Internet Marketing
Geo targeting, also called local search is about using the Internet to bring local customers to your brick & mortal business or organization. The technology now exists that allows Internet ads and offers to be shown only to people within a specific geographical area.
Most small, local business owners have never been concerned about websites, clicks, optimization, or page ranking. Their concern is live customers who want their products and/or services. They want sales, not clicks, customers, not high rankings.
Some of the more adventurous business owners will go through whatever is necessary to master website design, clicks, optimization and ranking in order to get the customers they want. Others will hire someone to do it for them. But the majority of brick & mortar businesses are far from the cutting edge of Internet technology. They don't know how to do it themselves and don't have the interest or resources (time and/or money) to fuss with it. They have accomplished some measure of success in their business to date without it. Yet, they know that they must eventually adapt to changes in the business world or fold. That's always been true.
The 'Net is THE Yellow Pages®
The fact is that most American consumers search on-line! They use the Internet like a Yellow Pages® directory.
- There are approximately 300 million searches per day for information on the Internet (Nielsen/NetRatings 2005).
- 60% of activity on-line is in one way or another “related to local content” (Directions Magazine 3/2005).
- For every one dollar U.S. consumers spend on-line, another five or six are going to offline purchases that are influenced by on-line research (MIT Technology Review, April 2005, "E-Commerce Gets Smarter").
- 97% of Internet users in the U.S. gather shopping information on-line, and of those consume 51% explicitly characterize their behavior as "Shop Online, Purchase Offline" (NPD Group).
Search engines are THE default on-line directories!
Internet advertising campaigns can be customized to bring more customers through the doors of brick & mortar businesses. All of the major search engines are expanding their local search capabilities (i.e., Google®, Yahoo!®, MSN®) in anticipation of serious growth.
Search engines and other Internet companies are increasingly committed to the prediction that small businesses are the key to advertising riches. They are optimistic because they know the math. There are about $60 billion in annual advertising revenue that could be funneled at least in part to the Internet. This projection is based on the local merchant's average marketing budget of $6,000, multiplied by the estimated 10 million small businesses in the U.S.
They also know the higher success rates and lower costs of Internet advertising. On-line display and search ad spending is projected to grow at 10 percent per year over the next five years, according to a study released by JupiterResearch. Jupiter also predicts that the on-line advertising market will rise from $11.9 billion in 2005 to $13.6 billion in 2006 – and $15.1 billion in 2007.
A study released in November 2005 by trade group Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers found that Internet ad sales reached an all-time high of $3.1 billion in September and predicted they would exceed $12 billion by the end of the year, up from $9.6 billion in 2004.
Internet Ads Served Locally
The key to the serious entry of small businesses in the Internet marketing game is the ability to serve Internet ads to local geographic areas. Small businesses haven't been willing to pay for clicks from people all over the world – and rightly so. Small businesses have shied away from Internet advertising because their target markets are not world-wide.
Technology has come to the rescue. ReachLocal has developed an Internet marketing platform that can manage ad campaigns across the spectrum of major search engines, and those engines can now serve ads to local regions.
Management Difficulty
The primary difficulty with Internet advertising involves campaign management. It requires time and specialized skills to plan, design, track and evaluate ads on each of the selected channels – and there are a lot of them. The input fields are different, the reporting is different. It's an administrative nightmare that makes the process daunting. Those with deep advertising pockets can handle it, the rest have been left out of the game.
Technology comes to the rescue, again. One company, NetLocalAds, uses a patent-pending third party software platform to target Internet ads to display to people in specific geographical locations across a spectrum of search engines. Currently NetLocalAds provides service for Google®, Yahoo!®, MSN®, SuperPages®, CNN®, AOL®, Excite®, AltaVista® and Ask Jeeves®. This provides very thorough Internet exposure within in specific geographical areas through one management platform. This solution is particularly helpful in generating new local customers for small businesses.
No Website? No Problem
NetLocalAds is able to provide a landing page for advertisers who don't have a website. This feature can be used for coupon campaigns, where consumers are encouraged to print and bring a discount coupon into the store. It can also be used for businesses to test Internet marketing before they spend resources developing a website. Web designers and developers could also use this feature to their advantage, as well.
Track Telephone Calls
Without tracking, measurement and evaluation return on investment is impossible to calculate. No problem. Telephone calls, email responses, and other site visits that are generated by specific Internet ads can be tracked and reported. This valuable feature is provided by a patent-pending process called Reverse Proxy.
The idea behind Reverse Proxy is simple. The advertisement's landing page is scanned and the code is regenerated and presented on a different unique page. During the process phone numbers and email addresses are replaced in the code with different but unique numbers and addresses used for the sole purpose of the ad campaign. In this way the platform can track calls and email responses stimulated by the ad. It's an ingenious idea – simple and effective.
Putting it all together, we see a movement afoot to provide small businesses what they need to get into the Internet marketing game. The industry is poised for significant growth. 
