e_Marketing

I've just begun a series of posts in our Affiliate blog called "Reaching Local Business". The product in question is what we call "Blogs for Business", targeted at local businesses in specific cities and towns.

The series is here: Reaching Local Business. It focuses on providing specific strategies for reaching people within clearly defined geographic areas (cities, regions).

In other words, rather than taking the usual internet marketer's approach of trying to reach everyone within a narrow vertical niche, your target is everyone within a specific geographic area across a range of vertical niches.

Sorry for the gobbledegook. But I've always found it interesting how most internet marketers completely ignore the geographic location thing - what you might call "local marketing" (and what the search engines refer to as "local search").

The marketing shift that took place when people started marketing online is fairly obvious - go after anyone in the world within your "niche".

But it's also surprising that the geographic niche has been all but abandoned by web marketers. The one glaring exception to this is real estate. Real estate agents and other marketing local real estate services have demonstrated how important it can be to be visible to people who do local real estate searches. Today about 80% of people looking for real estate information start on the web - with the search engines of course. And having a web presence in a local real estate market can make a big difference to an agent or service provider.

Local search and the decline of traditional media like the Yellow Pages is making it important for other types of businesses to be there too (that is, to be visible on line). This change has been fairly long in coming (I first wrote about this in about 1999), but it is inevitable.

When the Yellow Pages and other local print media drop below a certain threshold of viability - as readership and advertisers drop off - they will simply cease to be an important option for most local businesses. These local businesses will then have to get serious about the alternatives. And online alternatives are the most obvious ones they will have to look at.