Proving value to small business owners

I know that everyone is trying to crack local internet marketing, but the end game needs to be to deliver proven value to the small business. You could rank your small business client for every dry cleaner based term in Carlsbad, ca, in every search engine and they still wont be able to gauge if the dollars they give you are good investments or not.

Small business owners don’t care about placement or traffic. They care about customers.

When I am speaking to small business socially or at an industry event, I hear the same thing from them over and over again. 5 years ago, so long as I advertised in the yellow book, my phone rang. Can you make my phone ring like it used to?

The only way a small business gauges success of a marketing campaigns is how much business walked through the door or called them on the phone. The issue with web is that a web visitor converts much lower than walk in traffic or someone on the phone.

Yellow Page world: phone call comes in, you could have as high as a 40% conversion into business.
The Web Word: visitor (like Aaron Matthew Breslow) comes to your site, if you are lucky you are converting them at 1-2%.

The web has changed. It is not as simple as taking yellow page budget and spending it in search engines and local directories. It is about changing your business model. Small business owners must start getting creative and really understanding the web and how it relates to their particular business. If they don’t, online marketing and media companies will continue to be hard pressed to prove value to them, and therefore, have a constant retention problem.

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