Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Friend Recommendations Drive Local Business Visits

Primary Factor that Influences US Consumers to Try a Local Business, March 2011 (% of respondents)Social shopping can be hard to understand, but the point of mobile-enhanced shopping is that it builds on the ways people who buy things locally decide to do so. Fully 52 percent of consumers surveyed by CityGrid, for example, say that the primary reason they would try a local business is a friend’s recommendation. That far outstrips any other type of channel by at least 500 percent.

The revenue model for any mobile service provider or mobile-based app also is sometimes hard to envision, but it is, in large part, as simple as shifting a portion of today's spending on local advertising, for starters.

Word of mouth, in other words, drives lots of traffic. The whole idea of mobile-enhanced shopping apps is to build on that natural activity in a more systematic and structured way.

Online Sources US Consumers Check Before Visiting a Local Business or Restaurant, March 2011 (% of respondents)On the other hand, there also is quite a bit of evidence that consumers rely heavily on search when looking for a local business to patronize. Data from local search engine optimization firm BrightLocal shows that the top two traffic sources to local businesses were Google Places and Google search. Facebook provided only two percent of visits to local business websites.

Overall, BrightLocal found that 59 percent of Internet users search on Google at least once a month to find a good local business.


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