Locally Here: Thoughts and Reflections on Local Business

New Look Locally Here Website

locallyherebytes — Fri, 21 May 2010 17:13:08 +0000

Locally Here is proud to announce the creation of a locally here webiste for Ribble Tandoori Clitheroe. A new feature has been added to this wesite, whereby a ribbletandoori blog has been added to the website. The link can be found on the home page which can be found by clicking on the following link:

www.locallyhere.com/ribbletandoori

The Tyranny Of Print

locallyherebytes — Wed, 12 May 2010 19:55:07 +0000

Every small business knows the value of advertising. To paraphrase what Donald Trump famously said, “you can have the best product in the world..but if you don’t promote it, it isn’t worth anything.” To grow their business and to reacher a wider audience it is imperative for a small business to get itself known. This is widely understood by any experienced business person. A recent study conducted by a global advertising company showed that companies that invested 15% of revenue into advertising doubled subsequent revenue and increased profits by 80%.

So the value of advertising is beyond dispute. However companies who advertise have traditionally fallen into the following conundrum as identified by the former head of Lever Brothers; namely that 50% of all advertising spend is successfuly deployed, and 50% is wasted. Up until the arrival of the digital age this was a legitimate and acceptable trade-off. But not anymore. With internet-based advertising, audience reach can be directly monitered, and the actual cost of reaching those new sales prospects analyzed. No longer does business have to be enthrall to unmeasurable advertising platforms.

I was startingly made aware of this whilst speaking to a prospective client interested in advertising on www.ribblevalleyworld.com which is a Locally Here website aimed at helping Ribble Valley based businesses achieve measurable and cost effective targeted advertising. My prospective client told me that they had paid for a display advert (incidentally more expensive than a directory listing in Ribblevalleyworld.com) for which there were no measurable processes to analyze the actual audience viewing the advert, beyond a stated circulation figure for the free sheet, and which resulted in zero enquiries. Yes that’s right zero, that translates to a less than 1 in 20,000 sales conversion rate!

So why do small businesses persist in running adverts in print publications whose effectiveness cannot be measured? I believe it is because of inertia and fear. Small businesses know that they have to invest in advertising, but they are are both unaware and unwilling to invest in the clearly measureable advertising opportunities afforded by the internet. Better the declining, and unmeasurable advertising platform of a local publication, rather than make the additional investment of time into promoting oneself online. It is therefore a clear challenge to break the tyranny of print advertising without measurable returns by engagement and professional education of the small business community in our society.

The Pervasive and Persuasive Pull of Print

locallyherebytes — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 10:47:52 +0000

During the last week I’ve been spending a lot of time with local businesses in the Ribble Valley in the North West of England. The Ribble Valley is an affluent and comparatively sophisticated region with a vibrant small business sector that is weathering the economic downturn pretty well. A region where you’d expect small businesses to have their finger on the digital pulse and to recognize the importance of online in their future. And yet the reality is that a majority have little interest in what role the Internet can play in their businesses.

The key barrier to digital adoption for most of these companies is lack of understanding and familiarity. It is not that they do not understand the importance of marketing….in fact that is part of their problem. They will happily spend between 40 and 500 pounds a month on print advertising without ever seeing nor even seeking a quantifiable return on their investment.

Why do small businesses have such blind faith in print advertising? The simple answer is familiarity. They grew up with newspapers and magazines and by extension with print advertising. Newspapers and magazines have the highly convenient luxury of being able to rely upon years of heritage rather than measureable results as evidence of their importance to advertisers.

And the small businesses aren’t the only ones to fall for the persuasive pull of traditional advertising media. The TV ad business may not be in the rudest of health yet it massively outperforms the Internet in terms of ad spend. Every year consumers spend significantly more time online yet the share of ad spend that is shifted to the Internet lags massively. Advertisers stick with what they know, even when it is massively less measurable than the digital alternatives.

Small businesses can chose to ignore the highly measurable vast reach of the Internet until the channel becomes more familiar to them. But the price they will pay will be losing some or all of their business to the small businesses that learnt fast the lesson that you simply cannot afford not to be online in the 21^st century.

What do you think? Are you a small business grappling with the challenges of making online work for you? If so, let me know your thoughts and comments here.

Tim Mulligan is the founder of www.locallyhere.com a network of websites and marketing channels for small businesses.

When Being #1 on Google Isn’t Good Enough

locallyherebytes — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:55:48 +0000

During the last few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time with small businesses in the north west of England. Many of them are just coming round to the idea of getting online, but some already are. Some of my most interesting conversations came about with those businesses that already have a website.

