Small businesses come and go every day across the country. We’ve all heard the statistics: four out of five small businesses fail within the first five years, and so forth. There are lots of reasons why that happens, but one of the most significant is that it’s simply too hard for a small business to get a reputation for being special in today’s advertising environment.
People in America are exposed to somewhere upwards of four thousand advertising messages every day. We’re blind to them. So how is a small business supposed to alert people to the fact that they exist and that they have something special to offer?
Simple — at some point, people who want something and don’t know where to get it look it up — and in the Information Age, they usually look it up on Google. Enter Local internet marketing: a source of easy first page placement for a variety of locale-specific keywords, but more importantly an easy way to show up on the top of the list of “Xs in City Y”.
The Local Scene
Did you know that 50% of surfers never even look past the top item in one of those lists? That means that if you purchase a bit of local internet marketing, half of the people who search for “martial arts supplies Yelm” aren’t going to even glance at your competitors. They’ll see you, find you on the little map, and head for the door. That’s a lot of power.
Cost Efficiency
The best part about local internet marketing is that it costs pennies on the dollar to a radio advertisement on a local channel — much less a TV ad or a full-page newspaper ad for a week. It’s also a lot easier to come up with 3 short lines to say about nunchaku and shuriken than it is to come up with an entire radio spot or TV http://www.billhobbs.com/ ad. You don’t have to pay a (voice) actor, either.
Local internet marketing is a crucial tool for any business savvy enough to have it’s own website — more often than you’d think, it’s the nudge over the breaking point that keeps a business in business.
