There seems to be a giant increase in demand for internet marketing. Los Angeles is one of those cities that seems to fall into trends as fast as it falls out of them. Take for instance some of these frozen yogurt places. With introduction of Pink Berry (very yummy) in early 2008 everyone went on this frozen yogurt kick and about two months into it there were multiple variations of these frozen yogurt establishments all over Los Angeles.
Internet Marketing seems to be experiencing this effect but on a global scale. Yesterday I was browsing through CraigsList.org to find someone who can help me install a window air conditioner in one of the rooms in my house. Once I found what I was looking for I decided to see what was happening in the computer gigs portion of craigs list. To my surprise I found that there was a good amount of businesses that were looking for an internet marketing service.
Los Angeles was the section where I decided to put up an ad (now I know some of you CraigsListers will frown on this but keep reading), I posted an ad like this:
Small Local Business looking to do some Internet Marketing – Los Angeles
We are a new business that is looking to grow their website and are looking for someone LOCAL to help us with internet marketing. Please send some information about you, work you’ve done in the past and your experience with internet marketing – AND PLEASE BE LOCAL.
About 10 minutes after I approved the post I started getting email responses to my ad. I got about 250+ responses to this ad in the next 12 hours. These responses were coming in from all over the world – India, Thailand, Poland, Canada and Australia. As well as a bunch from United States, the interesting part is that I only got one email from someone who is local.
Now, I cant be mad at people for trying to market their business – specially in the internet marketing vertical, you really do not need to be local to someone to do this kind of work. But from my experience being able to meet with your client is very important, it is equally valuable to you (the service provider) and the client.
I personally like to go visit my clients in their place of business, I like to see and touch their product, I want to understand what service or product is the most profitable for my client so that I can take a very strategic approach to optimizing their website for search engines. Internet Marketing combines both the technical ability of optimizing a site as well as good understanding of how products need to be marketed. I really don’t think that someone in Poland has a good understanding of the US health insurance market, nor will they know which demographic of US residents to appeal to with this product.
When choosing someone to do your internet marketing make sure you are choosing a company that is local and has a good understanding of what your business is all about. In these tough economic times each penny counts!
