Yahoo Article

Hyper-Local targeting, or targeting individuals nearest to your store, has become insanely popular in the business community, and this study by yahoo is a clear indication of why. When you’re talking about “five times return on ad spend” the potential becomes noteworthy and people start talking. In addition, when 75% of this return came from in-store sales, that signifies the effectiveness of using the internet to pull people into your brick-and-mortar store.

They go on to say that within a 2 mile radius, 10.6% of the campaign’s ad reach generated 56% of the revenue for the store. Meaning, over half of people come from within 2 miles. The implications of this fact are remarkably significant. It indicates that the consumer market highly prefers proximity, and is an important trend to consider when designing your campaigns. Logically, if a small business really wants to maximize it’s advertising dollar it has to think with a hyper-local mindset.

Taking that extra 89.4% of the budget and focusing it on a 2 mile hyper-local radius would seem like the point of the article right? Consider, only 10.6% of their campaign reach was within that 2 mile radius. So presumably, to effectively achieve their desired reach, it could take them the length of 10 campaigns. Would it be worth it? When considering their return-on-ad-spend results it’s almost a no-brainer, especially because you could hypothetically run local campaigns across 10 networks to effectively do the same thing.

How does PocketCents fit into all this? PocketCents can target users down to a 5 mile radius with over 90% accuracy. This is well within the realm of “hyper-local” targeting capability. PocketCents is also a pre-pay, flat-rate system, which actually fits very well with what their data suggests. How? If I care primarily about reaching the people that are closest to me, then I am willing to run campaigns that are highly targeted but might get less impressions as a result. With PocketCents at 25cents/click you can invest any amount and can expect to receive that amount of traffic. Even if your hyper-local, 5 mile radius means you get 2 clicks a day, it’s still better than burning through countless ad budgets. The most important users are closest to your store. So if I am focusing on users in my specified area, why do I want anyone else to see my ad? If you set your ads on PocketCents to have a 5 mile radius, only people within that area will ever be able to see them and that makes PocketCents a really powerful tool for your local marketing campaigns.

Hyper-Local Online Advertising is possible with PocketCents

 ”I’ve tried online advertising before and it didn’t work”

In our business, we hear this all the time from business owners in almost every industry.  It is always the worst for small businesses who sell products and services to just their local area.  We need to stop and take a look into why the internet marketing attempted failed to achieve the results that were desired.

• Was the audience targeted properly?
• Did the advertisement have a call-to-action or incentive to purchase?
• Is the website engaging and also encouraging visitors to buy?

If any of those elements are missing or less than perfect, you could be missing out on thousands of valuable customers, not because of the internet not working well as an advertising medium, but because it is not being used to its full potential.

The Website

First, take a look into the website or landing page to make sure that when the right visitors land there, they will take action and become your next customer.

Ask the question “What action do I want the visitors to take?”.  Although it may seem obvious to you, it might not be as obvious to the visitors who land there from an advertisement they clicked on from somewhere else.  Make things easy and painless.

In both online and offline media advertising, sales, promotions, and coupons are always one of the easiest ways to get someone interested in making the trip to visit your business.  You may want to simply have the visitor enter their email address to receive special offers by email or let them print a coupon right from the website.

If there is the possibility your customers might want to bring a friend while visiting your local business, let them share the offer on some of the common social networks.  It’s easy to add the ability to share web pages through social networks with some of the easy to use tools from sharethis.com or addthis.com (and however many others are out there).

The Advertisement

Next, be sure that the advertisement you are running reflects both the content of your landing page and the action you wish visitors to take.  Internet advertising is slightly different than conventional advertising because the ads might be clicked on a lot by people simply browsing around or possibly even ignored completely.  If you are paying per click (PPC), you want to limit the clicks down to those who have already decided to take the action you are looking for before they even click on your ad.  This is why you will want to make sure that the advertisement tells the audience exactly which customers you are looking for by listing the call-to-action in the ad.

Also, when using search marketing, advertisements that are more relevant to the search keywords selected and the content of the page generate better click-through rates and often get the benefit of lower prices when bidding.  So it is important to make sure your advertisement reflects the same content as the landing page.

“Groceries on Sale at             ” — generic
“Fresh Vegetables on Sale at             ” — related to content
“Print this coupon for 25% off Fresh Vegetables at             ” – related + call-to-action

Targeting the Audience

Targeting the right audience online can sometimes be tricky for a local business.  When it comes to mailing campaigns for products and services that can be utilized by any household, a spray shot of ads mailed to the local area is fairly easy and can be effective when done properly.  The internet audience is a bit more spread out and can be hard to pinpoint exact locations of the users.  On social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, users are able to put their location in order to be shown advertisements from their local areas.  This can be an easy way to narrow down the audience to the local area.  The PocketCents network captures the location of each member of the audience before showing advertisements as well to provide the same effect through different mediums such as local newspaper websites and forums.  Both social networks and the PocketCents network function similarly when creating an advertisement allowing you to chose a very specific area in which to advertise.  Larger search marketing networks like Google, Yahoo and Bing offer targeting to regional areas as well, but results typically cannot be narrowed down as far as most small local business owners might prefer.  For many small businesses, the location of the audience members who see the advertisement matter less than the keywords used or the websites that display the ad.  This tends to be one of the biggest reasons local advertising on the internet does not provide the best results.  While creating advertisements for the search marketing networks, it is usually a good idea to include keywords for your local area along with location keywords in your advertisement.

“Print this coupon for 25% off Fresh Vegetables at              in Detroit, Michigan”

With the website landing page set up to encourage visitors to become customers, the advertisement set up to generate only the most qualified visitors, and the audience narrowed down to target just the people in the local area, local internet advertising can generate just as good or better results than conventional marketing and on a smaller budget.

