According to a recent report from Borrell Associates, overall ad spending in 2011 will grow by less than 5% but local online ad spending will grow by 18% in 2011.
They further go on to explain where the growth is coming from:
It’s clear that ad dollars continue to move from the old media to the new and now it’s time for local banner ads to have their day. When your retailers start to use local banner ads the key to success isn’t what the banner ad looks like or even how it performs, the key to success is the landing page and how it performs. That’s why if you have an online ad builder it’s not good enough to allow your retailers to build an effective banner ad, you also have to build, host, maintain and monitor the landing page. The landing page is where the brand message gets delivered and the cash register rings.
Here are the results from a study by Harris Interactive that asked marketers what works best in reaching local markets.
These results are right in line with what our clients are asking for in the ad builders we build for them. More than ever brand managers want digital outputs in addition to the more traditional newspaper ads and brochures that are already being generated online by their dealers.
The reason is simple. More consumers are spending more time online than ever before and certainly when searching for a product, it’s the number one place consumers go first.
When you combine the brand message with local promotions, local prices and the extra services that are offered by a local retailer, you have everything a consumer needs to make a purchase decision.
Exposing a co-branded dealer microsite in your dealer locator results page (instead of sending an interested consumer to the dealer’s site loaded with competitive information), as a landing page for a banner ad campaign or use it for a landing page in a local Google search campaign. It makes a lot of sense according to this study.
Here’s a good benchmark for setting your advertising budget as it relates to online spending.
Well said.
Here’s a study from CrossView that indicates that consumers prefer to get retailer promotion information from an e-mail and surprisingly web site, newspaper and social media are way down the list.
I think the key word here is “delivery” of retailer promotions. Not to be confused with how a consumer learns about a promotion. So maybe the only meaningful takeaway from this study is that this study tells us that consumers prefer e-mail delivery over direct mail by a significant percentage. And, that makes sense because it is so much faster and easier to deal with, if the coupon comes electronically.
Most ad builders have a relatively easy way for retailers to deliver a direct mail piece to consumers and that’s important to keep and improve.
However, many brands don’t have a good solution for a retailer to build and deliver a brand friendly email to consumers about a local/regional/national promotion. This study tells you that it should be on your list of things to add to your ad builder in 2011 or sooner.
Here’s an interesting report from WebVisible documenting how much small and medium size businesses are spending on search advertising. You can download the full report here.
We have to remember that these numbers are taken from a wide variety of SMBs and include florists to doctors. However it’s inescapable to conclude that the idea of buying keywords for local markets is growing and that if you have a lot of retailers out there the amount of money collectively they’re spending on search is noteworthy.
This report shows an almost $9,000 annual spend per retailer. If you have 1,000 retailers this would add $9 million to your search spend. That’s powerful if you could control the buy and the landing pages. It could be devastating if you don’t have any input into what’s happening locally online.
That’s why we’re working right now with leading brand names to add local search campaigns to their ad builders. Helping your retailers buy keywords and helping them create and manage the landing pages is the smart way to increase and improve a brand’s online presence. Making the buy co-opable is an even better idea.
I’m picking up this story from the Guardian in England, so I won’t vouch for their numbers but even if they’re half right this should put a scare into US newspapers thinking of putting up a paywall for their content.
The Guardian story claims that almost 90% of the Times of London online readers have abandoned the site rather than pay a fee to read the articles.
This information won’t help US newspaper publishers sleep any better as many, including the New York Times, have announced plans to charge readers to view articles online within the coming year. Free is a stubborn thing to take back once your customers have gotten spoiled by the concept. Not to mention the fact that so much of the content newspapers want to charge for is available free elsewhere on the Internet.
So what is a newspaper to do? They’re losing money on the print edition and can’t seem to charge enough for online advertising to offset the cost of providing the site while also enduring the losses from the print edition.
I don’t have an answer for them but I’m concerned about the ultra fragmentation of local advertising that will take place if such stalwarts of local advertising fall by the wayside. Will we have to find the best local blogs in every city and negotiate a banner ad buy with each one of them? I hope not.
Local advertising has been all about technological change these past 10 or 15 years as the Internet has become the place where consumers spend their time. Recently we read where White Page phone directories are becoming a thing of the past and yesterday we saw where Amazon sells more e-books than hardcover books.
In the past three months Amazon claims to have sold 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover books during the same time period. In the past four weeks the ratio was even greater at 180 e-books to every 100 hardcovers.
What all this means to those of us looking for better ways to advertise to potential customers locally is that we have to adapt to technology and provide our retailers with the tools they need to play in the digital arena. Yesterday’s online ad builder that helps produce print materials is still relevant, just not as relevant. It’s time to add microsites, banner ads, local search campaigns, fan pages and more to the mix.
Here’s a great quote,
Enough said.
There are several different ways to measure market share for search engines and here’s another view and another data point that indicates Google, while losing some share to Bing, is still the number one search engine choice by a wide margin.
The point here is that if you’re trying to help your retailers choose the best way to spend their money locally, local search is the best ROI ever. Then, if you want to tell them where to spend their money in search, Google is the first step. And, if you want to add the ability for your retailers to create AdWord campaigns and landing pages in your online ad builder or if you just want to provide them with campaigns, get it right on Google first and worry about the other search engines when time and budget permits. But, get Google local going right now!
AT&T in Madison, Wisconsin decided to publish a Yellow Pages only directory and offered a White Pages supplement if a homeowner was interested.
Only about 2% of the over 600,000 homeowners asked for the White Pages supplement. Here’s the full article.
The scary part is that there are still a lot of markets out there delivering White Page directories where 98% of the people couldn’t care less.
How about the Yellow Pages?
If your retailers are spending money on the Yellow Pages I wouldn’t tell them to completely walk away from that expense but I would recommend they take a good percentage of that money and transfer it to Google Local Search. We know that 80% of consumers walking into a store to make a considered purchase go online before they go into the store. I’ll bet that 80% don’t go to the Yellow Pages before going to a store.
Local advertising is changing, make sure your retailers are keeping up with the times.
Here’s another report about how important the Internet is to selling your products through a local retailer.
As a company that provides online ad builders for major brands we continually emphasis the need to expand from allowing local retailers to build and place traditional media to include digital and this study helps to make our point.
For our brands the key to digital output is allowing the retailer to customize a digital template that will act as a landing page for banner ads, email efforts, dealer locator results pages and local search to name a few. So many brands think providing dealers with banner ads or co-oping Google local search is all they need to do. The reality is that to control your brand message and to track and improve constantly means you have to control the landing page with input from the local retailer.
Once you have digital output figured out for landing pages, then everything else will fall into place and you’ll be ready for whatever comes next.
