Business owners find it intriguing when they read Internet consumption statistics telling them that over 60% of the local purchase decisions are made online and that as many as 78% of the customers research about services and products online, before contacting a business, either online or offline. That is an awfully huge number and as most of the business owners would see – there is not much that comes their way, neither in terms of web traffic nor in the form of
inquiries. What may be the possible reasons?
We are at an interesting crossroads when it comes to the Internet. It appears that marketing has become mobile, local and social; all at the same time. The local business owner is not faced with the question – “What to do”, but instead it is the plethora of choice, platforms and experts that make their life full of options and hence confusion. Add to that the still existent Yellow pages and trade publications. Small business owners have too many choices and this creates a hurdle in coming up with a decision of which channels to prioritize and which ones to leave.
If you have a business which is focused within a locality, a metro area, a county or even within a state, your traffic that “converts” comes from the target region. If you are in Cleveland, OH and sell dermatology services, chances are that most of your customers would be from North-east Ohio and not from other states, until and unless you have a big brand name and a spotless reputation.
Since we are in a mode of “prioritizing”, we would be looking at search rather than social as a traffic channel. The returns from a social marketing campaign originating on sites like Facebook and Twitter are still very low and for most of the small businesses, the traffic numbers are way too small. We have seen examples of Facebook sending tons of traffic to sites which are either in a particular industry type like hospitality, music, fashion, food or are a very well known brand themselves. For the other businesses, web traffic from social media websites is still an illusion.
Google is the dominant player in the search marketplace and with the “segmentation” that it has done over last two years, local is the new global. With the evolution of better Maps functionality and a highly evolved local business center, known as Google Places, Google has turned the table and made the playing field level for most of the small businesses which do not have a strong brand presence.
