Where have all my customers gone?
I spent time earlier in the week talking to some local businesses about how they were faring in this period of recession. Some of the business owners responded with “we’re doing ok; but not as good as last year”, some said “business was good” and others responded with “business was not good at all and we are seeing fewer and fewer customer customers coming our way”.
I then spent some time trying to understand just where these business’ customers have gone. One of the interesting discussions that I had was with a local plumber who has seen a year-on-year reduction in the number of enquiries he is receiving for his services. He has traditionally advertised in the printed directories (Yellow Pages and Thomson Directory) and he has seen a steady decline in the effectiveness of this form of advertising. When asked if he did any online adverting he replied that he didn’t feel he needed to pay for online advertising as his business has its own website and he thought that was enough.
What he failed to realise was that having a website is of no use if nobody can actually find it. The guy I was talking to is a plumber and is skilled in installing boilers and fixing leaks, he doesn’t have any knowledge about how to put a website together and how to market it effectively; and who would expect him to know how to do this?
When I explained to him that the reason he is seeing such a marked decrease in customer enquiries is because the plumber in his area that has worked out how to market himself online is taking all his business away. That was the penny dropping moment.
Bill Gates himself said back in 2007 that “the Yellow Pages are doomed within 5 years“; people will search online to find what they are looking for and the business owners that do not adapt to and embrace the online world will follow the Yellow Pages into oblivion. It’s a harsh message, but a message that businesses will be foolhardy to ignore.
Everything I have written so far was the motivation for us to create LocallyCompared. We know that many, many businesses have a real problem understanding how to position themselves online and we want to build our business by helping them. For a business owner it is extremely easy and cost effective to build a detailed profile of their business on LocallyCompared. This profile of their business will be seen by the thousands of visitors that come to the LocallyCompared website each day as opposed to the handful of hits that the businesses own website (if they even have one) will get.
I spend a great deal of my time talking to local businesses and we always seem to get back to this topic; most businesses need to advertise and it is vital that the advertising budget is spent in a way to maximise the return on investment. The formula is simple; a business needs to spend as little as possible in order to reach out to the largest number of potential customers. We are determined to make LocallyCompared the most effective place for a business owner to promote their business online, and judging by the positive feedback we’ve got from our existing customers, business owners are agreeing with us!
Matt Grest
Follow me on twitter: MattGrest
Tags: advertising, bill gates, marketing, seo, small business, sme, yellow pages