The Siphon Effect
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.
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, companies were leery of spending
anything in the online sphere. 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.
"The Siphon Effect"
PR Web Direct
June 6, 2005
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