Key SoCal Local Internet Marketing Trends To Remember This Year

Local Internet Marketing geniuses plan ahead

The Internet marketing world that small businesses are now required to circumnavigate comes to be increasingly complex each passing year. But Edwin Dearborn, business marketing strategist at Dearborn Associates, anticipates that key developing trends in 2014 will serve to codify SMBs’ SoCal local Internet marketing efforts. “This year, I expect that complexities in local Internet marketing will increase, but as local Internet marketing automation systems and economies of scale develop this complexity will become more wieldy and streamlined for SMBs,”.

Local Internet marketing complexities growIn today’s Internet marketing world, small businesses must compete in an increasingly frenzied and complicated mode, with changes taking hold across online-commerce, appointment scheduling, SEO, Internet advertising, mobile-optimized websites, social media and customer relationship platforms.  Additionally SMBs must consider email marketing strategies and the importance of positive web reviews and other local “citations.” The need for multifaceted planning and the challenge therein becomes stunningly clear.

This year the complexity of SoCal local internet marketing will further increase, and Yodle CEO Court Cunningham at NetNewsCheck.com points to ten SoCal local Internet marketing trends that savvy SMBs should (dare we say must) stay increasingly aware of –

1. Booking and scheduling tools will continue to get consolidated into larger marketing automation platforms. Consumers increasingly expect to be able to book services online the way that they purchase goods online. While some companies like ZocDoc, Uber and OpenTable offer booking services in specific verticals, the migration to comprehensive online booking has just begun. We can expect to see more deals such as Demandforce and Full Slate, which aims to popularize booking services across dozens of service industries.

2. CRM systems will emerge with better social tools to help business owners leverage online presence across the Web, mobile, social and email. Companies including Constant Contact, Main Street Hub and Yodle are automating time consuming processes associated with social media management. As social sites like Facebook add reviews as a key feature, tasks such as responding to customer reviews or creating special offers for customers will become simpler and quicker though integrated CRM/marketing platforms. Companies like Rallyverse will also look to provide ways to generate relevant content for local business to engage their customers.

3. Pure SEO companies will fade away as a result of Google secure search. Marketing companies that offered services in online advertising and SEO gained another competitive advantage after Google announced it would begin making search ranking and keyword data private. It essentially means that many pure SEO companies lost their primary source of data. Pure SEO companies will be significantly impacted as a result of no longer being able to access information they used to be able to get for free.

4. E-commerce will begin to widely expand to local, main street retailers. E-commerce companies are targeting the small business market to sell transactional solutions. Consumers increasingly want to transact directly from a website or social channel and local businesses will find that they’re negatively impacted if they don’t adopt commerce software to fulfill consumer demand.

5. Sales, and not just leads, will become the key metric in assessing the effectiveness of small business marketing campaigns. Companies who can bridge the gap between local marketing campaigns and real revenue stand to gain credibility and competitive advantage, distinguishing themselves from dozens of vendors who purely sell leads. It’s all about closing the loop and that’s accomplished through revenue.

>> Continue reading at NetNewsCheck.com

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