Delivering Quality Leads Through Local Search

With the yellow pages print and online directories, local search and mobile local search converging, advertisers are now obtaining leads from a number of different sources. More savvy consumers are adapting to the Internet, and the importance for marketers to integrate their online and offline information is clearly emphasized in a recent comScore Networks’ survey commissioned by TMP Directional Marketing. The survey reveals that 82 percent of consumers follow up offline via an in-store visit, or phone call – and of those 82 percent, 61 percent made purchases.

It is critical for advertisers to begin advertising in the local search space, and delivering quality leads through local search is clearly a way to convince advertisers to do so. Many people identify local search as being associated with service-based businesses – plumbers, pizza places – but the reality is that it incorporates major product categories, including automobiles and jewelry.

For a business, whether it is a local or national, it is important to advertise at all stages of the buying cycle for consumers. It is especially important in the stages where consumers are aware of their need and they begin researching and evaluating their buying criteria. As consumers get further along into the buying cycle, it is important for advertisers to key-in on the advertising geography – especially at the stage when a consumer is deciding to contact the business or purchase a product and/or service. For example, national companies should focus on distributing leads to local franchise locations or retail outlets, and small- to medium-sized businesses should focus on the various products they carry or the services they offer.

As consumers are using more sources of information to make purchase decisions, platform-neutral leads to a business are critical because the sources of traffic could be coming from a variety of places. For Superpages.com advertisers, exposure to consumers in various platforms is enabled through strategic partnerships, thus providing leads from consumers via online and mobile searches. Although money is being spent online, 97 percent of U.S. retail spending is still spent offline according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Much of the transaction, especially in the local space, takes place offline.

According to analysts, the majority of consumers that conduct local searches transact offline. The ability to convert this online traffic to a phone call or a visit to an offsite premises is vital as consumers are shopping on the Internet. With technology, tracking phone calls can measure the quality of a lead and making sure that advertisers are able to convert online traffic into valuable leads. Publishers and agencies are leveraging call tracking and monitoring programs to improve performance across channels to both local and national advertisers, and help close the in on that “last mile” to conversion by extending the utility of online ads through services like click to call and save & send, which allow consumers to connect with businesses immediately or save directory listings in their preferred format for later use. More importantly, these services provide granular ROI data for marketers to prove performance to their advertisers.

Consumers have buying power in the local search space, and compared to the average Internet buyer, the local search buyer has a higher buying power index according to comScore. The value of local search and the importance of measuring the quality of a lead are paramount for any online and offline advertising campaign to be successful.