For many small business owners, adapting to the switch from traditional forms of marketing and advertising to interactive marketing is like moving to the moon. People are using their Yellow Pages as doorstops and they only accidentally endure TV advertisements. Flyers on lamp posts are ignored by people walking past with their eyes on their smartphones. And those eyes are looking through local web marketing directories like Yelp while they are out and about because they are looking for a product or service to buy right now. We’ve talked about how critical it is to get a mobile web marketing strategy in previous blogs. What we’d like to address today is fear; the fear many merchants experience when they realize that, because of social and mobile media, their customers now have much greater control over their company’s marketing efforts than they may feel comfortable with. This is the world of interactive marketing; and we’re here to help.

With the rise of social media marketing, it is much harder for businesses to exert total control over their marketing messages, and this has given many small business owners the hives. This has led some of them to shy away from mobile web marketing or local web marketing directories like Yelp because they are afraid that someone may give them a bad review, which, they think, could potentially turn away customers. Instead of seeing this as a crisis, however, some small businesses are taking this as an opportunity. And the key to turning social, mobile, local web marketing into a great opportunity is getting the savvy assistance of a web marketing professional on your team to show you the ropes.

First of all, it’s important to understand that unlike traditional marketing, which was all about a tightly controlled, unidirectional message urging people to buy your products, interactive marketing is much more about building relationships and having conversations. These relationships ideally develop into loyal customers who then buy your products and tell all of their friends about you on Facebook and Twitter and leave positive reviews for you on Yelp, etc. The key difference in the new equation is that small businesses that succeed in the new interactive marketing paradigm are not afraid of customer feedback (even if it’s negative)—they thrive on it. They use these new social media marketing and local media marketing tools with the feedback (positive and negative) they get to develop better products and improve their service, thereby solidifying their relationships and inspiring their customers to keep buying and talking about them with their friends.

So all of this leads us to that tricky question nagging the minds of many small business owners: what if we get a negative review on Yelp? Won’t that drive away customers? This, again, is an opportunity and not a crisis. A negative review on Yelp, which is an important new aspect of mobile web marketing and local web marketing, if deftly handled, can actually improve your image, rather than damage it. How, you ask? Well, recent studies on this very topic show that businesses that have been responsive, honest and proactive in resolving a customer’s complaints and concerns actually strengthen their relationships with their customers; these customer relationships tend to be even stronger than with those customers who have had only good experiences. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. There’s no need to be afraid as long as you have a good product, a good service, and strive to keep improving it.

The key with local web marketing is to stay responsive and connected. We understand that this can be a challenge in the incredibly fast paced world of small business web marketing. You are probably too busy baking gourmet cupcakes, repairing cars, perfecting your new exotic pizza menu or remodeling somebody’s kitchen to stay up on those things—but make no mistake: local web marketing is absolutely critical to your business, now and in the future. That’s why Affordable Web Design is here. We can provide the interactive web marketing expertise you need to stay ahead of the next mobile web marketing curve so that you can build, maintain and expand those critical customer relationships in today’s mobile world! Contact us today for Yelp!