Make Digital Marketing Work

The first commercial use of the internet was by business looking to expand their marketplace.  It stands to reason that a local company looking to expand their business into national and global markets could find a fantastic medium online.  Anyone who could ship their products to the customer had a wealth of opportunity open to them and this is how eCommerce was born.

On the other hand, a traditional bricks and mortar local business that relies on local custom, can find the internet to be a baffling place. Dentists, hair salons, doctors, guitar teachers, mechanics and a whole host of other business types all fall into this bracket where their location is an important part of their appeal. Similarly their customers often make decisions based on location in tandem with their reputation and perceived value.  Location therefore becomes a hugely important factor.  Correlating this to an environment where time and place do not matter was a perplexing problem for a very long time.

I’ve heard advice given to local hairdressers to get involved in eCommerce operations which effectively meant they should abandon a business they knew for one they had no idea about.  That kind of advice is thankfully consigned to history now but some very big companies served up that kind of rubbish for a very long time.

The problem is that nobody is going to drive the length of the country to visit a dentist regularly, and the concept of the visiting dentist to London that comes to you from the Outer Hebrides didn’t catch on as far as I am aware.

For business such as these the online marketing strategy should include Google Local Search.  Other search engines also offer local search inclusion but Google is by far and away the simplest to set up in my view. By adding your details to the mapping anyone that uses location as a search term will see your information. There is still the need for it to be entered correctly and a marketer who is experienced in these things will be able to help you.  The results can be significantly better (and the costs significantly lower) using this method rather than trying to get to the top of Google’s rankings for the term “dentist”.  When you think about it, that is a pretty pointless goal to begin with.

All local businesses should be looking at Local Search as a promotional tactic.