First, before anything else, you need to have your business ready to serve, or sell to, a new customer. Elementary? Yes, actually, but on occasion I see businesses that are selling themselves before they are ready to provide service or product. First you need to be ready to do business.
There are many ways to advertise today. There are coupon mailings that blanket neighborhoods and towns. You can buy a page in this book and hope that people actually spend the time to thumb through it. You can buy a page advertisement in a bulk mailing of the same type, but it's loose, unbound pages simply folded together. Or perhaps you could include a page ad into the local newspaper or within the flyers section. Again, you need to hope people will open this up and go through it page by page, find your ad, and then act on it.
There are TV ads, of course very powerful, but also prohibitively expensive for many. There is radio, again quite expensive. Billboards? Well, this is not cheap by any means. The internet? Did you say the internet? My business is all local. I'm not selling to people in Cairo!
The internet has changed and people today use it to search for local services and products. A new marketing field is available today and it is called local search or local search engine marketing. What we have here is a new marketing option that is right on. You can put your product or service in front of people when they are searching for exactly what you provide! This is huge. This is not a random ad in a booklet that will probably never even get looked at. This is providing information about what you sell to people who are looking for it, when they are looking for it.
What you get with local search is a listing on the search engine that provides information about your local business. Let's look at how Google handles local search as an example. If you do a search for a product or service utilizing your important keywords and qualifying that search with a location, e.g., "work boots Memphis" you will get a listing of businesses that sell work boots in Memphis. The listings will be grouped together with cross references to a Google map so you can easily find each business. They'll also have a link listed with your company name that will bring you to what is called a "Place Page". Now this free business listing is what is huge about local search. You can claim this page and then put all types of pertinent information about your business on it. You can provide exactly what people want to know right there in front of their face when they are looking for it. Not buried in some book somewhere, but right in front of their face when they are looking for it.
There is also a spot for a link to your actual website. So if this person wants even more information they can click through to your website, if you have one, and learn even more about your business. So you see, today it is extremely important to get yourself listed in local search and take the time to make sure it is done correctly. This one time effort to get properly listed will pay off for a long time to come. Don't let this opportunity slip by you. Act today and get your local listing set so that it drives new business to your door.
Robert D. Kelsey works in online marketing through two channels, traditional SEO in CT and also through Local Mobile LLC where he helps local businesses get their local search listings setup to drive new business through their doors. Today you can use local search to place your business in front of those who are already searching for you. You need to act now to get your share of new business.
