Local Internet Marketing

Main Street2: Local Internet Marketing (Part 1) 7/28/2009 Introduction to the oppotunities internet marketing offers local businesses. This blog focuses on strategies that work with customer behaviors on Main Street and online.

More and more activities from our daily lives have gone online. It seems as if Main Street America is being replaced by the Internet. The outlook looks bleak. Why go to the bar when there’s Match.com? I can order groceries or a delivery pizza online, so I don’t need to go out. I can watch my favorite bands, even local ones, on YouTube or MySpace. The Internet is so convenient for all our activities why do we need to leave home?

The answer is simple. We need the human experience. We need to get out and stretch our legs. We like to go out with cash in hand to see what our town has to offer. The Internet is not going to destroy or replace our local businesses and destroy our way of life in some hard lesson learned scenario by Ray Bradbury. The world isn’t going to end, but the paradigm has shifted because of our other human need, information.

The Information Age is enhancing our communities by opening up communication. Local business listings on Google Maps and Yelp and other “review sites” opened up Word-of-Mouth marketing to business owners everywhere. Social Media, or Social Networking sites offers us a chance in our busy lives to build relationships in our community. Good relationships are the backbone of local businesses. Internet marketing bridges the gap that used to separate companies and customers.

The opportunities to connect the span are not hard to see, but information overload can blind us to them. It’s wise to consult with an Internet marketing professional at this point (wink, wink). We are told about pay-per-click, social media, page rank, Google, Facebook, shopping carts and how great they are, but they’re not new concepts.

Internet Marketing works because it’s based on traditional methods of building business-customer relations. In truth, the basic elements of T.V., Radio, Print, Yellow Pages and Word-of-Mouth have an online counterpart. The difference between traditional marketing strategies and Internet marketing is the heightened ability to track results, to measure Return on Investment, to adjust and adapt to market conditions and to interact with customers.

The second part of this series will look at the behaviors of customers downtown and online. What do they do on Main Street? What do they do online? Then in part three we’ll look at Traditional and Internet marketing side by side. How are they applied to customer behavior?