Local Marketing Deathtrap

If you believed everything you read in the internet marketing circles these days, you’d think that setting up shop in the local marketing space automatically entitles you to a free pile of money delivered to your door monthly.  The truth is, this couldn’t be more wrong in most cases.

As far as internet marketing strategies go, local marketing should be very low down the list of businesses to get into unless your existing structure is very well optimized and has exceptional systems in place that are not entirely over leveraged.  That’s a mouthful, so let me explain.

Leverage in Internet Marketing

Leverage is a VERY IMPORTANT word in internet marketing and is really quite misunderstood.  To put it simply, leverage is the level of return you get from the assets you invest on in your business.

So for example, in most internet marketing businesses, people may eventually employ teams to do something like SEO work.  A highly leveraged team will be getting great results for the expenditure on salary, a poorly leveraged team may have too many people or too much cost and not getting adequate return and finally, an over leveraged team may just not have the resources required to achieve the maximum return possible (ie. not enough staff to do the necessary work).

Obviously leverage is related to many things in business, not just staffing – you could have a mountain of cash sitting in the bank getting a 1% return via interest and compared to a 4% return a term deposit might bring you, you’d say that cash is massively UNDER leveraged.

Anyway, I think you get the point – you need to have some spare capacity to handle the increased workload.

Internet Marketing Strategies Require Systems and Structure

The other points I made were about systems and structure.  These are critical issues for internet marketing entrepreneurs who want to expand into local marketing.

Put simply, most people fail at internet marketing because they don’t have the right systems in place.  This failure is probably just in the arena of affiliate marketing where your goal is to drive traffic and get them to buy something.  That’s actually a fairly simple business model and one of the reasons I like affiliate marketing so much.

The problem is, a drowning person will cling to anything to stay afloat.  So what happens is, the internet marketing person who’s not succeeding at affiliate marketing, hears about this panacea known as local marketing and decides to give that a whirl.  The problems that plagued this person in the online affiliate marketing space have not been addressed and they are now compounded by adding REAL CUSTOMERS into the mix.

Local Marketing Requirements

The first thing any internet marketing entrepreneur needs to know when embarking on a local marketing strategy is that you MUST change the way you do business significantly.  You now are entering a world where real people are involved, they’ll want to call  you on the telephone, maybe even shake your hand at a meeting in person and they may be sceptical of your internet marketing magic.

Most people online preaching the local marketing mantra probably don’t even do it themselves.  It sounds nice in theory – a local butcher is paying $x,xxx/year for a full page ad in the local Yellow Pages that nobody reads anymore, so you just need to “enlighten” them on the glory that is the web and let the checks start rolling in.

The fact is, you need to have a whole offline, local marketing sales funnel in place that introduces the potential lead to the value that internet marketing can deliver to them.  That’s one system.  You need a customer management system to keep track of your (or your sales staff’s) interactions with customers so that you maintain consistency.  You need to establish local credibility – the local butcher doesn’t care that you rank #1 in Google for “invisible panty lines”, he wants to understand how the local community will see his message through your efforts and then buy his meats.

Most importantly, you need to be able to execute the work.  One thing local marketing requires above all else is great execution.  Customers want results and you need to be able to show them what you’ve done.

The last thing, don’t be a total hype internet marketing machine.  Telling the local butcher you’re internet marketing strategies will triple his foot traffic and quadruple his sales will make you look like a tool.  Talk about facts and be humble.

Internet Marketing is such a large field of business with so much potential, you need to be careful when “experts” are espousing internet marketing strategies that venture into areas you may not be familiar or comfortable with.  Local Marketing is one such area – unprepared internet marketing entrepreneurs stand to lose alot of time and momentum, so give it some serious thought before racing off into ti.

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Tagged as: affiliate marketing, internet marketing, internet marketing strategies, local marketing, make money online