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The SMB Perspective: Should My Mom Learn Geo-Targeting?
By Scott Finholm | September 27, 2007
Whenever I think about search engine marketing as it relates to small businesses, it hits close to home. My mother is a real estate agent in Gig Harbor, WA, a sleepy little fishing village about an hour southwest of Seattle (you can actually check out her site here). But that little village isn’t so sleepy anymore, lots of folks are looking to move there and competition among real estate agents is fierce. If you’ve ever bought or sold a house in the past few years (as our CTO Cam Ferroni discussed in his recent post), the Internet has become an essential tool for all aspects of real estate transactions. But how does a small-town real estate agent compete with the marketing budgets of large real estate agencies? The obvious answer is “the Internet”, right? Sure. But it’s not that simple.
Products like Google’s AdWords, Yahoo’s Sponsored Search and Microsoft’s adCenter were supposed to herald a new age of advertising, where small businesses could compete on equal footing with multi-national corporations. And it has, in theory. But what’s left out of that equation is that search marketing is difficult and time consuming. Trying to write an eye-catching chunk of ad copy within the tight character limits that the engines give you is difficult for any amateur marketer. And small businesses would rather spend time focusing on running their business vs. learning the intricacies of Google’s budget optimizer or MSN’s demographic targeting. When I mention this theory to folks in the search engine space, I get blank stares. To some degree, this is heretical thinking for them. But the core issue here is that just because someone can do something doesn’t mean they will (or they should).
The concept of an ad agency evolved for a simple reason that applies (even more so) today: business owners need to focus on running their businesses, not on the specifics of where and how to advertise. The concept still applies, just look at the success of our downtown Seattle neighbors aQuantive , culminating in their acquisition by our across-the-lake neighbors, Microsoft. Business owners need someone they can trust to manage their advertising for them. And they need to know that they’ll get more dollars in business than they spent in advertising budget, or else they can find other ways to spend those precious dollars.
For a lot of small businesses, that “someone they trust” to do their online marketing is cousin Timmy or niece Stacy, the resident family “computer expert”. We all have them (and the odds are that if you’re reading this you ARE one of them). But it’s not something those folks want to do, either. This is where the sales staffs for Yellow Pages publishers, newspapers, cable companies and many other such organizations who directly service large groups of local advertisers have an opportunity. They already have a relationship with small businesses and they can parlay that into shifting from being simply a “sales rep” to being a “marketing consultant”. This will require those sales folks raising their game and learning (and believing in) a new product. But there is no single seller of search engine marketing to the millions of small businesses out there. There is so much opportunity in local search for both advertisers and publishers, the trick is finding a way to bring them together. Perhaps the best way to do that is for if someone they already know and trust to help them connect. Then they can fire cousin Timmy and focus on running their business, which they’ll need to do with all of the new online leads coming in.
Topics: PPClick, Advertising |
September 28th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
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