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Marketing on a budget
for locksmiths
» » IN THE FIRST OF A SERIES OF IN-
depth articles, Marina Logacheva,
Marketing Director, of APECS looks at
marketing on a budget for locksmiths.
There is almost no other industry where
marketing and digital marketing will be as
important as in the locksmith industry. In
fact, there are more than 14,800 searches
per month for the locksmith in the UK
alone.
To make it more specific, people also
search by location, for example “locksmith
London” shows 1900 searches per month
and locksmith Bristol 1000 searches. If you
are a local locksmith it will be important
to catch those searches and convert them
to your website visitors and ultimately -
clients!
‘make sure that you
have a catchy name,
logo and a website
domain name’
In this series for Locksmith journal,
we plan to share with you some ideas on
free and low cost marketing tools that will
boost your business in the every issues of
The Locksmith magazine. You could also
find some more Marketing tools on the
apecs.co.uk page, in the Media folder.
Before we start discussing various
promotional ideas, let us make sure
that you have a catchy name, logo and
a website domain name. If you plan to
serve your local area, then locksmith and
“name of the area” domain name would
be your best bet, as it will help to get better
ranking on Google for people searching in
your area. If, however, you plan to expand
to various areas, than something a bit
more general would work better. After you
are confident with your name, your logo is
a matter of a few days. A great place to get
a good and inexpensive logo is fiverr.com,
where designers on this creative platform
can draw great logos at low prices: just
check for “logo development” reviews
when choosing the person for the job.
WHO ARE YOUR KEY CUSTOMERS?
Another important step before your
marketing activity starts – think WHO are
your key customers and WHAT are their
needs/problems, which you can help
to solve. Armed with this information,
it will be easier to come up with really
effective marketing ideas and campaigns
to promote your business.
Let us say that there are two major
types of customers. On one hand there are
individuals, looking for a quick fix, such
as urgent property or car access. On the
other hand, there are “corporate” clients,
causally looking for the maintenance
support in the building.
Regardless of the target customer type,
your website should be up and running.
To set a new website up, check free
DIY website builder tools, such as wix.
com, weebly.com and SiteBuilder.com.
Alternatively, if you own a website already,
make sure that it is optimised for the
mobile screen.
Imagine, a person in the pouring rain
on the street, trying to search on-line.
They will be searching for a website that
loads fast, opens easily on any phone
screen (eg IOS, Android) and has all the
key bits of information: contact details,
reviews, possible prices. Now, imagine
a maintenance manager in the school,
they will possibly be searching for the
locksmith from the desktop, they will need
to have examples of case studies (what
other school projects were accomplished)
as well as contact details and so on. As
you can see, everyone will be looking for
the locksmith, but they will need slightly
different information and approach to
website building.
So step one, make sure that you
have a well-built website with relevant
information. For mobile phone
optimisation insights, check the Google
Mobile Friendly Tool, which will show if
your website is well optimised for mobile
search on Google. For mobile screen size
optimization, check browserstack.com
and for your site loading speed insights,
use Google Page Speed insights. If there
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are any issues – fix them as soon as
possible.
Step two should be dedicated to the
research of the free tools available for
your organic search relevance increase
on Google. As a minimum, we suggest to
register on Google My Business. This will
help you to appear on Google maps when
p