Local print and radio advertising
While print and radio advertising have taken a beating in recent years, there are still some good results generated by local business owners who do a great job of targeting their customers and profitably marketing locally. Signage continues to offer one of the best values for local advertising; Unfortunately, you can’t trust all potential customers to come by and see your sign.
The most important ingredient for a successful print and radio advertising campaign is repetition and, consequently, a reasonably large advertising budget. It takes the average consumer between 7 and 15 ad exposures before they remember it – essentially, you need to have a print or radio campaign running every day for at least a month before seeing significant results; consequently, the cost per acquisition and risk can be extremely high.
Advertising on the yellow page
While it was very effective in its day, it was, and still is, extremely expensive and let’s face it: most people no longer use phone books. As much as they claim to offer an online “package” that drives clicks to their website (strangely, they actually generate those clicks through Google AdWords with 80% of the revenue going directly to Google and further funding their crippling monopoly ). Ultimately, moving online was a reactive move imposed on them by an eroding customer and revenue base (and by not paying attention to the elephant in the room). Like the older, more established newspaper chains, they reacted by buying (and typically overpaying) from their online counterparts in a feeble effort to demonstrate to what was left of their customer base that they were “taking advantage” of the Internet.
Everything goes back to local marketing
A hundred years ago, everyone did business locally; trade with your neighbors and other people within your own village. The builders brought their crops to the village and set up stalls to sell carpenters who paid for those vegetables with the money they received from working for the local shop owners. The world directly outside their doorstep was all they knew and needed. Then big companies came along and taught everyone who listened that the only way to compete in the global village was to think globally, and consequently the big conglomerates dominated the day. And then, in the mid-to-late 90s, the internet came along and removed the miles that often created barriers to global trade and commerce. Now, after 12 years of sustained growth, the World Wide Web is returning to its roots: small is new big. Local ad spending is the fastest growing stream in internet marketing. It is expected to increase by 18% in 2011 and will account for 25% of total ad spend by 2015. The new global village is its own village and many companies find that working around the corner, where coincidentally still spending most of the money, it’s just as good, if not better, than working all over the world.
but local businesses always knew …
While local businesses realized the need for websites, they didn’t know what to do with them. Some tried and failed to sell their products “all over the world.” The reality is that the average consumer spends 85% of their disposable income locally, literally within a 25 kilometer radius of their home. And that means you need to market your business locally, in “your village”, for your people.