I lost count of how many times I heard “ah but I’m #1 on Google”. I’d reply, “that’s great, but tell me, what search terms are you #1 for?” It was then I’d hear them tell me they were #1 for the exact name of their business along with the name of their town….What I had to stop myself from saying back to them was “Well that’s just great for the customers that already know you and where to find you, but it is close to useless for those customers you haven’t found yet…or more to the point, those who haven’t found you yet.”

And even for those customers who have bought from you, what happens if they aren’t regular customers. Can you be totally confident they’ll remember your company name in 12 months when they’re looking for your services again? Maybe they can just remember that you were a great architect in Bristol but not your name. If you’ve not bothered to optimize your site to deliver results for ‘architect in bristol’ then guess what, that customer won’t find you again, even though they’re looking for you.

If I had to pull out three priorities for online strategy for local businesses they would be:

1 – get online!

2 – make sure people can find you and what you do (don’t just look nice online)

3 – create an online network of multiple support properties

Why What You Can’t See Is Often Most Important for a Successful Internet Strategy

locallyherebytes — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:51:39 +0000

One of the big challenges for small businesses is how to know whether they’ve made the right decisions with their Internet strategy. Once you’ve got your company’s first website live it is, or at least should be, a great feeling. But a successful Internet strategy is far more than having a nice looking website. In fact, all too often it’s the stuff that you don’t see that is most important.

Take the example of www.gbrsales.com

They’ve had built for themselves a basic but perfectly functional website. What they almost certainly don’t realize is that their web designer has completely let them down with search engine optimization. But it’s worse than that the site not correctly optimized, it has actually been optimized for another company!

Try entering the following search terms into Google:

gbr sales joomla

Look what has happened: one of GBR Sales’ index pages has been labeled as Joomla instead of GBR Sales. And the plot thickens when you look at the rest of the site. Instead of the appropriate optimization for GBR Sales, all of the search engine optimization is for Joomla instead!

In case you’re wondering who Joomla are, they are a commercial open source provider of website templates which the web designer has clearly opted to use here for their client.

Web designers using 3^rd party templates for a client is one thing. But failing to optimize a client’s site in even the most basic ways for Google and instead effectively building the site as advertising inventory for a 3^rd party software provider does the client a clear disservice.

This case study illustrates one of the most important principles of a successful Internet strategy:

Being online is only the first step: if your customers can’t find you online you may as well not be there.

Make sure that your site does everything it possibly can to stack the search odds in your favour and that whoever you assign to do your website building for you knows how to do this for you. Before engaging a web design agency ask them about what sort of SEO tactics they use and examples of how they’ve used them – with success – previously.

It’s a dog eat dog world out there and you need every advantage you can get.

The Problem With Directories

locallyherebytes — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:23:30 +0000

With over three quarters of the population online and the majority of those on broadband, companies of all shapes and sizes are waking up to the fact that they simply cannot afford not to be online. The problem is that many make mistakes in their rush not to get left behind. One of those mistakes is expecting directories to be their knight in shining armour.

Directories – particularly the online versions of traditional directories – play a role seen with the advent of all new technology: that is the role of transition technology. It has one tentatively placed foot in the future and as huge one stuck in the past. Directories are how people found local businesses in the pre-Internet age, and they seemed like a natural evolution in the Internet age. But just as the first cars looked like stagecoaches without horses, so directories now look like something from a bygone era.

There are simply far too many directories to be effective. Making your business seen or heard through the noise and clutter of online directories is a hugely difficult and equally costly task. You also have the fundamental problem that most directories are simply not places that customers would chose to visit by choice. Which leaves you relying heavily on your directory listings getting picked up by search engines. But of course there are so many directories that even this will often prove challenging.

To be heard above the noise and the clutter, businesses need to get smart about how to make the Internet work for you, not the get swept away with the Internet using you.

For example, one of our customers at LocallyHere.com has long invested in placings with Yell.com. He’s had decent if unspectacular return over the years but never had anything to compare it against. Until we built him a LocallyHere website. Within 1 hour of us putting our web expertise to work we had become the Number 1 search result for his keywords, pushing Yell into 2^nd place. That’s right, Number 1 after just 1 hour. But don’t just take our word for it, try searching for him on Google with these keywords:

philip lea chartered surveyor wennington

So whatever you chose to do online, don’t rush into it, and don’t fall for the lure of the directory, or if you do, make sure it is part of a structured multi element online strategy. The days of being in a directory alone being enough are long gone.

If you’d like to learn more about LocallyHere.com websites then please visit www.locallyhere.com

What have your experiences of working with directories been like? Either as a business or as a customer looking for a local business. Let me know your thoughts and comments.