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Ah, the Good Old Days
By Cameron Ferroni | October 30, 2007
Son, I remember the old days, when I would walk barefoot five miles in the snow to school, and “online” meant that you had someone available to answer the phone…
I don’t envy the challenges of the local business right now when it comes to advertising. In the old days, it was pretty easy - not always cheap, but easy. You basically had six different outlets to manage - yellow pages, newspapers, tv, radio, mail, and outdoor (billboards, buses, etc). Now, while these could range from inexpensive to very expensive, and from simple (just a phone number) to complex (high quality TV ads) - at least they were well understood in terms of cost to create, cost to build, and ROI.
Fast forward to the internet and, frankly, it’s chaos out there. First off, despite what some might say, none of the above have really gone away - all are still very viable sources of leads, and worth investing in. Then you add online into the mix, and the possibilities multiply rapidly. In what would seem obvious to most of our readers, the first step should be a Web site. But what is obvious to those of us who are connected doesn’t always translate to the rest of the world - in fact, only as few as 40-60% of small businesses today have Web sites (according to various studies).
When I consider that is the base from which we are starting, it truly gives me pause. I mean, think about that for a second. Just think about the mental gap between where small businesses are and where we focus on things online every day are. Consider for a second all of the advertising channels/complexities in the internet age: Search Engine Optimization; Search Engine Marketing - and not just for one engine, but managing campaigns across Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, and the list goes on and on; Video Advertising - whether via YouTube or others; Pay-Per-Phone-Phone Call advertising via Voicestar, Ingenio or others; Conversion Tracking on my Web site; eCommerce; Product submission to Shopping Web sites (of which there are dozens); Yellow Pages/Directory Listings - making sure I’m represented in all the right places; Contextual advertising; and last but not least (and frankly the hardest to really even quantify) - keeping up with all of the various places my business may be listed on the Internet, and making sure that they have up-to-date and accurate info (e.g. do all of CitySearch, Urbanspoon, OpenList, Yelp etc etc have the right address, phone number, cuisine types etc.)
Heck, it was a daunting task just trying to list all of them and remembering all of the key players, can you imagine running a local dry cleaning business and trying to get full coverage across all of those channels? I didn’t think so. And then, back to the top - you may not even have a Web site yet! But who can blame you - really? I mean, you are definitely turning away business, but the slope is very very slippery when it comes to launching and maintaining a good Web site that will maintain value - and even if you do really want to reap the rewards you want at least a balance of Internet advertising across all of those channels to maximize your ROI.
Seriously, I’m not sure how anyone can expect your average small business to sort all of this out without the help of agencies, and even with that help, we aren’t doing much to make the agency life easier as an industry either. Maybe what I’m challenging us to do as an industry is to spend less time both coming up with and pushing the next great advertising opportunity, and spend a little more time making sense of all of the great stuff we already have available - both for us and our customers….
Topics: Local Advertisers, Local SEO, Yellow Pages, Local Search, PPClick, PPCall, Advertising |
January 8th, 2008 at 12:40 am
When it comes right down to it, outsourcing is the way to go. In the long run it is cheaper than all the overhead associated with hiring an employee. And if you are going to have some marketing person wear this extra hat when s/he hasn’t before, don’t expect the level of proficiency to be anywhere near that of someone who does it for a living.