aimClear Search Marketing Blog

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In yesterday’s post, guest blogger and CEO of BlitzLocal.com, Dennis Yu, tackled some important concepts of the local ad firm- specifically the fact that it is sure to kick the bucket in 2010 if industry professionals don’t take proactive steps as soon as possible. Part two of this story will address changes the future has in store for local ad agency fiscal models and a closer look at the crucial dynamics of this evolution.

How will the financial model of local adapt over time?

Firms can take a 50% margin until the market gets smart. Consider the current VC-funded, growth-oriented approach of a pretend composite company… we’ll call it SuperLocal, Inc. Read the rest of this entry »

Borrell Research released a report on the Economics of Search Marketing for firms catering to local—ReachLocal, Yodle, MarchEx, WebVisible, and others.  Companies in this space churn up to 90% of their clients every 6 months, meaning that they lose clients as fast as they can gain them.  The Kelsey Group confirmed this trend last year, citing the inability of these companies to deliver leads.

Clients will stay on a few months in good faith, giving the lead gen’ company time to make the phone ring.  At a certain point, pleas to allow the system more time to “optimize” and concessions not to leave break down, leading to more churn. Read the rest of this entry »

[Editor's note: This post is our continued dissemination of content from this week's  SearchEngineStrategies San Jose search marketing conference, where aimClear had 3 correspondents providing our readers notes and articles. The following is from our friend and blogger-associate, Charlene Jaszewski:]

Mobile and Local are tied at the hip, but up until recently the tools weren’t up to the task. But with advent of the iPhone however, all that is changing.

Besides making iPhone a great productivity tool (not to mention GORGEOUS eye candy), Apple has opened up third party application development.

This SES San Jose session demo-ed a few of the existing and up-and-coming applications taking advantage not only of local search, but also of the iPhone’s unique capabilities. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year in Denver SMX Local Mobile was a gathering of theorists, brilliant upstarts, handset manufacturers, fledgling platforms and edgy prognosticators.

Keynote speaker Michael Jones looked skyward and evangelized Google Earth’s mission of placing the world’s information in geographical context. Experts introduced many of us to terms like on/off deck, walled gardens, and dumb pipes.

The initial release of the iPhone was embryonic and we all knew it would change the world, in terms of mainstream expectations for mobile web page parsing quality. One year later, the LoMo promise is coming true and SMX Local Mobile has become an extremely serious search marketing conference. Read the rest of this entry »

The leaders in the local/mobile search industry gathered here in Denver to discuss state of the art, teach, share, and prognosticate.

Ironically, the most appropriate “takeaway” is that very little is static in this arena. The revolution is still in its infancy, however it is clear that a marketing explosion of nuclear magnitude is imminent.

There is SO much money on the table. There are SO many fragmented channels, many of which are critically important to understand and master. Will your marketing campaign be left in the dust as the world changes? Read the rest of this entry »