Local online advertising is not expected to flourish in the immediate future. Despite the struggles facing local newspapers, local advertisers are not flocking to local advertising sites like one might think.
One possible reason for this as Sarah Lacy at BusinessWeek points out, is that there are so many ways to target niches online that focusing on a local region is often unnecessary. "Thanks to the myriad of online communities from information aggregator Digg to social network Facebook to niche blogs about everything under the sun, we can identify and coalesce around similar interests and shared passions with anyone in the world," she says. "You no longer have to be best friends with your neighbor or co-worker when a site like Twitter recreates a feeling of intimacy, if only a passive kind, online."
Another possible reason is simply that the web is flooded with content. "You have a lot of competitors offering the same thing, or something that is very similar. It's holding back the market to some degree," says Greg Sterling, principal at consulting firm Sterling Market Intelligence, as quoted by Wall Street Journal.
In fact, I wrote a piece for WebProNews on this subject recently. The sheer amount of content being posted to the web on an ongoing and infinite basis makes it harder and harder to choose the best possible places to advertise. There is so much content to view that nobody has time for everything they would be interested in. Therefore an audience that in the television world would flock to the same content sources, is being split up all over the place in the online world.
To be clear, I am not of the mindset that online advertising (even local) is doomed like some. To me, these are just signals that the need for ads to stand out is greater than ever. If anything, these factors should contribute to the creation of some truly memorable and innovative advertising campaigns.
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Comments
advertising should be
advertising should be targeted then it will be sucessful.
Peter Roesler
President florida web design company
I agree adveritsing needs to
I agree adveritsing needs to be VERY targetted these days, to get the exact person you want to be a customer, every dollar spent needs to have a return.
Complete package..
Spending money on any advertising is worthless and can be more harmful if your website is not ready and I mean ready. Too many times we've heard the story from our new clients that come to us saying they spent $1,000's on local and even online advertising without success.
For those that were online stores it was a frightning site to see what they were promoting or how they were promoting the product with a very basic run of the mill online builder. Some had excellent products but just were not packaged right whatsoever.
Take a package of gum for example.. they spend 10,000's of thousands on just the box design alone that only holds 12 sticks of gum or so.
One client even spent 10k in 30 days on just local advertising, newspapers and radio with very little results. We spotted the problem right away with the site and had them spend 1k on the web and did 5 times as much in sales.
Local ad's are a dying breed for the most part.
local advertisers price themselves out
I agree with your article. The fact is, the laws of supply and demand apply. Local advertising rates are often so high that with free and low cost advertising online, it does not make economic sense to use local advertising--particularly for small to medium sized businesses. Local advertisers would be well advised to harmonize pricing with demand and offer online exposure as part of the overall package.
A turbulent year is pretty
A turbulent year is pretty much a good description of how I see 2009 shaping up for the online advertising industry. For the consumer economy at large we all know the story by now, retailers and manufacturers both large and small are hitting the wall as consumer spend freefalls.
Local Advertising
With the advent of the internet the majority of people having abandoned the yellow pages and newspapers for information - in contrast to what those selling advertising in such publications would tell you - how can businesses get new customers?. To keep up with this influx of meida from the internet, businesses are required to use the internet for their advertising needs. However, the local jeweler, dentist or plumber can't afford to blanket the internet nor are expensive banners going to work. What can they do? PPC - but that can become very expensive for the dismal results acheived with Google and Yahoo. The solution is a new company has arisen to meet the needs of the local businessman's advertising on the internet. Check out LocalAdLink for details.
Local online advertising
Local online advertising from LiveDeal will place your business in front of potential customers looking for your goods or services.
I agree online advertising
I agree online advertising is the way to go.
Mike - the magniwork review consultant
Local Advertising Sitess Need to Show the Value
I think Sarah Lacy and Greg Sterling are both missing the mark. There are millions of small businesses who don't want to market to the entire world via the Internet. They need and want to market to their local areas which account for 100% of their business.
The problem is how to get a good return on investment for the small business. They don't want to pay for impressions that may not be coming from their local market, but many of these local advertising sites force either that model or a flat rate fee.
To a large extent the best value for a small business is highly targeted contextual advertising via the search engines in combination with solid SEO. Beyond that a business really needs to research where its potential target audience is spending time online and then figure out if it can get a good roi by testing ads and closely tracking where referrals are coming from.
Local Advertising
Local advertising on the net would work if only the local advertising sites would be content to stay 'local'. In this time of everyone doing everything (banks selling mortgages & insurance; supermarkets doing holidays and photo processing etc) they are not happy unless they are trawling the web for national and even international advertisers, so once again the local adverts get lost. It's corporate greed once again.
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