Local SEO & Online Digital Marketing Strategies

Online digital marketing strategies every local business needs

The need for  local digital marketing. Most small and mid-size businesses are aware of, or using some of, the electronic media to market their brand, products & services and the concept of local SEO.

A short history of the terms and explanations for the methods of marketing is important to building a winning strategy

There are many and varied explanations for the rapid expansion of techniques for marketing interfacing with the electronic devices customers are using today.

Today, the electronic marketing techniques can broadly be referred to as “digital marketing” or online marketing and we refer to that in this article as the current outgrowth of the earlier history of this type of marketing. field of digital marketing and advertising  has grown.

These devises encompass; desktop computers, lap top, computer tablets and mobile phones, particularly mobile smart phones.

While the evolution of both the strategies and the electronic medium used has evolved rapidly, the history and terminology looks something like this.

Elements of the use of the internet for rudimentary marketing may go back as far as 1959 but most will agree that the advent of marketing on the internet through websites really took flight in the early 1990’s.

The Internet Browser and Online Commerce in the 1990’s

The early beginnings of the use of websites connected to the internet for commerce resulted from the 1991 decision by the National Science Foundation to remove any restrictions for companies to use the internet for advertising and promotion. The availability of a browser opened the way for website advertising and promotion as people used their browsers to search for information and products or services.

Website Blog Marketing

The advent of the website Blog was initiated as a “online diary” somewhat in the manner that Social Media are used today.  During development of website promotions and brand awareness effort of the decade of the 1990s the Blog format developed as party of business marketing strategies. According to the History Cooperative.org from information at Forbes…

Blogs are now part of most content marketing campaigns. They are used to provide information, build customer relationships, generate sales leads, increase brand awareness, get customer feedback as well as community marketing and more. It is also used to develops internal and external networks for company awareness.

 The Use of Banner Ads in Online Marketing

Our research found that Tim O’Reilly created a website called Global Network Navigator (GNN), thought to be the very commercial business website in August 1993.  Global Network Navigator became the first business website to also “sell a clickable ad (later they were termed as “banner ads”).”

The use of Banner Ads on a business website was a milestone of sorts in the modern journey of internet type marketing. According to HubSpot, the website for Wired Magazine included a clickable banner ad. There objective was to create space, somewhat like an on page bill board, to sell advertising.

Advertisers discover paid search and pay-per-click

In the 1999 – 2002 period, the internet web surged rapidly, driven by the need people had to search and navigate around the web.  The search engines, responded to this need and the popularity it created on the internet.  This led the search engines and commercial advertisers to team up to take advantage of better targeting of the people searching.  This gave birth to the term “digital advertising.”

By this time, the web was expanding rapidly and users needed a better way to navigate the terrain. With search engines steadily gaining popularity, advertisers looking to create ads that were more targeted and less loathsome turned to sponsored search as the next digital advertising frontier.

Amazon got into the act during this period by allowing credit cards to be used and advancing the “affiliate marketing” strategy whereby a marketer could offer products of other companies online and receive a commission for sales.

According to an article in Affiliate Marketing Training on the history of affiliate marketing, Amazon was the major initiator…

Amazon was the first company to use affiliate marketing as a program that was available to the general public. Their system known as Associates Program allowed people to sign up to be able to offer links on their website. It was launched in 1996. As a result of sharing the links to Amazon’s products, the user was paid a small amount of money in return for referring new customers. In the history of affiliate marketing, Amazon was the first major company to widely use affiliate marketing as one of their marketing platforms. This became the model for other affiliate companies to base their programs on, and the growth of affiliate marketing continues even today.

Google Enters the Online Marketing World with Pay-per-click

In 2003, we found that Google initiated a dynamic era by promoting a  form of advertising called “paid per click (PPC). This provided an opportunity for companies to advertise using a market targeting tool built of of the “keywords” consumers were using to search for products, services and information. Still in strong use today, the combination of the target focus available and the ability to budget the amount of Ad spend is a viable internet marketing technique.

Social Media Channels Enter the Realm of Online Marketing

The technology and deployment of social media channels, and their adaptation to online internet marketing, was very rapid. In 2003 Linked in appeared, primarily then as a business and job networking site. It was 2004 when the almighty Facebook was launched and reached 1 million users the first year and then initiated it’s first Ads in 2006.

It turns out that 2006 was a big year for online marketing.  Twitter came into being that year and Facebook introduced it’s mobile phone application and the world went bonkers. In 2007 Apple iPhone was introduced and lifts Internet Marketing Opportunities to new  levels.

This brings us to today’s evolution of the original web based online and internet marketing industry. The term we believe best encompasses all the channels, tools techniques as strategies is “digital marketing.”

Social media is a key component of effective digital internet marketing. Local small and mid-size businesses can leverage growth via effective digital marketing.

Digital Marketing

The term digital marketing can be viewed as a marketing strategy leveraging the electronic media most people engage with today and utilizes a growing number of tools and techniques as consumers rapidly adapt to the latest means of search interaction. These concepts need to be applied to the local digital marketing strategies of small and mid-size companies, not just big corporations.

Digital marketing (also known as data-driven marketing) is an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.

Digital marketing’s development since the 1990s and 2000s has changed the way brands and businesses utilize technology for marketing. As digital platforms are increasingly incorporated into marketing plans and everyday life, and as people use digital devices instead of visiting physical shops, digital marketing campaigns are becoming more prevalent and efficient. Digital marketing – Wikipedia

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What Exactly is Digital Marketing?

It is very important to grasp the implications of digital marketing, particularly as it relates to the small and mid-size local companies.

This form of marketing  encompasses versions of traditional marketing, promoting and branding your company, e-mail marketing to subscribers, various forms of online information, such as brochures and information guides, etc.  These are integrated with the electronic devises in uses from your desktop computer, to laptops, tables, smart phones and at home voice search units.

Here is a look at some of the most important techniques involved in an effort to market digitally.

Digital Techniques

• Website Pages and Information
• Blog post content
• Downloadable assets; E-books guides, Studies and whitepapers
• Infographics and PPT Slide presentations
• Interactive tools such as  surveys or on-page software tools.
• Social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Snap Chat, etc.)
• Earned online coverage (PR, social media, and reviews)
• Videos; promotions, reviews, how to information, etc.

Online Digital Marketing as a Local Company Strategy

This brings us to how all this affects the local company striving to compete in a dynamic and evolving digital world. our premise at M4 Digital Marketing Services company is that the local business and professional service providers are in the ideal position to leverage the tools and techniques for this form of all encompassing internet marketing to grow their business through local digital marketing.

Don’t think that all successful business are not doing everything they can to integrate digital marketing techniques into their strategies.  Local business owners and entrepreneurs can learn from what other successful companies are doing.  Take a look at what P.F. Chang’s restaurant Chief Marketing officer  has to say…

“We need to better use our data and spend our marketing dollars more wisely to improve both digital and in-store experiences,” said Chambers, CMO for P.F. Chang’s, which has about 300 restaurants globally. 

Local Digital Marketing for Small Companies

Marketing online is both a Global and a Local undertaking.  A local small business can use local digital marketing SEO techniques and all the components of a comprehensive marketing plan to compete in their “local market.”  It can be a high leverage, high ROI endeavor that is both affordable and within the reach of almost all local business organizations.