In the race to acquire your small business advertising and digital marketing dollars, the winner doesn’t seem so clear-cut. At least when we take some geographical or demographic information into consideration.
Sure, the local phone book publisher has most likely seen a cataclysmic drop in ad revenue over the past few years. And certainly this must be directly correlated to the rise in online searches, increase in mobile internet accessibility, availability of improving technology, and the overall topsy-turvy world of defining consumer habits.
According to research from the Local Search Association (formerly the Yellow Pages Association) conducted by Burke, search has taken over as the top way to find local businesses for most demographics1.
Interesting that the Local Search Association was formerly the Yellow Pages Association, but maybe that’s another blog post. As a Carlsbad small business owner the challenge becomes how to best leverage each (and every) communication medium available to increase local sales and improve customer retention.
And of course how to weed through all of this digital chatter to identify those opportunities.
According to this recent article on the Google+ social networking move, the average U.S. visitor spent 375 minutes per month on Facebook in May, compared with 231 minutes for Google.
How many minutes are there in a month?
We can bet our mobile carriers can tell us. But are we getting our moneys worth for those minutes?
Moreover, how many minutes do we spend actually thumbing through the phone book?
We’ll reserve judgment on the blog posts…and promise to only take our finger-pointing to a whole new level via Twitter!
Although this is quite the contentious subject amongst some marketers, small business owners need not let emotion dictate the best communication tools for use in driving more local sales.
Hashtag AT&T are you listening?
What do ‘the phone book’ and MySpace have in common?
Hint: MySpace reportedly sold today for a whopping $35 million…it was acquired 6 years ago for $580 million…
