Most businesses have an internet presence but few have a strategy on how to use it. A website without a marketing plan is similar to having a billboard in the mountains where only the animals and an occasional hiker can see it.
Local Internet Marketing 101
There are a couple undeniable facts about small business marketing that all business owners should understand. First is that the internet has become the most productive and cost effective method to promote your business. Second is that the local search technology used to find your business online has had an explosive growth recently. The keyword here is “LOCAL”, as compared to “general” search.
Just think of one word, “Google”. Google has changed the local business market over the last couple years. When a customer contacts a business, usually that customer has been online doing a local search. Where ever you are, what ever you may be looking for, it’s only a Google search away. Unless you have a big brand name, your customers find you with search.
Search Marketing
Local Internet Search is the fastest growing method for finding local businesses. This explosive growth will continue and brings a tremendous opportunity for the businesses prepared to take advantage of this growth. With local business search, your competitors are only located within your city or local area, not from around the globe. This makes it much easier to get top search results.
If your business is not using the internet to find customers, to keep customers, and your competitors are, you will find it hard to survive. Your business must participate in this online local search growth in a way that gets your business recognized. And you need to do it well!
Marketing Strategy
Traditional business marketing uses the internet as an after-thought, as a second or third level approach to promotion. Larges sums of money are typically spent placing ads, direct mail, and many other offline marketing strategies. Local internet advertising is less expensive, much more productive and can more easily be measured.
The key is two fold; target only the consumers interested in your product or service and have your company front and center 24/7. This can only be done using local internet marketing.
The solution for any business to take advantage of this local search explosive growth is using the latest tools and techniques. You can’t just have an outdated website and call it good. You need to use multiple techniques that can be integrated into a consistent marketing plan.
A good local internet marketing plan will reduce your sales costs, increase your customer base and increase your revenue per customer. Small businesses can easily take advantage of this approach to quickly increase profits.
Most businesses will not take advantage of the new phenomenal local internet search. Many business owners will be too busy trying to survive, will never understand the impact it’s making on local businesses until it’s too late, are non-believers in internet marketing or will just trust in the same old traditional methods.
The businesses that fully embrace local internet search, can dominate their competitors, can grow and make their businesses more valuable. In 2008, 82% of all US households had internet access and 53% of search traffic was for local businesses. The winners are the businesses that are prepared to convert these search customers.
There are no magic bullets or short cuts, you just have to know what to do and do it well to get top results. The problem is that only a few businesses can have the top search results. iProspect conducted a study showing “68% of search users click results only on the first page” and “39% of search users link search result placement to company prominence”.
What is local business search? Search engines have been providing internet search results since the 1990’s. These natural or organic search results have focused on the most relevant results from around the globe. While this is very useful when looking for certain types of information or products, it has done nothing for the local businesses trying to provide products and services within their close vicinity or the local market.
Starting is 2005, Google introduced Google local which has since become Google Maps. Google Maps has progressed over the last few years to be the premier local business directory with Yahoo and Bing following in second and third place.
Local business search results have replaced the print yellow pages for users trying to finding local businesses.
What is local business search marketing? Local search marketing is the method of getting local businesses listed in the top results for a local business search conducted on Google, Yahoo and Bing. The search results consist of business listings in as many places on the top search page as possible; Local OneBoxes (Google), organic search results and the sponsored results.
Why are local search results different then organic search results? Organic search results are search listings on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) that appear due to their relevance to the search keywords used by the user. For Google these are the bottom ten results on the page. For competitive search terms, it can take millions of dollars, many resources and years to get to the top search results page.
Google, Yahoo! and Bing now have blended results or results that include images, video and news, all part of the organic results. Also these search engines provide vertical channels for searching specifically for images, maps, videos, blogs and news items.
What makes the marketing plan and website function better? There techniques are explained in detail on this website. Some of the more commonly used terms are Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Lead Generation, Web Analytics, Regional search, Pay Per Click (PPC), Social Marketing and email marketing to name a few.
What are the steps or the pieces that make up a good marketing plan? The basic pieces to a local internet marketing plan are lead generation, a good SEO website, usually some type of advertising (depending upon the market, position and budget) and a method for measuring the results.
Related article Marketing Strategy .
