Recent surveys show that 82% of consumers use search engines to find local information and the trend has been growing for years as other media usage goes down as you can see from this chart.
The power of advertising on search engines is so obvious to us that sometimes we forget to recognize what is so different about it than traditional advertising.
The power comes from the fact that local search advertising is where buyer and seller meet on purpose, the buyer is looking for the seller and hopefully vice versa. Someone once said to me local search advertising is more like trapping than hunting.
So the message has to be different, image is important but facts trump good looks as consumers get ready to get in their car and head for a store. Consumers at this critical stage of their purchase cycle want to know much more about product, price, promotion and availability.
No matter how good your brand website is you can’t offer the consumer information about price, promotion and availability without input from your local retailer.
So you need a good system to take current dealer information, combine it with your good product information and present it to consumers who are ready to buy.
If you’ve got such a system you should be using it more for online efforts than ever before, if you don’t have a system to put all of this information in front of a consumer you’re losing business at a greater rate every day.