Small Business Center

Local Online Advertisers Miss Sales Opportunities

October 7th, 2008 by Admin

A new study by Marchex, Inc. shows that many advertisers are not doing locally targeted advertisements. While many (over 70 percent or the 150 advertisers surveyed) are advertising online, about half are doing local online advertising.

The advertisers want to do more local online advertising, aren’t quite sure how to approach it. Few local advertisers are running ads targeted to city, or zip code. They also cite limited success metrics to measure how their campaigns are performing.

Here are some more findings:

• Almost half said that at least 25% of their in-store sales were driven by online marketing.
• More than half use different messaging or tactics to target different geographic or local markets. 45% use the same messaging despite targeting different geographic/local markets.

Marchex recommends that online advertisers:

• Diversify and manage traffic sources beyond paid search (SEO!)
• Use landing pages to drive leads to specific locations and markets
• Track and analyze all consumer actions - including calls (as in call tracking), emails, form submissions, map prints, and coupons - resulting from local online advertising efforts including determining results and ROI
• Tailor ads to local markets and using local call tracking numbers to measure and help generate more phone calls to your business.

Again, a phone call is an important marketing event, one that you can track inexpensively. You can drive local online advertising to a phone number that can be tracked so you’ll know where the call came from, how long the call was, and other metrics.

Seth Godin says: “The most valuable marketing event is almost always an inbound phone call…The customer or prospect is taking the time to call you. She’s focused, interested, paying attention and willing to trust you.”

OrangeSoda specializes in local online advertising solutions for small to mid-sized businesses. We have an internal tracking system and a call tracking option so businesses can gauge the impact of their work. We also work with our clients to target their advertising by zip code, area, city, and state.

I interviewed an OrangeSoda employee about our take on local advertisers and where the pain point is:
The best thing businesses advertising locally is add tracking to their web site. We are continually surprised by the number of businesses who come to us looking for help with their online marketing and do not have any tracking system on their websites.

We’ve found that most of these businesses aren’t aware of the many free or low cost tools that are out there that will help them understand where their web visitors are coming from and how they can increase the number of sales that are coming from those visitors.

Helping local advertisers has been one of Orange Soda’s strengths, especially with our easy-to-use Fizz reporting system. With just a few lines of code added to their website, local advertisers can quickly and easily see where their sales are coming from.

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