Mobile Technology and Local Search: How will your business adapt to a change in one of the Four P’s of Marketing?
The Four P’s of marketing are crucial to the success of any business. Product, Price, Promotion, and Place round out the category. The release of Apple’s Iphone and other mobile devices that will follow in its footsteps will have a dramatic effect on one of these four P’s: Place.
Place refers to the distribution channel by which a customer can acquire your product or service. It could be your brick and mortar store, a catalog, or a virtual store on the internet. Small businesses with physical locations will need to sit up and take notice of the trends in local search and mobile technology. Consumers are increasingly demanding information wherever and whenever they want it. Mobile technology will factor in heavily in the Local Search arena. Will your business appear on the tiny LCD screens of mobile handsets?
Imagine This:
A woman is driving home from work in Cleveland, Ohio speaking to her husband on her cell phone.
“I am too tired to cook dinner tonight, let’s just order a pizza.”
“Sounds good to me, I will pick one up on the way home.”
The man proceeds to log onto Yahoo.com with his handset and do a query:
pizza cleveland oh
“Ah, Tony’s Pizza is right on the way… that was easy!.” He says marveling at the speed at which he arrived at the information.
On most handsets you can select the phone number you see on the screen and choose to call from your mobile device. Incredible. Although Tony’s Pizza is probably not picking up a lot of business from this yet, this will become a major source of new and repeat business for them. Just ask any marketing professor, the easier you make it to do business with your company, the better the experience.
So the question is, how did Tony’s Pizza appear on that man’s mobile phone? That, my friends is what this entire blog is about.
Do: Take notice of the trends in local search, mobile handsets will be one of the ways that customers will find your business.
Don’t: Stick your head in the sand and allow your competitors to take business away from you.
July 3, 2008
Tags: local search, local seo, mobile search, Yahoo Local Posted in: Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Others
2 Responses
Great Blog post. I am going to bookmark and read more often. I love the Blog template
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