In Part 1 of our Local Search article, we talked about the basics of local search. Now, let’s look at what local search can do to grow your online visibility and reputation.
As we close-in on 2011, we are rapidly approaching the point when customers won’t pick up the phone or drop by a business location without first doing a quick local search, confirming that your business is convenient and open, and scanning the reviews.
That’s the new reality — no one wants to waste time or money, or to have a disappointing experience. And the best way to help ensure a satisfying outcome is find out what previous customers experienced: Are your tacos really the best in town? Are your surgery patients happy with their outcomes? Is your contracting service trustworthy? Can I conveniently drive to your office?
This is contributing to the reason why traditional, business-driven print ads, direct mail, and cable TV are running flat or collapsing, while customer use of local search is growing at 50% per year. Customers want the insightful information that local search provides.
Here’s another underlying trend: Web-enabled smart phone sales now exceed 250 million units per year. And sales of all portable smart devices are expected to overtake personal computers by 2013. What will many of those users be doing with their snazzy new toys? That’s right . . . Local search.
For many of our clients, email marketing campaigns are a vital tool for communication and sales. That’s why we have added an email marketing tool to our reporting system. This feature makes it easy to monitor and report on email marketing you are already doing through your Campaign Monitor and MailChimp account, two popular email services.
Campaign Monitor and MailChimp both have the ability to connect your existing email marketing account to the RightNow Communications reporting system. All we need is some basic information about your email campaign. After we synchronize our reporting system with your email service, the reporting platform will retrieve data and enable you to monitor and report on your email campaigns. The one time set-up is free to RightNow Communications clients.
Campaign Monitor and MailChimp automatically include campaign variables with their links. This allows our reporting system to retrieve data from Google Analytics for each email campaign you send out. We look forward to adding more email marketing services as our system grows, and we are hoping to include Constant Contact and Aweber in the future.
Email Report Data Sample:
The Power of Local Search Marketing — A Low-Cost, High-Value Strategy for your Business
Part 1: Local Search 101
What is one of the most important recent change in online small business marketing? It’s Universal Search, the integration of all these media types and sources — everything meaningful about a particular topic — on a single search results page.
The simple text search results we’ve known in past years now include a spectrum of new formats and sources: images, videos, blog posts, news headlines, social media updates, maps, etc. — everything our friends at Google, Yahoo, and Bing think we might want to know about something — hence the name universal search.
But for small businesses, the big news, the compelling feature of universal search that provides an unprecedented opportunity is Local Search.
What is it? [Read more...]