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Repeat After Me: Local is Small and Small is Local
November 09, 2005
We hear it almost every Month: surely, I tell you, next Month will be the birth of the biggest thing we have ever seen in paid search: LOCAL!
And if not next, then surely the Month after that!
And yet, just as we hear it each Month we also come across shortly thereafter an item like today's from Online Media Daily:
"Two-thirds of small businesses are confused about online marketing," said panelist Greg Sterling, an analyst with the Kelsey Group. "Nobody is advising small and medium businesses how to get in front of the online consumer. Consumer adoption of the Internet... has been far greater than corresponding use of online marketing by small business."
There really is no mystery here. Local is small business and small business is primarily local, and therein lies the current adaptation problem. Many of these companies have as their only budgeted marketing item an annual ad in the (local) yellow pages. They've not only been doing it that way since the birth of their business but also cannot afford any external marketing on top of that.
Local will become truly LOCAL! in the online world of advertising when the physical yellow pages no longer work, which will be right about the time when the last man performs the last search in the last physical (local) yellow page book for a given industry in a given locality. Then a Month or two later companies in the given industry in that given locality, their phones having stopped ringing, will supplant yellow page advertising with LOCAL! paid search.
Can you imagine the articles we will see then?
All posts by John Lustina
posted by John Lustina at November 9, 2005 06:38 PM
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