Small businesses should pay attention to location-based advertising
If you have a small business with a retail or customer-facing location, is it time to take advantage of web and mobile location-based advertising?
Since most small businesses do the majority of their revenue from customers within 50-100 miles of their offices, it makes since to focus marketing efforts on that immediate market. However that standard toolset — yellow pages and local snip n’ clip periodicals have seen a drastic usage decline over the past few years.
There is good news: web and mobile location-based search, and thus the advertising, is a definite growth industry with an explosion of new services that have launched within the past year. Several of these services focus on easy ways to draw customers through the front door:
Directory assistance calls, especially from cell phones are extremely expensive, topping out at over $1.50 per call. 1800-free-411 gives consumers the same services, but for free.
The service is made possible by thousands of national and local businesses who sponsor this service with brief valuable audio advertisements that are played to callers who request businesses in their yellow pages category. This advertising model allows businesses to acquire new customers over the phone, cost effectively, with little or no risk. Meanwhile callers get free directory assistance, potentially saving each of them thousand of dollars per year.
It works like standard directory assistance, except the consumer listens to a short ad before receiving the phone number, and if they prefer, they can connect to the advertiser by typing 1 on their keypad. So far they have had a pretty impressive 13% conversion rate.
Local Business Review Sites:
Sites like yelp.com, judysbook.com and zipingo.com focus on creating a trusted network of users to review local businesses. If I type “chinese restaurant” in Denver, CO at Judy’s Book, I get a fabulous review, a map to the location and location-based ads on the left.
These types of sites will eventually raise level of accountabiity for all small businesses as users populate them with content. They will prove to be a boon for businesses who choose to offer great customer service or a unique product.
Local Search and Sponsored Links:
In the past year, several local-specific search engines have popped up that allow users to search based on their location, and receive advertising specifically for their area.
With a simple, google-like interface, both local.com and truelocal.com get right to the point. If I search for “chinese food” in “Arvada, CO” on local.com I get the expected results, but also a sponsored listing for the Asian Deli in Boulder.
The big 3 (yahoo, google and MSN) are in the game as well, also with a focus on sponsored listings based on location. As the options grow, so will the difficulty of choosing who to advertise with. Luckily this industry now has a research point at localsearchguide.org. Here, you can investigate different search engines and enter your business in for free listings.