Local Yokel, Revisited
Back to business. The
NewsFactor
Business Report, that is. And the problem of local search.
Here we get another perspective on the issue – the
numbers.
In the TNS Media Intelligence
study of category ad spend allocated to the Internet, it is computer
products (18.6%), financial services (17%), diet and fitness (26.1%), and the
Internet itself (51.2%) that have the highest
percentage of their budgets for online advertising. But people, at least where
I come from, do not spend their days buying gadgets, stocks, and diet books.
They are working, playing, shopping, and eating.
Let’s talk eating.
an example if I want to. The state
of the restaurant industry, despite taking some hard
hits, I would deem “healthy to quite healthy.” And restaurants are a prime
example of local business – particularly by neighborhood. The decision to eat
at a particular restaurant is not as impulsive as that mini-bag of Skittles at
the checkout counter of the grocery store, but certainly less in-depth than the
purchase of a new car. Either way, it is still a consumer decision – a decision
that, as we now know, can be made or broken by the quantity and quality of
targeted advertising campaigns.
Yet only 0.9% of all restaurant
advertising budgets go towards online ads, and only about 5% of small
and medium-size businesses are using paid search (Kelsey Group). In this case, 2 plus 2 is not coming out to 4. In
fact, it’s not even pushing 3. Local restaurants and bars are lagging behind in
their online & paid search efforts, and they are not going to increase them
unless they feel confident that they will see results from their local
community.
Where are these going to come from? How about a 4-5%
click-through rates – as opposed to the average at a lowly 0.5%? That’s what
Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless, the company that is attempting to bring local
search technology to the forefront, is shooting for. So far, they have mapped
the 100 biggest
cities (70% of the country) and enabled marketers to locate the exact
coordinates of any device with a Wi-Fi antenna, which means PCs and more importantly,
cell phones. The location-based Internet search toolbar is called Loki and
allows users to find services and product that are geographically relevant. This
kind of technology makes me go Whoa, Keanu-style, and makes consumers go, “Hey, that’s
right on my way home. I think I’ll check it out.”
What do you think? Is this the future knock, knock,
knocking on our door?
Methinks, too, that once restaurants jump on board,
retail food stores and department stores, which now also are on the low scale
in terms of online ad spend, at 2.1 and 4.4% respectively, will not be far
behind.
