Welcome to a very special edition of the Handling Business Podcast! We’re excited to introduce you to Mike Linville of Black Dog Marketing. Mike is a digital marketing expert who’s spent the last 17 years carving out his place on the internet. Mike offers similar services to what you would find at a website like www.justseo.co.nz which signifies why SEO might be so important to digital marketing nowadays. A Marine with a double major in material science & electrical engineering from UC Davis, found that he enjoyed helping small businesses rise through the ranks of the web more than doing power calculations. Mike takes us on his journey from unmotivated teenager to marketing mad man and answers your biggest questions along the way.
Mike started his marketing journey in the construction industry, providing websites and directories for contractors and home builders. After years of success in that space, Mike decided to focus on helping small businesses learn to grow. In this day and age, businesses will need to look to digital marketing campaigns – be that in the form of email marketing, creating an interactive video platform, working with influencers, whatever they feel is going to be the best way to help them stand out against the competition. Businesses will differ in how they choose to approach their marketing, and things like budget and ability within staff may affect how they decide to produce and market their content. They may choose to use a company that focuses on one particular digital marketing field such as oneseo who focus on SEO, or they may choose someone who is a marketing professional within their chosen industry. Mike, for example, found himself working within the pet industry and spends much of his time teaching pet industry entrepreneurs how to compete with the big guys.
In this podcast, we talk about Mike’s drive to help the small guys & why it bothers him when a dog walker who provides a better service can be pushed out by one who is simply better at SEO. We also discuss how small businesses can work with digital marketing agencies (like https://serp.co/services/marketing/) for their marketing campaigns and then tackle the first step of creating a successful strategy. Throughout this discussion, a few key points continue to pop-up; the importance of having a solid plan and sticking to it with patience. You’ll learn why throwing all of your ideas at the wall and hoping something sticks is a futile strategy that ultimately will only waste time, money and resources. Patience in marketing is a difficult practice, but a necessary part of finally achieving results. Mike breaks down why patience is so important and how you can maximize your potential for ROI along the way. Think you’re too small to compete with the likes of Rover, DogVacay and other “big dogs” of the industry? Think again; Mike explains that those bigger guys will never have the advantages of community connection or local neighborhood recommendations. Take advantage of the knowledge that you have of your small community to come up with tactics that your competitors can’t. Is there a magic formula for finding these tactics? Not exactly, but you don’t need to spend a fortune either. Creating a solid foundation to market your business can be easier than you think with the right steps in place.
We like to learn from our mistakes here at Handlr so we asked Mike to break down the many, many mistakes of business owners new to the marketing game and how to avoid them from the get-go. We know that marketing your small business can be intimidating and sometimes a daunting task, but this episode of Handling Business will conquer your fears and give you the confidence to send your business to the top of the ranks.
SHOW NOTES:
Black Dog Marketing – https://www.blackdogmarketing.com/
