The Internet might be the one true equalizer for local businesses struggling to compete with entrenched brands. Especially in industries where shipping costs are low and the barriers to purchase are minimal. The problem is, how do you get the word out as a local business owner? Online advertising brokers are finally starting to get this, it is really no wonder then that they are increasingly courting local businesses to fill out their inventories.

The LA Times does a good job covering the details. To sum it up, companies like Yodle, ReachLocal and even huge ad servers like Google are working hard to bring geographically targeted local advertising into their stable of products. What does this mean for the future of small business? Well, lets see.

Act Locally, Think Globally

One of the many problems that online advertising faces is that there is absolutely no local relevance. No matter how good Google’s geo-targeting algorithms get, they still don’t have any inventory of real local ads. I am never served ads for products that I could walk outside and buy. I am never served ads for products that value impressions over click thru. This push could change all of that.

Imagine going to a website and seeing a promotion for your local Chipotle, or learning about a sale at your local Wal*Mart. Imagine if advertisers could finally make some use of all that geographic data they collect from our browsers and deliver promotions that we could act on both online and out there in the real world? How valuable would an impression be on a site like Facebook if you knew that you could drive users too your storefront?

For publishers that don’t deal in the niches that traditionally do well with systems like Adsense, this could also help to drive up their revenue. If you know your readership is almost exclusively from a particular geographic location, wouldn’t it be much better to be able to promote businesses in that area? Isn’t this how print media advertising has always worked?

Web 2.0 Roundup

A serious push towards local advertising options for publishers could be one of the best things to happen to online advertising since the pop-up went out of fashion. It would open up entirely new markets for publishers that have up until this point been completely ignored, and provide new vectors for local businesses to expand their presence onto the web.

Sounds too good to be true…

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