The team at The Video City Directories would like to welcome you to our marketing and advertising blog. This blog is dedicated to the small business owner looking for marketing tips and strategies for their business. In addition, we will announce special promotions, client success studies and other useful information on this blog. We welcome your feedback and encourage you to forward this blog to anyone you think might benefit from it.

Nowadays it seems one can’t turn on the news without hearing of yet another company having gone out of business or laying off employees—even American giants like Mervyns and Bed Bath and Beyond. The sad truth is, in these economically challenging times business owners across the nation find themselves hard-pressed to make ends meet and are looking for ways to cut expenses. Marketing and advertising expenses are often the first to be slashed. But is this really the place to cut costs? Would it not be more advantageous to re-examine:

How Much Business Is Our Current Marketing and Advertising Producing and How Can We Improve Results?

Skimping on marketing or stopping to advertise altogether is more often than not the wrong strategy for any business. A far better one would be to re-evaluate where and how to spend future marketing dollars. With marketing being classified in the P&L as an expense, we are conditioned to think of it as an expense, when in actual fact, marketing should be viewed as an investment in the business!

In a study conducted by Management Review, American Marketing Association (AMA) member firms were asked about their advertising and marketing spending habits during the 1990-1991 recession. The data collected clearly showed that firms that continued to spend money on marketing had a much higher chance of surviving slow economic times, and those that raised their marketing budgets were twice as likely to pick up market share.

But since the nineties we have seen many changes, haven’t we? The Internet and the entrepreneurial boom have created a huge paradigm shift between sellers and buyers. It used to be that buyers relied on the sellers for information. Not so anymore! Not only do consumers now have 24/7 access to product and service information, we also have many more choices available to us. This has clearly put the seller at a disadvantage. More often than not, before setting foot in a store, potential buyers come armed with product and pricing information, and they aren’t afraid to use it to their advantage.

To compete, now EVERY business must have an Internet presence. This is also true even if the business only competes at a local level and doesn’t have a website yet. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo realize the importance of local searches and have adjusted their business models accordingly. However, just as we saw it happen with Radio in the twenties and TV in the fifties, it did not take long for companies to recognize the importance of having a website and an Internet presence. Within just a few years, we went from hundreds to thousands to millions and millions of websites competing for high search engine ranking. This fierce competition spawned whole new industries, techniques and ways to get ranked highly in the search engines. As little as 10 years ago no one had even heard of the terms PPC, PPI, SEM, SEO, CPA, etc. Needless to say it quickly became cost prohibitive for the small business owner to compete online. After all, what’s the point if no one can find you? But things have changed…making it possible for the small business owner to have an Internet presence and not break the bank.

Back in August of 2004 we already saw 3.7 billion searches conducted on the Internet (Source: Comscore QSearch, 2004), and a whopping 35% were local searches – people looking for local merchants (Source: DM News). And with a projected growth rate of 16% per year I dare say, print directories such as the Yellow Pages have become redundant and local search directories like www.TheVCD.com are here to stay.

If you don’t believe me, let me ask you: When did you last pick up the Yellow Pages?

Are Local Search Directories a Cost Effective Means of Marketing on the Internet?

The answer is yes, if you pick the right one! But what you must know is that not all search directories are created equal. Some require pay per click advertising, some allow you to post your listing for free in their local directory, some cost some money, some a lot. As with most things in life

FREE

isn’t necessarily your best solution.

FREE

typically does not get your business in front of searchers online.

To harness the power of the Internet look for marketing venues that are Web 2.0 friendly (we’ll explain what that means in a future blog) like The Video City Directories are interactive, can host videos and will drive traffic to their site. And since I would imagine you are plenty busy running your business and haven’t got a clue how to script, produce or edit a video, you should choose a vendor that provides hands-off turnkey services. For instance, TheVCD takes care of the production of your video and/or product slideshow, hosts and maintains your video ad, and does behind the scenes keyword optimization, so you will indeed be found when someone puts in, for instance, “Florist in Fallon, NV” into the Google search box. Another important question to ask your provider is “how do you drive traffic to your site?”

Let’s take a look at a Florist client example:

Doreen’s Desert Rose

This little video ad has resulted in Doreen’s business being currently listed organically four times on Google page 1 – now that is powerful!

In our next blog we will discuss the benefits of video advertising in more detail.

Till then,

Linda and the Team at The Video City Directories