Interactive survey provides insights into local business ad spends

January 22, 2009 by Dave Haynes

Interactive marketing company Webvisible, which is focused on local businesses and advertising, has a released a survey done with Nielsen on how consumers ind local business information these days, and how local businesses do their marketing.

It is entirely about online, but there are some really good insights in there for anyone running ad-based networks that are after local advertising.

The survey’s highlights are in a piece on MarketingCharts and talk about the great divide in the way local business owners act as consumers and how they market their businesses. In short, when they are looking for products and services, they turn first to online, but they don’t put much time or money into marketing their own businesses online.

The survey reveals business owner attitudes about what they are doing with their marketing, and include at least a couple of relevant insights for people in the DS industry:

• 99% of small business owners are directly involved in the marketing.
• 78% of small business owners dedicate 10% or less of their budget to marketing. Of those, half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget on internet advertising, while 30% do no Internet advertising. 

The takeaways here …

If you are chasing local businesses for ad dollars, you need to get right to the owner almost every time. And you need to be aware that these guys typically allocate limited dollars in their budget to marketing.

A couple of other things …

Clearly, the marketing spend that has gone for decades to local print, directories and broadcast is slipping, so people selling hyperlocal screen networks have an opening.

And there are people in those more traditional local ad sales businesses who have vast experience pulling budgets out of local business people, and their industries are struggling and in many cases, shrinking. Think about what your Yellow Pages looks like now, versus 10-15 years ago. It’s unceasingly hard to find good ad sales people, and some of these people may be considering a shift to media sectors that are growing, not contracting.