Ads Next™ Local Internet Advertising, Annapolis, Maryland, Internet Advertising Solutions, Search Engine Optimization, Website Design and Integration, Social Media Marketing

Many people search online for local dentists, doctors, restaurants, spas, landscapers and many other local businesses.  Is your business being placed in front of these users? 

It’s not just about how many people make it to your Web site, but whether or not they take action once they’re there. Are they filling out lead forms?  Are they making a phone call?

Phone call tracking is one way to measure the success of your Local Internet Advertising efforts.  Call tracking allows you to place unique local or toll-free telephone numbers on your website, online and offline ads or landing pages. 

Call tracking proves accountability in both online and offline ad campaigns.  It allows you to monitor the effectiveness of each ad campaign and prove ROI to advertisers.  Calls can be recorded for quality assurance purposes and to measure the quality of the leads that are being generated.  You are able to listen to the phone calls through a real-time reporting portal.  Within these reports you are also able to view name, date, time they called and phone number.

Starting an online or offline campaign with tracked phone numbers can drive qualified leads to your business.  If you are running an ad campaign without tracking the results you could potentially be losing money.  It is crucial that you start tracking your local internet advertising efforts.  Find out what ad campaigns are working best for your business and invest more into those campaigns.

I found this article today from eMarketer very interesting.

Here comes the “Precision Shopper.”

Any retailer who isn’t using the online channel to promote offline sales—as well as online sales—is missing a sizable opportunity.”Today, online consumers think nothing of shopping across a retailer’s stores, Web site and catalog,” says Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the new report, Multi-Channel Retailing, “As a consequence, online product research is driving more in-store sales than online sales.”

Last year, eMarketer estimated that store sales influenced by online research totaled $471 billion. Comparatively, retail e-commerce sales were only $136 billion.

Looked at another way, for every $1 in online sales, the Internet influenced $3.45 of store sales.

”Online consumers are becoming precision shoppers,” says Mr. Grau. “They are availing themselves of the wealth of information resources online to discover and evaluate products, compare them and find where they can be purchased.”

Mounting research shows that a significant percentage of store purchases are influenced by online product research.

In addition, the “eHoliday Mood Study,” conducted during last year’s holiday shopping season by Shop.org, showed that 63% of US online buyers made their holiday purchases in two or even three retail channels.

The percent of respondents who used more than one channel would have been even higher if consumers who researched products in one channel then bought them in another were included.

According to eMarketer estimates, combined Web-influenced store sales and retail e-commerce sales accounted for 15% of retail sales in 2007. By 2012, the percentage will nearly double to 28%.

Forrester Research, in contrast, reported that Web-influenced store sales plus e-commerce sales accounted for 27% of retail sales in 2007—almost twice eMarketer’s estimate.

”As much as online shopping is a convenience and the online shopping experience continuously improves, people are not about to abandon stores anytime soon,” says Mr. Grau.

So if your cross-channel marketing capabilities are still in the early stages of development, don’t despair. As Mr. Grau says, “The majority of multi-channel retailers still have work to do to resolve organizational and IT issues that stand in their path.”

So you have a website, now what?

Just like a brick and mortar store your website needs to be promoted. On the web there are two main ways to accomplish this goal.

Paid Advertising: This includes pay-per-click text ads on the Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You can also buy display banner ads on local newspaper and magazines sites. This form of advertising is very affordable and the results are tracked. Small Businesses are finding this form of advertising to be a great place to start when advertising a new business. More established small businesses use the Internet to highly target customers in a specific area

Organic Promotion: This form of website promotion is less common, but incredibly effective. This form involves Search Engine Optimization, the process of creating title tags, keyword density and site maps so your site ranks higher in the search engines. It is also very important to create a Blog for posting orginal content. The Blog is then linked to your website. The content can be posted on other community sites (ex. Digg.com) for additonal quality links to your website. In addition is very helpful to have the blog feed the posts into a defined space on your website. This is excellent spider food and really helps with organic rankings.

Website Features shoud Include:

• Creation of quality Inbound and outbound links
• Blogs with RSS Feeds
• Real-time Chat tools
• Search Engine Optimization