Many marketing solutions fail to address at least one of the critical factors to local marketing success. Take a look at some approaches that will help you hit this sweet spot.
The United States is officially in a recession and, to our surprise, it has been in place since last year. Disposable income is scarce and people just aren't in a buying mood; for small businesses, especially those that depend on seasonal sales to keep them afloat, the current economic situation is particularly precarious. As marketers, your two main priorities right now are to retain customers -- they have plenty of reasons to stay at home and cut out every perceived luxury -- and to drive sales when income availability is generally low.
Advertising revenues for the third quarter of 2008 are tanking across the board, but thus far, the one area that seems poised to recover quickly is local online advertising. Why? Because it involves such a direct element of targeting and extends beyond luxuries to necessities (such as grocers having a sale on produce), local online advertising remains an effective advertising medium even in today's climate.
The challenge today is that local online advertising isn't a one-shot deal. For instance, the Yellow Pages once exemplified the idea of local reach. For better or worse, this just isn't true anymore. The print Yellow Pages had their heyday as recently as 10-15 years ago when all one needed (and all one had) was a phone number and address for a business and consumers had a collection of phone books that were relevant to their regions. If you needed to find a carpenter, you looked up carpenter in the Yellow Pages and called the listings. In essence, the Yellow Pages were the only show in town. But today, asking a consumer to "let their fingers do the walking" is no longer viable.
Of course the classic Yellow Pages have addressed the natural evolution of technology with the introduction of the Yellow Pages online, but while the service does offer an element of online advertising and certainly targets local consumers, it's deploying a model that is trying to fit a square print peg into a round internet hole. In doing so the Yellow Pages and other marketing solutions like print advertising, vertical sites and aggregators fail to address one or more of the three critical factors to local marketing success -- geographical targeting, audience intent and traffic. All of these elements are equally important; you can get by with only one or two fulfilled, but you won't hit the marketing sweet spot unless you have all three.
Targeting
While online directories contain valuable information and can offer innovative features like ratings and reviews, they can't change the fact that they're not the automatic entry point for the internet (hello Google). When consumers want to find a carpenter, they type "carpenter Boston" in a search engine and evaluate the results. Your Yellow Pages listing may appear amongst the results, but it's just one result and it might appear on page two. There's so much information available to distract prospective customers that they might not even click on your listing. So in this instance, you'll cover intent and targeting, but not traffic.
Traffic
Traffic is a complicated beast. Prioritizing traffic over intent and targeting is like dousing your entire garden with gallons of water because one of the flower pots looks dry. By trying to force traffic you're simply ushering in as many eyes as you can, but you have no guarantee that those eyes want anything to do with you. For example, banner ads generate a huge amount of traffic, but most people would agree that they don't provide great ROI. And even if it secures traffic and (rarely) audience intent, it might not hit home with geographic targeting. For instance, I might get fed an ad for a Hummer when I'm surfing for info on cars, but that does me no good since I live in Boston (have you ever tried to parallel park a Hummer between two tightly-packed Civics? It's not pretty).
Intent
Audience intent is extremely difficult to gauge because it requires the most personal investigation, and even then it can never be exact. You'll never completely understand your audience's intent and be able to match products or services precisely, but you can increase your chances of having your ad or listing seen by someone who might actually want to buy from you. Don't try to mine customer data through your ISP; it's a bad idea (see NebuAd). You can, however, take a vertical approach -- place ads where prospective car buyers flock: auto enthusiast sites like Road & Track, for example. You'll attract customers who are interested in your particular market, but keep in mind that you may have to sacrifice traffic and, potentially, a local audience.
Keeping it local is an obvious part of local online advertising; you're trying to reach customers in your area, especially if you sell products that don't make sense in other geographical areas (i.e., a local car dealership, dry cleaning service, restaurant). If you're a small business selling to your local community in Providence, R.I., you very likely don't need to reach customers in Wyoming to drive sales. Most Providence-based small businesses need to reach New Englanders, and if you're paying for your online ads to appear next to general search terms or placing banner ads on a site simply because it has the highest page views, you're inadvertently throwing money away. Again, having plenty of people see your ad won't help if they're not the right people.
Local advertising is a far more complicated beast that it was in years past, and it may seem daunting to reconcile all three factors -- traffic, intent and geographical targeting. In fact, you may not always be able to do so.
It's true that at one point in time, the Yellow Pages really could offer you all three: targeting by address and area, audience intent gauged by whoever looked up something in the phonebook, and a great deal of forced traffic. But times have changed, and maybe for the better. After all, you don't need thousands of people viewing your local directory listing or ad on a vertical site on any given day; you'd be better off with 100 views that generate a healthy amount of sales or leads (traffic + local + intent).
Remember that the key to marketing success in the economic downturn is to get in front of the right-sized audience, from the right demographic, when they're willing to buy. It will very likely help you survive in this recession.
Jean-Eric Penicaud is COO of DirectoryM.