Small Business Online Marketing with Andre Perreault, former Director of SEO at the Richards Group. Andre shares his entrepreneurial journey, and valuable advice and tips for marketing your small business online. 

Andre has many years of experience in advertising, marketing, and design. He was an early adopter of search engine marketing and has over a decade of online marketing experience. He got his start in advertising while owning a small retail bike store. Using the skills of industry leaders like David Oglivy, he created ads and campaigns that literally created buying frenzies. Later he worked for Aquent, the world’s largest creative staffing agency, where he had the pleasure to meet and work with some amazingly creative people.

• Andre’s first small business experience came from owning his own bicycle store. One of his big challenges was understanding and learning about marketing and avoiding expensive mistakes in this area.
• He implemented geographic targeting and guerrilla marketing tactics to drive tremendous results at his small local business, after realizing his traditional marketing and advertising efforts were not delivering results.
• Early on, he discovered his love for advertising. He sold his bike shop and went to back to school to further his knowledge or marketing and design.
• Andre worked in the corporate world and an ad agency, but has always had a strong desire to be his own boss.
• His approach to Client Optimization focuses on creating great resources and content for their clients. The goal is to to serve up the best possible content that meets the search intent of those searching online.
• Andre has found that to be successful in any business you have to continue learning and growing.
• For small business owners, the initial focus for online marketing should include (in addition to a website) getting included on online local listings (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo) so that your potential customers can find you, and a modest budget to start a paid media campaign (i.e. Google AdWords CPC ads, Bing ads, Facebook boosts and ads). As it relates to your paid media campaign, Andre stresses that you should not “set it and forget it.”
• Don’t expect to hire an SEO company and get immediate results for your small business – it can take 12 to 18 months for SEO efforts to take effect. Some CPC ads will get you there faster (hence the recommendation on a paid online media campaign).

Resources:

Books mentioned in this episode:

[We receive commissions for purchases made through these links (more info)].

• Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t by Jim Collins

Other Podcast Episodes:

Marketing Episodes

To learn more about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your small business website, we recommend episode 376: SEO & Google My Business Page with Adam Kirk

You can find other episodes of The How of Business podcast, the best small business podcast, on our Archives page.