The web has been hailed as the righteous hero for small businesses. A simple web page opens the door to the world, right? Plus, with the so-called built in accountability, each dollar is stretched as it is easy to measure what works and what doesn't...
But is the picture really all that rosy? Yes, the web has enabled e-commerce, effectively widening your potential market, but for a typical local business, the majority of sales come from closer to home. Take a car dealership for instance, a website is certainly necessary for client research purposes, but the sale will come from an in-store visit.
So... how easy is it for a local business to promote itself locally? When it comes to the web, it's not as easy and accountable as people assume.
As a media planner, I was responsible for national scale brands and had a plethora of tools at my disposal. Typically on a national scale, a company will focus on the major markets and allow spill to fill in the rest. When it comes to online media, looking for websites with a large composition of Canadian visitors (wherever they are located) is easy as the measurement tools are in place with a statistically significant panel in each market.
On the local level, this measurement does not exist. Local companies must rely on Search as their primary or only online marketing tool. Even then, there is only so granular you can get.
This lack of measurement and accountability on the small scale is a shame - particularly for the medium that has spent the last decade thumbing their nose at mass media (AKA: local media) for being wasteful. It is ironic that for a typical small business, without adequate local measurement, digital marketing is a really tough sell.
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