Why Internet Marketing?
Over the last 10 years or so, the internet has become more and more ingrained in our daily lives. People use the internet to search for almost everything, including local businesses and other local information.
And with the explosive growth of smartphones like Blackberries, Androids and the iPhone, this move to searching for everything online is just going to happen faster. If you’re not reaching your customers (and potential customers) in the places they’re searching for information, you’re going to get left behind by your competition that is.
In this report, we’re going to look at some of the things that you need to be aware of when marketing on the web, as well as some of the ways that you can not only reach new customers, but get your existing customers to spend more money with you, and do it more often.
The Move To Online Search
According to Google, 20 percent of all searches are related to location. And comScore reports that Google served up 10.7 billion searches in April, 2011. That means that approximately 2.14 billion searches were related to location – in other words, local search.
These numbers have been increasing every year over the last several years. Compare them to April, 2008 when Google served up 6.5 billion searches, which means roughly 1.3 billion local searches. The bottom line is that more and more people are using the internet to search for local information, including businesses like yours.
Yellow Pages
And one of the advertising mediums that is being hit the hardest by this move online is the Yellow Pages directory. Traditionally, the Yellow Pages has been the “go to” source for local businesses, and as a result if your business wasn’t listed in the Yellow Pages, you would be missing out on a lot of potential customers.
But with the transition to internet-based local search, those searchers are becoming less and less likely to use the Yellow Pages. And not only because of the convenience and speed of the internet – they’re also looking for reliable sources for reviews and other information about the companies they’re considering which isn’t possible with print advertising.
And while Yellow Pages has spent a lot of money to fight back by providing a full online service to compete with Google, that attempt has been woefully unsuccessful.
This graph shows a comparison between the number of searches made on Google versus those made on the Yellow Pages site.