I’m going to take a moment and explain the PocketCents Affiliate Marketing program and how we are doing things a bit different in order to combat some of the downfalls we’ve seen in other Affiliate Marketing programs.

About the PocketCents Online Advertising Service

Online Advertising is a fast growing industry with increasing demand and prices. As prices continue to increase, many businesses will start to focus on solid results produced from the lowest cost forms of internet advertising. With the flat rate of $0.25 pay per click, and a solid local traffic model, PocketCents will continue to become a more desirable service with every passing day.

Our Affiliate Marketing Program

Word of mouth is still the number one best form of marketing. Rather than spend tons of money on advertising, PocketCents has decided to let our quality services and great price do most of the talking and provide generous commission to anyone who wishes to help spread the word.

How Much Can You Make?

10% of every bit of PocketCents revenue is handed directly to those who refer advertisers to our network. At first, 10% might not seem like a huge amount, but consider that even a small (B2C) business with around $1 million in sales can be expected to spend close to $150,000 a year in marketing. The current industry average for online marketing is 15% of the marketing budget and rising.  That means they might spend about $22,500 of their budget in online advertising.  10% of this amount is $2,250. Even if you only manage to find one small business a month interested in advertising online, you could build up to a salary of $27,000 after the first year and $54,000 a year later. PocketCents pays commission continually for every month and every payment made by advertisers referred to the network. This is perfect as a secondary stream of income, even if you do not have much time on your hands.  Referring advertisers can be as easy as:

• Talking to local business owners in your area
• Handing out PocketCents cards with your own promotional code
• Sending emails
• Placing a link on your website
• Offering your promotional code to your current list of contacts

Because we rely on the marketing ability of our agents to grow, we encourage the success and prosperity of all of our marketing partners.

Visit our Agents section for more information about becoming a PocketCents marketing partner: http://www.pocketcents.com/index.php?section=services&page=agents

If you have just recently created your website and have not performed any SEO or submitted your website to directories and search engines, you may want to read our previous article about generating free traffic from various sources before jumping into some of the paid marketing tactics in this article.

Monitor the results
Before engaging in any online marketing campaign, it is best to always track the effectiveness of your efforts to make sure every dollar is well spent in generating the maximum revenue from your website.  Google Analytics is one easy (and free) way to monitor your website activity, set goals, and check how effective each form of advertising is in generating traffic and sales.

Local PPC Advertising
Local online marketing, such as the PocketCents advertising network, can help improve sales for businesses who wish to target specific areas.  The advertisements can be forced to be shown only to internet users in specific local areas, increasing the likelyhood of finding buyers for your products and/or services.  Local advertising can give a large boost to brick-and-mortar businesses looking to sell more products and services in their direct local market.  Try creating advertisements that link to printable coupons on your website and make sure you have a map or a link to get directions to your local business on the same page.  If your coupon offer is for something many people would be interested in, you will see an almost immediate increase in foot traffic to your business.

Paid Search Marketing
Bid low but enough to at least be on the first page of results.  Find inexpensive keywords with few competitors.  It is said that searches using keywords of 3 or 4 words in length are most likely to purchase what they are looking for.  Choose very specific keywords that you feel someone would be searching for to find your exact products and/or services.  There is no need to pay for huge amounts of untargeted traffic unless you are working on a branding campaign with millions of dollars to play with.  Target the traffic as much as possible because fewer clicks and traffic can mean that the clicks you do pay for in the end are the exact customers you are looking for to be on your website.  Bidding generally drives the price of keywords up and you may have to consistently monitor your accounts and rebid to keep your keywords active.  If this becomes too much effort, you may wish to look for a management tool or a service like PocketCents with a low fixed PPC price.

Internet marketing can seem like a difficult and time-consuming task at times, but there are many tools and services to make things easier.  The results from marketing online are easy to monitor and can easily increase website traffic, internet sales and even walk-ins to your local business location.  If you are not yet advertising your business online, it is never too late to start.

1. Optimize your website
The first and most obvious traffic source to focus on is, of course, search engines.  When an internet user is searching for your website, you want that person to be able to find it as easily as possible.  While constructing your website, research your industry to find out the most you possibly can about what terms are searched for the most often and which phrases tend to lead to sales.  You may wish to consult with a professional search engine optimization (SEO) company to help out with the research or you may be able to find free or inexpensive tools online to perform the research yourself.  Before spending any money on paid advertising, be sure to properly use the keywords and phrases throughout your website and optimize the pages for the best possible free search results.  If done correctly, search engine optimization can generate residual traffic to your website every month at little to no cost.

2. Submit to search engines and directories
After optimizing your website, it is ready to be captured by search engines and placed in the search results.  Submitting to as many search engines and directories as you can is the next step in getting your website exposed to the world.

3. Generate keyword rich content
Adding new content to your website on a consistent basis can add more ways for search engines to find your website and increase your rank in the search results.  Although achieving high search engine ranks is a bit more complicated than simply adding the right content, creating articles, blogs, videos, press releases and other media promoting your website, products, and services is very important.

After you have gathered as much traffic from the ‘free’ sources, it’s time to focus on paid marketing to rapidly increase the growth of your business.  Check out the next article about generating additional traffic to your website.

Local ads are better at generating revenue because they are not only relevant to the industry of your websites content and what it’s about, but also relevant to the user’s area. Because the ads are local to the user, they are more likely to click on them generating a higher click through rate.

PocketCents is focused on generating the most revenue for the publishers in the network by providing locally targeted ads relevant to your websites content.

Check us out at:

www.PocketCents.com

www.pocketcents.com

Please feel free to read up on our most recent news and updates.

Have a pleasant day!