The Local Search Revolution
So, why are search engines better than any other form of marketing for small businesses?
1. They are used by 80% of the consumers. Search engines are always on. Search engines are always there and consumers can instantly get information on demand.
2. The search engines provide the opportunity for any small business to over shine/outshine/overtake their competitors instantly. They don’t have to wait until the next edition is printed in the Yellow page. Can you imagine having your
competitor put an ad right over yours in the Yellow pages and you having to wait 3-6 months to get your ad over top of theirs if you can get it over top of theirs? Instant gratification. The advertising is targeted. You can target exactly, only the consumers who are looking for you instead of shotgun blasting. It would be like comparing traditional advertising to billboards, your just shooting a billboard at anybody who drive by it or an online billboard which would be a banner that can only show to people who are actively looking for a lawyer, or looking for legal services in your state.
3. Online campaigns are easy to edit, easy to make changes to far different from Yellow pages and print advertising.
4. You can capture the customers data, you can capture the customers information easily right there in the advertising. A billboard is not capturing the people’s names as they drive by. Yellow pages are not going to see how many people open up the Yellow pages and how many people actually touched your ad. Can’t do that with the Yellow pages, but you can do that with the banner ad, you can do that with your online marketing and you’re going to provide this ability to the local small businesses. For the first time ever, you’re going to give them an ability to know what their dollars are doing with their marketing.

5. They’ll have direct ratios to how much they spend with you and how much that resulted into their bottom line, into their leads, into their increase of business. This allows them to calculate their return on investment. They can track their success rate, so they’ll be able to see what works, what doesn’t immediately work and make the adjustments. you’ll give them the ability of local marketing to run multi-medium type of ads. You’ll get them to be able to be heard in front of their customers, not just a simple lifeless ad, but you get their personality, you get the video from their practice, you get them positioned in front of their customers.
6. It’s a multi-media internet and it only makes sense for them to have multi-media messages out there communicating with their customers. A study done by the
Kelsey group says that now 83% of all US households now use the internet when shopping locally for products and services. So, we’re talking 83% of the population there, people who would have normally done like weekly paper and the Q pods, people who are looking straight to sites like groupon and online sites now.