In 2007, the New York Times shocked readers by revealing that we see over 5,000 advertising messages per day. It’s a staggering number, and a revealing admission that of all the advertisements we see each day, very few are memorable.
Local businesses can report much the same: of their billboards and display ads, only a few of the thousands of people that walk past them every day can remember what they were advertising and why they offered value.
Offline advertising, it seems, just isn’t as effective as it once was. With customers in major cities paying less and less attention to billboards and flyers, businesses are taking their ad budget to a more measurable medium: the Internet.
Read on to learn about the five biggest advantages that online advertising mediums such as Google Adwords offer that traditional local advertising methods simply can’t match.
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Measuring the customers you get from a billboard is tough. While some customers might mention where they heard about your business, the vast majority fail to tell you where they heard about you – or in some cases, where you found them.
Adwords, on the other hand, makes it incredibly simple to track visitors from search keyword to advertisement, from advertisement to landing page, and from landing page to checkout. Every step of the process, and it’s all in one simple platform.
Scaling your Adwords budget from $20 per day to $200 per day is simple. Scaling your billboard campaign, however, requires a series of phone calls, several weeks, and a considerable budget for artists and raw materials.
One of the biggest advantages of online advertising is its scalability. Whether you’re aiming to rapidly expand your local customer base or sell lots of inventory in a huge discount sale, online advertising makes it easy to expand your audience in a hurry.
Online advertising is very lucrative for businesses with the skills to optimize their campaigns properly. With the right conversion optimization, you can source new customers online for a fraction of the cost of acquiring customers via billboards.
While online PPC is undoubtedly an expensive venture early on, once you’ve found profitable keywords and effective ad copy, you can source new customers at prices that make radio, offline display, and newspaper ads seem very overpriced.
From setting your budget to testing different advertising images, using Adwords is far from difficult. While offline advertising is also easy to set up, you’ll often spend most of your time waiting for other people to take action on your campaign.
Adwords gives you a hands-on, user-friendly interface for managing your search and display campaigns. If you aren’t interested in managing them yourself, it’s an easy process to set up Adwords campaign management with a marketing agency.
Want to capitalize on a hot new trend? While billboards and other offline display ads would take weeks – if not months – to set up, a timely new Adwords campaign is up and running in minutes.
Adaptability is key, particularly in today’s economic climate. Search marketing gives you the ability to rapidly adapt to new challenges and capitalize on opportunities – a process that’s far slower and less effective in the offline advertising world.
For decades, the go-to advertising platform for local businesses wasn’t Facebook or Google, but the Yellow Pages. With millions of customers in every major metropolis and the ultimate ‘buying mode’ audience, the Yellow Pages was, for a long time, the only way for local businesses to reach people that were interested in buying.
Today, it’s a little different. With Google and Facebook offering ultra-targeted local advertising at very reasonable rates, what reason is there to spend your ad budget on the Yellow Pages?
The answer is fairly obvious: very little. With a declining audience and fees that are massively expensive when compared to online marketing, the choice is clear: move your Yellow Pages budget online and reap the benefits of advertising that’s easier to track, cheaper to implement, and far greater in scale. Check the Cost of SEO Services
Adwords is an incredible source of local customers, especially in ‘problem solving’ industries such as construction, plumbing, or dry cleaning. If your business offers a service for consumers, it can reap incredible benefits from Adwords search ads.
Thanks to Google’s new pay-per-call ad metrics, which allow you to pay for calls as well as clicks, it’s easy to make the transition from Yellow Pages to Google. The only difference is the pricing – instead of paying a flat monthly fee regardless of results, you only pay for the results that your ads generate.
Optimizing for local search keywords requires a slightly different strategy from the typical product or service-driven keywords. Instead of competing with corporations and large companies, you’re primarily competing with other small, local businesses.
This means your success is determined far more by smart keyword selection than it is by your budget. Create content that’s targeted to local keywords – even districts in your city – and you’ll be able to capitalize on lucrative, low-competition keywords.
The same is true of SEO – you’ll be competing not with the large corporations of big-traffic search keywords, but small, local competitors. This levels the playing field and makes local SEO more about relevance and trust than the size of your budget. See more : SEO Package Prices
In a way, the Yellow Pages was a printed precursor to SEO. Instead of vying for the top search position using links and on-site content, businesses fought for the most prominent Yellow Pages position using their marketing budgets.
Optimizing for Google Local is a great way to reach the same audience that used to read the Yellow Pages without paying a cent. Links and content replace what was once a marketing budget, giving you even greater results without the costs.
If you’re beginning to notice declining results from your Yellow Pages ads, consider making the transition today. Your local SEO company can help you optimize your website for local maps and begin attracting customers from Google within weeks. Check about the SEO consultant in Los Angeles.
The readership of directories is rapidly declining, and more customers are turning to search every single day. This makes Yellow Pages advertising the ultimate poor marketing investment for businesses – while the cost stays constant, the audience continues to grow smaller.
It’s time to call quits on offline directory marketing. Take your marketing budget to the Internet and you’ll generate more traffic, attract more customers, and make far more sales. Check out Orange County digital marketing services.
We can help your business replace its offline directory campaigns with a scalable and effective online PPC campaign. Contact us today to learn more about our PPC marketing services and local SEO campaigns for businesses. Learn about the Performance Based SEO Pricing
