Target Market
Google was the center of attention of the internet for many years and it has gone by unchallenged until the rise of Facebook started. Although the influence of Facebook and its role on the internet has grown significantly in recent years, Google isn’t something that can be replaced. In fact, Google’s role as a search engine still remains to be the untouchable. However the threat that Facebook target market poses to Google is there and Google recognizes this. This is why Google has decided to fight back with Google+.
Google+ is a made to compete with Facebook and it is slowly gaining its popularity. Although its growth isn’t as strong as the growth that we’ve seen repeatedly on Facebook, Google+ is slowly but surely increasing its influence on the social media world. Most importantly what this all means is that Google+ in itself can be a good traffic source for your business. Hence in order to understand the relationship between Google+ and small business we must look into the benefits of why any serious online entrepreneurs should take up a certain amount of interests on Google+.
Get good integration with other Google services.
The first advantage that you will get from Google+ if you compare it to Facebook is that you will get a good integration with other Google Services with your Google+ account. This means you can link all your accounts together and use a lot of the features that Google has provided in all their services. This could prove to be very beneficial to you and your business in the long run especially if you use a lot of Google’s services such as Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Google Trends, and Google’s External keyword tool, Google Adsense or even SEO.
What this ultimately means to you is that you can get all the great tools as an internet marketer and most of this service can be integrated with each other as the compatibility of the services are very high. More importantly, future updates of the Google’s services could mean a lot to your business.
Using Google+ may help your site rankings.
If you are using Google+ to promote or back link to your sites that you wish to rank high, it could actually help your site rankings. While there is no official proof of this bias, we all know just how much ‘Blogger’ (owned by Google) gets a lot of high ranking blogs on the search engine rankings and it will only make sense that Google should rank their own Google+ pages higher than its competitors.
Therefore if you are into SEO of if you are trying to rank any of your site high on the search engines especially Google, you should give Google+ an honest try. Who knows that this could be a move that you’ll never forget.
Everyone can see your Google+ profile (including non-members)
On Facebook, one of weakness in the eye of a marketer is that not everyone is able to see your profile online due to privacy reasons. Google+ has taken a different approach. Google+ is actually helping marketers in the sense of allowing the general public to see all the profiles even if you are not a member of Google+. As a marketer this is a wonderful research tool although we can’t say the same about privacy issues.
However, most Google+ users are notified about this transparency and they have a choice to see if they wish to create an account or not. Hence, this means, you can do your market research all day long with the profiles within Google+ and it will be completely legal.
Make sure that your target market is there in Google+.
Using Google+ would mean that you will have to take extreme care in your marketing moves. One of the reasons is that because Google+ is a lot newer than Facebook, the amount of traffic is definitely much lower than Facebook. Hence you will need to find out if your target market exists within Google+ or not. The good news is, this can be easily remedied with some clever market research within Google+.
And if your target market exists within the Google+ social network, then you are in luck. You can quickly use multiple ways (free or paid) to actually reach these potential customers. Marketing to the people within Google+ will be quite similar to the audience within Facebook. One will need a tactic to reach your target market, take them away from the distractions of the social network and market to them separately outside of Google+. The best way to do this is to use the traffic from Google+ and then build a list from that traffic.
Once your target market list is built, you will essentially have a list that is targeted and that is when your marketing strategies will come handy. Learn to build a good relationship within the list and you will reap the benefits of having a list. Essentially, as a marketer you will be using the Google+ social network as a way to engage your target market, listen to what they have to say, nurture your brand awareness within the network and finally market to the traffic the smart way.
