Entrepreneur’s Journal: Ditch the phone book and advertise on the internet?
Posted by: in Small BusinessFiled under: Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), salesforce.com inc (CRM), Small business
Each month or so, it seems that I get a new phone book. But I throw them away. When I need to get information on a local business, I go to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Local.
According to a research report from the Kelsey Group, about 54% of consumers have substituted world wide web search in place of phone books. “Users are searching local information from the desktop as well as mobile devices,” said Kirk Crenshaw, who is the CEO of RevCatalyst. “Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL)’s iPhone should also accelerate these trends.”
So how can your business capitalize on local online advertising?
Get listed: Make sure you enter your business profile on Google’s Local Business Center and Yahoo’s Local Listing. “When the information is processed, your business will appear on maps and searches,” said Crenshaw. “You should also list with smaller sites, such as Citysearch, Ask.com’s AskCity, and Local.com.”
Paid Search: This means you purchase search phrases on Google and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO). For example, if you operate a mobile phone outlet, you could bid on the phrase “Mobile phone store Fresno California.”
Keep in mind that you can geo-target your ads, which means that they’ll pop-up only for local searches.
However, it can get tricky to manage your campaigns in terms of measuring effectiveness and budgeting. To help things out, Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) has developed an on the internet advertising system that’s part of its Salesforce Group Edition.
“I talk to a lot of small businesses who are new to internet marketing and on the web advertising,” stated Kraig Swensrud, a vice president at Salesforce.com. “Companies tend to use on the web advertising as a mechanism to generate new leads, so they need a way to present a marketing message to interested buyers and then capture the name and contact information of that interested buyer.”
To this end, he suggests spending a few hours to answer the following questions:
- What goals are we trying to reach by marketing on the internet?
- Who is the target audience for our message?
- Where physically is our audience located?
- How do we intend to get this audience to react? What is our offer? Where will we bring them after people click on an ad?
Search-Friendly Website: It’s often the case that websites are not optimized for search engines. No doubt, this can result in missing out on possible leads.
Well, there’s a website development platform - which is geared for small businesses - that can help out (although, it will mean recreating your presence.) It’s called Doodlekit.
“With our service, each page has a descriptive URL and are W3C complaint,” stated Heath Huffman, who is the co-founder of Doodlekit. “Or, if you want to insert an image, we require that your write up a description. Such things are often overlooked - but can make a large difference in your Google ranking.”
Tom Taulli operates SmallBizMix.com.
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