Internet Marketing: the Three Steps of Local Online Advertising

I’d like to introduce you to the first article of our new “Local Internet 101" series; a set of entries geared towards helping small business owners coming from a bricks-and-mortar business who are making their first steps onto the internet.

If you’re new to local internet advertising, let me be the first to say “Welcome”. You’ve probably already experienced enough terminology, technology and new concepts to make your head spin. Well, the Local Internet 101 series is here to get you caught up to speed by walking you through some of the fundamentals of local online advertising for small businesses.
Let’s get to it then, shall we?

For our first topic, we’re going to dive right in to the existential question at hand: What is Local Online Advertising? Quite simply, local online advertising is using the internet to market or promote to a single geographical area such as a city, region, or state. A prototypical example of this is a small business creating a website and promoting it so that local customers find it online and then visit or call the business. The three steps in that simple sentence are the core of local online advertising;

1. The small business owner creates a website: But he doesn’t just create any website. He creates a website that accurately and compellingly represents his business. Generally, a small business owner should have this step undertaken by a website construction firm; websites do not have to be fancy, nor littered with bells and whistles. But they must be professional and well-maintained. Your son’s friend’s brother Bart who took a computer class a few years ago might sound like a great deal- but will he be around to add your latest promotions and remove outdated contact information months from now? 40% of consumers reported that the quality of company’s website, or the total lack of one, is a factor in who they decide to do business with. For many businesses, a professionally designed website will pay for itself in 2 to 3 new clients; clients that may never have contacted you if your website looked like it were designed by Bart.

2. The website is promoted so that local customers can find it online: This is the key to online advertising; if the right visitors find your website, it will generate new customers. The tricky part here is getting the right visitors. If you’ve looked at options for promoting your website, you’ve probably seen the word “targeted” so many times that you’re starting to think the internet is a digital firing range! Targeting simply means “putting your ad/website/promotion in front of people who will potentially be interested in your offer, AND not putting it in front of people who won’t be .” The point of this is exactly the same as when you’re running off-line ads like mailers; if it costs you a dollar to send out a mailer for your wedding cake bakery, and you send it to someone who’s already married, you just wasted a dollar.

On the internet, the first step of targeting for Local Internet Advertising is the Local part. Because the internet is global, the chance that someone in your city will find your local law practice website is just about the same as the chances of someone in London finding it. That’s why you must target the region where your customers are. For many small businesses, that may be your city, your county or your entire state. Website promotion comes in many forms, from getting your website ranked highly in search results to purchasing ads that display on the right-hand side of results to creating press releases and much more. We’ll dive deeper into that discourse in later issues of Local Internet 101. For now, you just need to understand that in order to be effective, your website must be promoted where the target customer can find it.

3. The customer contacts, visits or calls the business: Well that’s the whole point, isn’t it?! Getting the customer to take an action that you intend; be it a call, visit, online purchase or store visit is called a Conversion. Conversions are the goal of your Local Online Advertising; and result in you establishing new customer relationships and making new sales.