The subject of local online marketing is burning up the local marketing business space these days and the conversations are only going to continue to get hotter as more small and medium business owners begin to understand – and finally take action on – what’s possible with marketing on the Internet.
And it’s not just hype. There is a lot of substance behind the talk, as the numbers from Kelsey-BIA study in May 2010 reported – of the ninety-seven percent of consumers who go to the Internet to search for local businesses and locally available products and services:
- 90% use search engines
- 48% use the Internet Yellow Pages
- 42% use comparison shopping sites
- 24% use vertical sites
And if you think that B2C businesses are the only ones that have been benefiting from the growth in demand for local business information on the Internet, think again. According to a NielsenNetRatings-WebVisible study. forty-one percent of B2B decison makers turn to search engines to find nearby businesses to buy products and services from.
It’s pretty obvious what the message is: business decison makers and consumers alike want to spend their money with local businesses. And they’re finding local businesses by going online.
Where Consumers Are – and Aren’t – Spending Their Time
The study also found – not surisingly – that utilization of the Internet as a source of all kinds of information had risen dramatically since the previous study
- Search engines – up 72%
- Internet Yellow Pages – up 46%
- Email offers – up 52%
- Email newsletters – up 28%
Not surprisingly, in the face of the continued growth of the Internet as a source of local business information, the popularity of traditional media channels has plummeted. According to the same Nielsen/WebVisible study, consumer usage of traditional media channels was down across the board:
- Yellow Pages Directories – down 7%
- Local newspapers – down 15%
- Direct mail – down 18%
- Television – down 18%
- White pages – down 9%
- Radio – down 14%
Why are the Yellow Pages like nursing homes? They’re shockingly expensive, few people under 70 use them, and many who do are just a little out of it. Killian & Company.
And yet, in spite of the fact that consumers and B2B decision-makers have been abandoning traditional media channels in favour of local online marketing and media channels, owners of local businesses have been slow to respond – or simply haven’t responded at all – as the following facts attest:
- 90% of busness owners haven’t yet claimed their free Places Page on Google
- 61% of business owners spend under three hours a week promoting and marketing their websites
51% of business owners feel that the quality and ability of their website to acquire new customers is only “fair” to “poor” – nielsen/webvisible
- 49% of business owners spend under 10% of their marketing budget on Internet advertising and marketing
- 46% of small businesses do not even have a website
Ultimately, the majority of small/medium local businesses are missing out on the benefits of Internet marketing: better results and lower costs.
Obviously, this also means that a local business that jumps all over the local Internet marketing opportunity will have a huge edge over its competitors and begin to enjoy the benefits of a dramatic increase in traffic to its website (not to mention phone calls, visits, and emails to its physical location).