For many years, businesses have sought to find the most effective advertising methods to best promote their brand, products or service. For any business to succeed, it is important that it is able to identify and acquire new customers. For decades, the methods of customer acquisition have remained largely unchanged. However, nowadays with the rise of the Internet, many aspects of the marketing landscape have changed. Many businesses are discovering that local search engine marketing is one of the most effective methods to enlighten others of their small business and acquire new customers. There is a lot of power in the simple method of search engine marketing.
The main reason that local business internet marketing is so powerful is that it identifies prospects who are actually in the process of searching for a product or service. Compare this to an ad in a newspaper, magazine, or radio program. In these cases, the prospect is attempting to enjoy his media, and the advertisement is more like an intrusion on his entertainment. However, if he is actively searching for a product or service, then it is far more likely that he is in the market to buy. For example, if someone in San Francisco types “bird feeder” into a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo; then this would be a prime opportunity for a bird feeder dealer to place their advertisement near the top of the search engine results.
While it is possible that the person in San Francisco is merely looking for information about the history of bird feeders, it is also highly likely that he is a good potential customer for a bird feeder dealer. He is many orders of magnitude more likely to be a future customer than a random Internet user who didn’t perform such a pertinent search.
Typically, a business that engages in a local search engine marketing campaign only pays advertising fees when his advertisement gets clicked on by the searcher. This is known as the pay-per-click (PPC) marketing model. A business can customize the headline of their ad to make it either more or less likely that a searcher will click on their ad. A catchy ad headline will often garner a lot of clicks, but it may not be the most cost-effective strategy if a high enough percentage of those clicks do not actually turn into paying customers.
Although it can take a while to get comfortable with the process, any business that learns the art of local search engine marketing stands to gain a lot.
