop the ads that aren’t working and put those funds into more of what is working. You’re constantly looking to refine your advertising so hone in and figure out what your secret formula is.

Here is a great tip to always remember when doing any sort of advertising. When people say that advertising failed, they usually blame the medium when in fact it’s almost always the message at fault. If your advertising isn’t working, change the message. An offer that converts is the Holy Grail in this business. More offline marketing is that if you find your target market to attend similar social gatherings, then you need to get out and network. When I was first starting out this was really nerve-wrecking but the easiest thing to do is ask other people what they do with their time.

If it is not a business meet-up, it is very important to ask what they do with their time rather than what work do they do. The reason why is not everyone is happy with the work that they do and they don’t want to talk about it. By asking what do they do with their time, they can take it anywhere that they’re interested in. Eventually when the questions bounce back to you, make sure you let them know what you do and hopefully they can join the dots on their own if they need a tech guy. If you feel they might be interested, ask about their setup and suggest things on how you can help.

Don’t be pushy though, approach with a helpful consultive angle, not a salesman angle. No one wants to be given the hard sell at social events, and definitely do not do the famous elevator pitch; you need to be more subtle than that. To find events, people tend to go to events in their own areas. So if you are targeting the wealthy people, look for events in the wealthy areas. Pay attention to what is on in the local newspapers, events guides or whatever. Meetup.com can also be a decent place to meet people. Some of them are business-related like marketing or entrepreneur groups which are good for business clients.

Some are hobby-specific where you’ll have to work a little bit hard to convert these ones because they’re not out there necessarily looking to network themselves. If you aren’t confident talking to other people, start with the hobby-specific meet-ups where you’re an expert in that topic. It is very easy to talk about something you know about well.

That’s it for this podcast. I hope it gives you some early direction in your advertising. This is Bryce Whitty with the Technibble Computer Business Podcast.

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How to Advertise a New Computer Business