Infoserve Group

An interesting study from Borrell Associates, with suggestions that most small-business owners are turning away from local paid search campaigns.

We have long argued that appearing next to search results is the best way for local businesses to reach potential customers, but is support wavering? Is this down to cost? Lack of results? New and better strategies?

For a start, we don’t believe local businesses are turning their back on paid search advertising and our retention figures would back this up. With search engines still being the most popular way for consumers to find local businesses, it simply just makes sense to mirror their movements. Plus online ads produce measurable results, so I don’t think there is a better marketing strategy out there.

That’s not to say that paid search advertising isn’t complex and time consuming though, which is why we would always advise SMEs to employ someone to manage your account for you.

But, that equally doesn’t mean you should sit back either, so make sure you keep them on their toes - find out where your ads will be running to see the results for yourself, make sure you review your key words too (rather than simply rely on your account managers all the time), and use Google Analytics to fine tune your campaign.

Finally, one of the most interesting points I’ve read recently is that paid search advertisement isn’t just a quick-fix solution either. Like optimisation, it helps build your brand, your visibility and recognition too.

You can find some more top tips about Google Adwords here on a previous post

My colleague came across an article in Marketing Magazine about how paid-for search is suffering as brands reduce online spend.

This is despite paid-for search being “hailed by the IAB as ‘the advertising recession-buster’, with more customers searching online for cheaper goods and services.”

We left a comment (how could we be expected to resist?) about how Infoserve disagrees. We wrote how we are

“…experiencing record levels of new customers who are turning to the internet to market themselves. Within the SME sector, paid for search obviously presents a huge opportunity to target local searchers looking for specific goods and services, and businesses are finding the ROI that online advertising can provide incredibly useful when budgets are tight.”

It’s also worth reading the last couple of paragraphs of the Marketing Magazine article about social networking sites and advertising, which pretty much reiterates what I wrote about last week.