Just to add to the confusion in local marketing, Google+ will have pages for local dealers.
In case you haven’t heard, Google+ is Google’s new competitor to Facebook. Google+ is in beta now and Google claims it will do what Facebook does plus, among other things, have the additional capability to segment your friends into groups. So you may have a circle of family friends, work friends and lifestyle friends. The idea is that not everyone will see everything you post and that is a big improvement over Facebook and should attract a lot of users.
In addition, Google’s head of Commerce & Local Jeff Huber tweeted this,
And pre-emptively answering a question — yes, we will have (smb) business profile pages on Google+. I can’t announce a launch date yet, but we want to make them *great*, and we’re coding as fast as we can.
Google+ adds to the confusion and the effort needed by your local retailers to manage all of the online touch points they have with consumers.
This means that brand managers have to help local retailers with digital content and good advice. The best place for that to happen is inside of your online ad builder. Now is the time to add digital content in formats friendly to the various online options a dealer has and then track and react to everything that is happening in local marketing.
The good news is that digital local marketing is cheaper, better and faster than the good old days of just newspapers and radio.