Local Internet Advertising

 By. Kyle J. Simmons

Businesses which serve local markets should consider shifting their advertising dollars to online marketing. A professionally designed website that is properly optimized for local search can give small businesses a big advantage in local market reach.

Moreover local search advertising can help you connect your business with consumers in your surrounding area. Consumers these days are highly likely (about 65%) visiting a website and search for golf, sporting goods, restaurants, and retail stores in their surrounding areas as opposed to using a phone book. 

Reaching Your Local Market 

Consumers are looking for more than Flash animations and pretty pictures. Online retail consumers want value. Consumers are increasingly relying on local search to make decisions about where to spend their money and time offline. In fact, about 86 percent of Internet users search for local products and services, up from 70% in 2006, and more than 90 percent of the transactions resulting from these searches are completed offline. So if your business is not showing up in these searches then someone else is surely cleaning up on customers that could be yours. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Search Engine Marketing 

Search continues to lead the pack among online tactics. Spending on search in 2009 is expected to total 15.4 billion, or 59% of the overall interactive pie.  

Google, Yahoo and MSN (now called Bing) and other paid-search products are absolutely tapping local ad budgets. In July 2004 one test showed that 5.7% of the paid advertisements were “local” – that is, placed by a local advertiser with specific local interests. And that was 5 years ago which is like a millennium in internet years! 

  But organic search (those big search results normally on the left hand side of the page) has been a defining factor behind the success of the Internet. It is through search that people can find products, resources and information. For instance through search realtors can connect to ready and willing customers who are ready to buy real estate NOW!  

Search engine marketing offers one of today's most affordable and effective internet advertising opportunities and is the ideal way to geographically target local consumers. With more and more consumers turning away from phone books and searching the internet to find the local products and services they want, businesses would be mad not to capitalize on this very effective medium. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Business -To- Business Shifting To Online Advertising 

Business-to-business media is seeing a rapid shift of advertising dollars to online platforms, according to Outsell Inc., a research consultancy serving the information industries. But a closer look at the numbers shows that, in part, the apparent shift is simply a dwindling away of print revenues, accompanied by moderate growth online.   

The beauty of the online advertising medium is that a  business listings can now very easily include contact information, hours of operations, payments accepted, specific business categories, a link to their website and even user reviews.  

Conclusion 

Local Internet advertising is a big business, but you also need to be careful about what you are advertising on. There are a lot of local 'directory' sites, but when you dig into them, how many entries do they actually have, and are they up to date, or are they using a bought-in mailing list which is now a number of years old?  

So although  buying trends are  moving towards local online advertising just remember that as in anything that is growing and affording a lot of potential success there will be those individuals who have no scruples or who simply have no idea what they are doing. 

But if you address local online advertising with the same sensible approach that you would any other type of advertising, you will do just fine and probably make some good profit while you are at it. 

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