Where Are You?

Web marketing is great; its effective, fast, and its cheap....sometimes free.

Yet for many businesses, where you are situated is a very important factor that needs to be conveyed well. The local bakery in your town doesn't advertise in the newspaper of a town on the other side of the country does it? Local businesses advertise to the most relevant people possible, and for many this means the people in your locality.

View Location! in a larger map

I.E. what's the use of trying to compete with every plumber in the world for online marketing space when you can just be targeting the potential customers in your area?

Enter 'location based web marketing', a term that I may have made up.....if not, accuse me of plagiarism in the comments.

Google has been making the web locally relevant for a while now with Google Earth and Google Maps as well as the recent push of location specific marketing tools like Google Places and Hotpot.

Its not just Google either, sites like MapSEO, Foursquare and Twitter all understand the value of being geographically relevant on the net. Some are referring to this new scramble for local relevance as a location war.

Either way, the web is no longer irrelevant to local business. It is rapidly becoming a place where local businesses can target local customers. This makes the web a useful marketing tool for many more businesses, not just those that can deliver on an international scale.

Bye Bye Yellow Pages?....At Least In Paper Form

If local businesses make use of the ability to market to the local population online (and they are), I cannot see why the cumbersome, book based, local directories that you used to thumb through will be worth the paper they're printed on in years to come.....paying attention long term antique collectors?

With the explosion of locally relavent information comes more useable local information. Unlike the "old days" a directory listing no longer contains just a phone number and an address, but a whole raft of information that can help the purchase decision;

1. Relevant images of products/services
2. Relevant videos
3. Extended descriptions of the product/service being offered
4. An accurate map showing the place of business and how to get there as well as contact details
5. Reviews from other users thanks to Hotpot etc

The best thing, however, is the price; $0.00

Stand Out

One might assume that with all this offered for nothing a business isn't gaining a competitive advantage but merely keeping up with what the consumer will soon be expecting.

Enter 3D buildings. Your business and building can stand out, not just keep up with the crowd, but race ahead and make your info more relevant in the process.

3D buildings are live for all of Google Earth's users (300 million+) to see and interact with. Users don't need to be intentionally searching for a business like yours to find you because 3D buildings stand out on the landscape.

A 3D building isn't just an inactive shell, its a container for information, when users click it a "bio" shows up about your building and business with a link to your website. Your building can also be embedded right within your website so users can see exactly where you are in the world and what your premises look like.

To quantify the value of this, here's a quote by Google Earth Product Manager, Bruce Polderman from last week:

"Whenever I speak to a business owner, the two bits of advice I offer are: 1) Visit Google Places to manage the information Internet users will see about your business, and 2) develop, or pay someone to develop a 3D model of your business so that it's visually represented in Google Maps and Google Earth."

You can DIY the job using Google Sketchup or Building Maker, or if you haven't got the time or the patience to learn these disciplines, Estate 3D will do it for you ($99 USD). Either way the extra exposure gives you a quick return on investment and a unique way of showing your location and premises online.