In the past ten years, I have been involved in 10-15 local business seminars and have found the results to be not so great. I believe the fatal flaw in each of those seminars was the focus on the sale. The bottom line in the seminar was to get the local business owner to purchase advertising on the newspaper.com.
I was reading a post from a friend of mine, Mel Taylor, regarding his efforts to educate the local business owner for Tribune. I don’t have copies of the presentation but from his short post I got the idea he was using an “Internet 101″ type program. Mel is definitely the right person to deliver this message but to educate the masses, it is going to take a very long time. If you are going to do these seminars, I would recommend breaking them down by business type to ensure the message is relevant thus increasing the return.
Google’s approach to educating the SMB…
Google recently announced a partnership with Office Depot to both educate the user on the value of their AdSense programs and re-sell advertising units. This type of partnership has the potential to educate the masses much quicker than small business seminars.
Cambridge, MA based CityVoter.com uses a similar approach for their growing advertising network. They currently provide printing and email marketing solutions for local business and will expand on their business center offerings in 2008.
Educating the SMB on their need for multi-platform, hyper local advertising is key but it will fail unless we become the “One Stop Shop” for extending the local business owners reach and develop a simple process to get this done.
Some media companies have made strides to try and accomplish this.
Examples:
- McClatchy Interactive is partnering with WebVisible to manage local advertising campaigns on major search engines.
- Freedom Interactive is working closely with Orange Soda on similar initiatives.
In most studies in recent years, the main reason local businesses don’t advertise is lack of time.
To make that model successful we need to create and promote a self serve interface that allows the local business owner to post their ad on the newspaper.com, major search engines, create and post simple display advertising campaigns and develop Business Profiles that can act as their website. We only have 10-15 minutes of their time, so we need to make it very simple and intuitive including recommended, pre-designed text and display ads, seeded business data so all they have to do is confirm or update it.
Filed under: Local Search, Marketing, Newspapers, Training, Yellow Pages |
Tags: Advertising, Local Business, Local Search, Mel Taylor, SME, Training
2 Responses to “The SMB- Not educated or overwhelmed?”
Leave a Reply
-
-
subscribe
-
are we connected?
-
Palore Data- clickz stats
Stan, you touch on a lot of common, recurring themes in local online marketing. I think your recommendation about a self service interface has some potential, and of course there are a lot of players out there trying to make this work.
But I go back to your comment about lack of time being a reason SMBs don’t advertise. I think to some extent, at some point, we have to stop there and say, wait a minute: if you as a business owner are not willing to invest some time in learning how to sustain and grow your business (i.e., market it), then you can’t be helped.
Yes, there are certain narrow verticals where a templatized self-service solution can work, but that’s not a truly scalable approach, and it leaves a lot of business out.
HubSpot’s blog had a post along these lines (http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4091/The-Single-Most-Important-Ingredient-in-Your-Internet-Marketing-Strategy.aspx), and I think this whole issue pre-dates the internet. SMBs always faced the “I’m good at my job but not good at running a business” problem, and the internet just introduces a new element of that same challenge.
The business owners that take it upon themselves to find out how to get good at running a business are more likely to find long-term success and growth, and I don’t think there’s any readymade solution out there that can get around that. Certainly the internet came facilitate the learning process, but the business owner has to want to make it work.
Mike- Great points. No matter what we do the business owner needs to want to succeed. I’ve been involved with a few projects recently that included intelligent, intuitive self service tools. I don’t think a tool like that will ever be the only answer but it will definitely help. To reach the masses we may need to focus one niche and category at a time while continuing to capture best practices.
If the business owner takes things seriously and moves up the learning curve by understanding his limitations, it will make the training process much easier.