So you’ve determined that either you’d like to develop a web presence, or you already have one and you’d like to expand. There are many different web channels you can use, and some of them will be more effective than others, so you should be prepared to analyze your business model and the behaviors and preferences of your consumers when coming up with a plan for attack.
The most important bit of information you need for your online marketing effort is how your customers are likely to find your business, and how they behave before making a purchase decision. Try putting yourself in the shoes of your customer. If you were them, and were looking for XYZ service or product, how would you go about doing it? It might even help to ask some of them how they found you. Very often, customers behave differently from how business owners expect them to.
In the current day, if someone is looking for a local business online, they’re finding it through one of 4 destination types:
Do you think that your potential customers are looking for you on one of those sources? Well, if so you should at least do the very minimal work required to get listed in the IYPs as well as on local search engines. According to a comScore study released last winter (winter of 2005), local search engine lookups were roughly the same as IYP lookups, so if you’re going to do one, I would make sure to do both. Once you’re listed on these sites, you’ll always be listed there. No need to renew or anything (as of now!). Local search engines generally have partnerships with an IYP where they use IYP directory listings in their search results so it may seem like you have your bases covered by just being an the IYPs, but experience has showed me that just to be safe, it’s better to spend the 20 minutes it takes to get listed in the local search engines. I’ll also add that a lot of IYPs offer various levels of premium listings, giving your business added visibility. However, I’ve never done a side-by-side comparison, so I can’t say what the return-on-investment on this would be.
Here is the list of IYPs and local search engines I recommend along with the link to a page where you can start the sign-up process:
Internet Yellow Pages
Local Search Engines
You might want to consider getting listed in online local event publications for your region as well. This could come in the form of a listing in their directory under the appropriate header, or it could also be a write-up promoting your business, event associated with your business or something you offer. Write-ups have the potential to get you a ton of new business because they have the ability to be very viral (i.e. someone will read it and then share it with their friends).
What we’ve talked about so far in this article are all things that you can do without a website. Now, lets talk about the possibilities if you have or want to build a website. To a small local business, a website is essentially an online brochure. It tells people about your business and what you offer so that they can learn more about what you’re selling and hopefully get closer to a purchase decision. If you have a business where people want some educational material before taking the plunge, a website is a great thing to invest in. That way, if people find your listing in the IYPs or local search engines, they’ll be able to check out your website as well, and providing people with the right information can be the difference between someone creating a list of 5 stores to check out vs. just yours. It also helps remove the frustration that arises when a customer visits a business establishment only to find that it isn’t what they were looking for. A website can also give customers a way to get in touch with you via e-mail if they so choose.
Some business niches receive a large number of general search queries as well. Aside from e-commerce (people seeking to purchase something online), people may seek out a website chock-full of information for a business that is local to them rather than looking for a listing. People do this when they are seeking something that requires more upfront research before paying you a visit and they’re most likely to do this on a search engine as opposed to an IYP. Suppose I’m looking for a high-end auto repair shop that is able to service my expensive Italian sports car. Am I going to be able to find it in an IYP? Most likely, there won’t be enough information in an IYP listing for me to know whether or not they service Bugattis as opposed to a Volkswagen. However, if I search for Bugatti and my geographic location in a search engine, perhaps a website listing for just the type of auto shop I’m looking for will come up.
When it comes to general search engines such as Google or Yahoo, the benefit is that you can tell if people are searching. Yahoo releases information on search volume based on keyword phrases. All you have to do is go to Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool, type in a keyword phrase that describes your business (i.e. yoga in san francsico) and voila, I get an estimate of the number of people who typed in that query into Yahoo over the course of one month. If you run a business that has a high volume of searches that fit your offer, such as “yoga in san francisco”, you would most likely want to have a presence on the search engines. You can achieve this with organic search (or search engine optimization) or paid search. These are heavy topics which we’ll go over in detail in subsequent chapters.
I’ll also add that pay-per-call technology is a new yet promising way for businesses to get new customers and pay only when they receive a phone call from an interested party. Ingenio.com and Verizon’s SuperPages.com are currently the services available in this area.
(last updated 8-18-06)