"As Seen Online" -- Local Business Finally Figures Out the Internet (and Newspapers, Yellow Pages May Feel the Pinch)
A catering company in a suburban Connecticut town eliminates its Yellow Pages advertising, which once ran to $12,000 a year, in favor of promoting its website. For a growing number of small businesses, local Internet marketing is proving cheaper, and more successful, than traditional local advertising.
Norwalk, CT (PRWEB via PR Web
Direct) June 6, 2005 -- People have talked forever, it seems, about how
consumers are searching online for local products and services, and how this
will siphon millions in advertising dollars away from print Yellow Pages,
newspapers, and other local media. If the story of one caterer, who axed his
$12,000 per year Yellow Pages advertising budget in favor of local internet
marketing, is anything to go by, the worm may finally have turned.
As
recently as 2004, clients of Small Business Online, (http://www.smallbusinessonline.net) located in Norwalk, CT,
were leery of spending anything in the online sphere. Small Business Online's
clients are, for the most part, local businesses serving a local customer base:
lawyers, realtors, caterers, small retailers, sailing schools, chiropractors,
lumber yards, to give a sample. In 2004, most were happy to get a search
engine-optimized website online, and leave it at that. By 2005, a marked change
had occurred. Success in the online sphere, for these local businesses, led to
more investment in Internet marketing, which led in turn to more success.
Examples: the caterer who received so much new business from the Internet that
he needed to hire a new employee. A furniture retailer, with a bricks and mortar
store, who now gets about 90% of his new business via the Internet. A lumber
supplier who is selling $20,000 flooring jobs spurred by his website.
The
siphon effect? Two out of these three businesses have already eliminated
virtually all of their print Yellow Pages spending – in one case, representing a
$12,000 a year loss to the Yellow Pages industry. Their new Internet marketing
campaigns are costing these businesses less than their old Yellow Pages or
newspaper advertising. The caterer who added a new employee is now spending
about $500-600 a month on Internet marketing – the equivalent of a modest Yellow
Pages ad or a single newspaper ad. For this, he is getting a steady stream of
visitors to his website, with a successful conversion rate into paying
customers. For these small businesses, local Internet marketing is proving both
cheaper, and more successful, than traditional local advertising.
A new
professional niche is emerging to support this growth: the local Internet
marketing consultant, or expert on local search marketing, as it is sometimes
called, who can put it all together for the local businesses. Such an expert is
essential. The field is strewn with ill-advised offers and products from
companies promising to simplify the process and bring tons of new customers to
the local business. Some examples of "get rich quick" schemes for internet
marketing include mass submissions to search engines (useless); affiliate
linking schemes that will boost search engine rankings (this one may result in a
website actually being dropped by a search engine); "guaranteed" search engine
placement (no-one can guarantee this) to name just a few. Also questionable are
"packaged leads" whereby a vendor provides traffic to a website for a flat fee.
Successful Internet marketing depends on an integrated approach, from lead
acquisition to sales conversion. It is useless to drive traffic to a
poorly-designed, single webpage. The business ends up paying for leads that
don't convert into customers. Contrary to what some marketers may say, the
online space can be complex, and a local business must maximize its Internet
marketing with a careful strategy.
Done properly, local Internet
marketing views each business as unique, and creates an affordable, ongoing
marketing plan that fits the business. Successful elements of the mix include
such things as optimization of the website both for search engines and for
customer conversion; carefully-planned pay-per-click campaigns, that deliver
quality, rather than quantity, of leads; online publicity; appropriate linking
campaigns; submission to local and vertical directories; special website
promotions; customer email-marketing, and more. The secret is in getting the mix
just right for each business, and maintaining an ongoing program to keep the
business's website front and center before the local audience. When
carefully-planned and executed it can bring big dividends to a small
business.
For many local businesses, the question is no longer whether
they should begin to market in the local online space, but when. Currently, as
Neil Street, sales and marketing director of Small Business Online sees it,
incredible opportunities are being missed, as consumers search online for local
products and services, but the businesses do not have an effective online
presence to serve those customers. But as success stories such as the caterer's,
or the furniture retailer's, begin to spread, that gap will close, and
significant advertising dollars may soon shift to local online
marketing.
Contact:
Neil Street
Small Business
Online
203-299-0889
e-mail protected from spam bots
www.smallbusinessonline.net
# # #
Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/6/prweb246981.htm