The other day I was talking to a client who is a retailer in a small town of about 8000 citizens. He was telling me that he had stopped to spend money on his website because he had spent quite a lot of money 6 years ago, but didn’t really see any considerable results.
While we were having coffee I was trying to explain that in the last 6 years many things have changed on the web. Just the fact that a one-time inversion of a few years ago didn’t result in a huge success doesn’t mean that small stores can’t have success online today.
Since this topic seems to be an issue that needs clarifying, I will focus on explaining the web’s potential for local businesses in today’s post.
Let me ask you three questions in order to help you understand how you can appreciate the web’s true potential for your local businesses:
1. Are your clients online?
First and foremost you have to know how many of your clients are online frequently. There still might be a certain niche business that only sells to grandmothers, but you can be quite sure that most of your clients do have direct access to the Internet, or at least know someone who can find information for them online within seconds.
I remember my family asking me to search for handymen near my home town, or Italian restaurants in Graz (Austria) at a time when they hadn’t already been familiar with the Internet. Luckily, now it’s no problem for anybody of them to find their stuff on their own 
It’s important to see the fact that most of your potential clients have direct or indirect access to the Internet, and most of them will know how to search something in Google – your business, for example.
2. What’s your business’ Community Potential?
“Online Communities” or “Social media” are probably two of the emerging trends coming up in the last years. I like to think of an online community as a group of people interested in the same subject, that use certain tools to get in touch with each other, interchange photos, videos, links and messages.
From a business related point of view, the idea of communities is to gather potential customers around your business and your main fields of competence. Just think of tuning shops trying to form a community with car freaks, or model aircraft pilots getting together on a model plane retailer’s website.
There are certain businesses that are more likely to be successful with building up an informal, community-based relationship with their potential clients than others. While a dentist should definitely have a website to be found on the web, I guess it’s quite unlikely that patients or “potential patients” are keen on getting in touch with each other talking about their inlays.
3. Are you ready to give it a true chance?
Tons of people thought like my client some years ago. They thought that having a website with two photos and publishing the company’s address and opening times would be enough to get people coming in – well, it definitely was, 10 or 15 years ago.
Today, things don’t work like this any longer. Nowadays, in order to have success on the web one must be willing to spend a certain time and budget on their online marketing strategies. The more complex the Internet gets, the higher the demand for professional help with your Internet related stuff.
When I started doing business online, almost everybody knew a teenager who could create a website with some free software. Now, having a presentable website still is of high importance, but the website has become just one single part of a fast-growing complex network of online marketing tools.
While locally operating companies very often spend huge amounts of money on flyers and newspaper ads, very few of them consider the Internet as a real option to get the word out there. That’s a shame, because after doing an online marketing campaign for you, I could tell you exactly what was the outcome. With your latest flyer campaign, in contrast, you will hardly have a chance to know anything about its results.
Let’s have some Pizza!
I’ve written this post because I would like more local businesses to use the Internet’s true potential. On most Google websites after searching for “pizza” you will get an input box asking you for your zip code. Why? Because Google knows that if you’re looking for pizza, you most probably want to find an Italian restaurant near the place where you live.
Today, users even sometimes use the Internet to see if their neighbours have got a hidden swimming pool behind the fence in their garden – using the web to find local restaurants, clubs, car studios or hairdressers is something nearly everybody knows how to do, and almost everybody does.
Your neighbours are online, and this is why your business needs to be there as well.
What do you think about the web’s potential on local markets?
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