Brick, Mortar, and Digital Ephemera: How Local Internet Marketing Drives Profits

Local internet marketing is one of those tools that has two areas of thought about it — there’s the people who use it, and the people who don’t understand it. There might also be people who know about it but don’t own a business to locally internet market, but they don’t count.

If you’re a business owner, you probably already use local internet marketing, even if you don’t realize you’re doing it — and if you’re not, it’s because you don’t get it. If you did, you would.

The biggest source of confusion about local internet marketing comes from business owners who don’t understand how a website (or “a bit of digital ephemera” as one shopkeeper described it to me) can bring people in to see your wares at your brick-and-mortar store. It’s part of a common bit of techno-agnosticism that says that the Internet and the real world are two different places that don’t interact.

But the fact is, even if you don’t, most of the people in your area look up whatever they plan to do online before they actually do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new recipe or a store in their area that caters to lovers of martial arts equipment. People don’t want to waste their time on something that might not work out if they can verify online that it will work before they have to leave the house.

The result, if you haven’t clicked yet, is this: they get on their computer and they look up something like “ninja gear Waldron Arkansas”. If they happen to see your store’s website first on the list that comes up on their screen, there’s a very good chance that they’ll be on the way in the door within the hour.

Now you can’t win that particular scenario if you don’t have a website, but if you’re interested, you can generally find someone to build you a website pretty inexpensively. Then there’s only one more key ingredient to make it start sending you customers: a little bit of organic SEO.