SMB’s – it is not as easy as dumping the Yellow Pages for the internet

One of the big changes in advertising for Small Businesses is that they are dumping the yellow pages and going online. When I talk to small businesses, they think this means dumping the yellow pages and going to search, or the internet version of the yellow pages. It is not that easy…and small businesses need to get prepared for a more complicated online local advertising landscape.

Before the Internet…
Before the internet, consumers had one choice to find a business. Go into their cupboard and pull out the yellow book and search. It was a pretty simple formula for the small business, the bigger the ad, the more calls and businesses they would get.

After the Internet Explosion..
The internet has changed everything, especially the accessibility of information which has had an enormous impact on consumer behavior. Consumers have learned that they can get information from different sources. They might buy shoes based off of what someone said in facebook but then turn around and buy their shirt from looking on a search engine. Many still get their information from Search Engines and Internet Yellow Pages, some from their piers in Facebook. Others rely on review sites like Yelp and Citysearch. Micro blogging like Twitter will change the ways people go to events, view promotions, etc.

So What is a small business to do?
So given all of this, I am commonly asked by small business owners what they should do. The answer is pretty simple….you have to do it all. No longer can you going to place a single ad in a single source and expect to be successful unless you can pay an agency 6 figures a year to do so. Search Engines are great, and a great first start, but you have to follow that up with all of the other components.

The issue here is how does a small business owner do this? They were used to buying an ad in a single yellow page book that would span all of the communities within a city. To do this online, it would more than bankrupt a small company. For a small business to get strong search engine exposure in all of the communities in San Diego (there are roughly 50 communities) it would cost well over $40,000 a year. And the real problem is that they are not going to get the same call volume and customers they would have received 10 years ago from a similar spend in the Yellow pages. Consumers are too spread out in their searching, and they have too many choices. The internet has really leveled the playing field.

Small Businesses…Do this!
The best advice I could give you is to do what you can on your own, and hire a professional to do the rest. As a general rule of thumb, go by this plan:

1. Search Engine Optimization – Hire a professional firm or SEO consultant to take care of this for you. This is one of the more important forms of online advertising you are going to do and one of the more complex as well. Hire a professional!
2. Review Websites – Manage this yourself. Tap into your customers and offer them coupons if you see their name on a positive review in Yelp, Mojo Pages, etc.
3. Twitter, Facebook – this is all you. I would recommend you hire a social media consultant for a couple of hours to explain how to use this as a platform. Once you learn it, you should use this daily.
4. Paid Search – hire someone to set your campaign up and show you how to run it. A small local paid search campaign is not rocket science, but it does need to be setup correctly.

Most importantly, you cannot settle and get comfortable with what you are doing. The Yellow Page industry was dictated and formed by executives and business people. The internet will continue to change by way of the mass audience…so change will continue to occur at this rapid pace. For you to have a competitive advantage over your competitors, you need to be more aggressive and stay up on change better than him.

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