Local Online Marketing

Can Local Businesses Compete Online?

admin — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:04:13 +0000

This is a follow on post to Do You Do Business in Richmond discussing the effect of location on local area search results.

The posts come from some research I did with local search terms and locations. I chose three search terms likely to have local intent: "pizza", "women's clothing", and "car repair", and searched them in Mechanicsville, Henrico, Short Pump and Chesterfield by varying the location with the change location feature of Google search. As a control I also did the searches in Richmond and cross checked the results by adding "Richmond" to the root search term.

Do You Do Business in Richmond?

admin — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:05:59 +0000

Retailers have always known that location matters. It’s easier to do business where there are a lot of people around. For a while, it became possible for businesses to break out of their location with customers searching for products and services in yellow pages that spanned an entire metro area.

But with yellow pages increasingly consigned to the trash can and people turning online to find things, location is asserting itself in an unexpected way. As you might expect, this is due to Google. Specifically, Google Maps.

Why Local Businesses Should Blog

admin — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:03:21 +0000

Blogging is difficult. It takes time, thought and dedication to turn out posts with any kind of frequency. Why should a local business bother?

You should blog because it works-- in several different ways. Here are the main reasons businesses blog:

Blog To Enhance Credibility

Do you really know what you're doing? What sets you apart from your competitors? Why should I believe you?

These are all questions prospects ask before they do business with you. Most of the time the questions aren't asked explicitly, and if they are, they wouldn't believe your answers anyway. There's only one answer you can give, isn't there?

Naming Your Blog

Keith West — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 13:07:42 +0000

Titles are of increasing importance. A good name has always been a plus, but with search, feeds that show just a bit of information, and the increasing amount of information people are expected to process, having a good name or title is essential to being read.

Local Internet Advertising: Getting Started

Keith West — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:52:14 +0000

In my previous two posts I covered Why Local Internet Advertising is Exploding and Where to Find Local Internet Advertising.

You may still have the (quite reasonable) question, "Where do I get started?" And that is where we will start now.

Local Internet Advertising: Where to Find It.

Keith West — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:50:44 +0000

In the last post we went over Why Local Internet Advertising is Exploding. There we pointed out that self service ad markets, pay per click pricing and geo targeting have combined to make internet advertising possible for small to medium local businesses.

This post will cover the types of places you can find local advertising opportunities, and the next will offer recommendations for the best places to get started.

Social Media Does Scale

Keith West — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:12:02 +0000

Jeremiah Owyang is wrong. His July 13 blog post starts with the simple declarative sentence: “Social media doesn’t scale.”

Now I’m going to give Jeremiah a little benefit of the doubt. He is a very smart guy and his blog is a welcome addition to my list of feeds. And, his overall point that CMO’s should develop an advocacy program to lessen the burden of growing a social media program is right on.

However, I do believe that his contention that social media doesn’t scale is incorrect.

Saving Money on Digtal Marketing Talent

Keith West — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:29:35 +0000

Piece of mind is expensive.

If you want to dry out your basement, you could regrade the soil around the house and hope that will take care of the problem. If you want to be certain of success, you might dig up all around the house, put drains at the foundation, waterproof the sides, put drains under the interior floor and install sump pumps.

The path you take will depend on your objective. If you only have a washer and dryer in the basement and want to use them without stepping in puddles, regrading could be worth a try. If you want to install a home theater and expect to spend considerable time there, the low cost way is risky.

Digital Job Descriptions: Social Media Specialist

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 19:42:10 +0000

With all due deference to the legions of social media experts who have sprouted up across the web, this is a difficult position to define, and not just because it is new. To start with, the technology associated with social media is trivial. Many idiots have managed to create a Facebook page. Any design or differentiation for a social media project is going to come from web designers or developers, not social media specialists.

So what does the social media specialist do? In a word, communicate. If that sounds more like a task more closely related to traditional PR or marketing than technology, it is.

Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy

Keith West — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:00:55 +0000

Too much of digital marketing is reactive.

One day the man calls up and says "I’ve been hearing a lot about jizzerat, that new social media blogging real time local video community that’s getting a lot of traction. What are we doing with that?"

You being the out front marketing person you are quickly reply you’ve been tracking the growth closely and as soon as you nail down the ROI metrics for finance, you’ll be rolling it out across all appropriate business units. Hanging up the phone you type in jizzerat.com to see what all the fuss is about. You then make a note to pull the designer off of the email newsletter that goes out to 650,000 subscribers every Tuesday and have her work up a design for your new jizzerat community page.

That all too common scenario is why we bother developing a strategy. Without one we flap around with every change of the breeze, trying this, forgetting that, and wondering why so little progress comes from all of the activity.