Paul Price

Google instant search: what is it and how will it affect local advertising?  If you have never seen "The Sentence Finisher" episode of Seinfeld then you have to watch this clip: 


Generally speaking, sentence finishers are frustrating and annoying.  However, in some situations they can be very helpful.  As a software developer I can get a lot of mileage out of "auto-completion" tools that predict what I am trying to type, jog my memory, and even provide instant documentation.  When used properly, these tools can dramatically increase my productivity.

The nerds at Google and other search engines have been providing auto-complete for some time now. You start typing a search query, and they give you a list of completion candidates ordered by "most likely" candidate.  Now, the new "Instant" feature not only guesses your next move, but also instantly shows you the results.  For example, if you type "Billy" then you get the following instant results:




Notice that Google pulls up images, natural search results, and paid campaigns without ever clicking search or hitting enter.  How will this affect local internet marketing?  According to Google, you should not have to change your SEO strategy to account for instant search.  As for SEM, you should not make any drastic changes.  As usual you should constantly test, measure, adjust and repeat.  The most likely outcome, according to AdAge, is an increase in impressions.

If local internet marketing—including paid search and optimization—is not a part of your current strategy, then you probably need some help. Check out Balihoo's ad builder software and local marketing automation tools for just the help you are looking for.

Imagine a big jar filled with Skittles.  The Skittles are randomly distributed throughout the jar; a jumbled mishmash of red, green, yellow, purple and orange. The jar is on a machine that shakes it vigorously.  Now, imagine that this shaking action is captured on a video and played in reverse. There is no way that you can tell the video is being played in reverse.   When the video is played backward, the candies bounce just as they would when played forward.  You have no way to know if the video is playing forward or in reverse.

Now, record a new video in your mind.  This time, start with a jar where the Skittles are arranged in colored layers.  Moving from the bottom to the top, you have red, green, yellow, purple and finally a orange layer.  As the machine shakes the jar, the candies bounce and collide until they are again randomly distributed. 

In this video, you can easily distinguish a forward playing recording from one that plays in reverse.  This experiment illustrates the effect of entropy known as the arrow of time.  The basic principle of this model is that without the help of an external exertion of energy, a system tends to become less ordered over time.  Interestingly, this is the only physical property that seems to define the flow of time from past to future.

I got to thinking about this principle as I was mowing, weeding and maintaining my yard yesterday afternoon.  Everything in life follows this principle: yards, cars, homes, computer systems, roads and even business strategies including your local advertising strategy. It will slowly fall apart and become less effective over time if you don't continually test, measure and refine it.  For example, if local internet marketing was not a part of your strategy a few years ago, it may not have hurt your sales.  But, today, if you aren't investing in local internet marketing, then you are almost certainly losing opportunities.

Even if you are executing a successful local pay-per-click campaign today, it is almost guaranteed to be less successful in the future if you don't continually test, measure and refine your approach.  The same goes for all other mediums, strategies, tactics and local marketing ideas.  You have to stay up-to-date on the new tools and techniques or your competitors who do keep up will leave you behind.

As a national brand, local affiliate, reseller or independent small business owner, you have a lot to worry about, and probably don't have time to get into the nuts and bolts of fighting local advertising entropy.  That is where Balihoo comes in. We do that work for you; from ad builder software to email campaign automation, microsites and local media buying.  Click here to take a look at some of our whitepapers and case studies.  If you are a franchisee or product reseller, then direct your national brands to Balihoo, so that we can help them and you to get your skittles (aka: local store marketing strategy) to look more like this:

 Are you a local advertiser who is trying to figure out the most efficient way to drum up more business?  A few years ago when asked about local marketing, a small business owner may have expressed the kind of frustration this cat is feeling:



It was kind of hard and frustrating, especially with no opposable thumbs.  And, as in the case of a color blind cat, it was difficult to really understand the effectiveness and results of your efforts.  That was then.  Now local store marketing is something a little more akin to this:


You'd think that it would be getting easier, right?  I can reach out to individual consumers with all this new whiz-bang technology, right?  But with all of the fragmentation of publishers, and new complexity that sits between them and the advertiser it can be a pretty daunting task to just understand the landscape, let alone achieve tangible results.  We're talking about agencies, ad servers, media buying platforms, creative optimization, analytics, data suppliers and aggregation, data optimizers, ad exchanges, ad networks, performance analysis, print ad builders, yield optimization, social tools, publisher tools, etc.  How do you make sense of all of these puzzle pieces and get them to work together seamlessly?

At the end of the day you simply want more people to spend more money in your store.  It would be really nice if it were handed to you like this:


Ok, nobody is going to hand you a completely solved marketing solution.  Every business and market is different, there is no perfect one-size-fits-all solution.  But the tools and expertise to help you get there are available.  Check out our white papers and cases studies to see how Balihoo, the premier provider of local marketing software and services, can help you solve your local marketing puzzle so that you can spend more time chasing mice and playing with balls of yarn.  Oops, I got my analogy a little mixed up.

Everyone sees the world through their own set of spectacles.  I thought it would be fun to take one aspect of perspective and see if I could break the world into a normal distribution of how people seem to perceive aesthetics.  This is more for fun than anything else, so don't get too bent out of shape that this is totally unscientific, extremely opinionated and probably ugly itself.


The Chart.  There are four major rectangular categories that overlap to form six sub-groups which are sort-of overlayed onto a normal distribution.

These are the traits of the four major categories:
  - Pink: People who mistake ugly for beautiful.
  - Magenta: People who can tell if something is ugly.
  - Blue: People who recognize beauty.
  - Yellow: People who are creative.

The minor categories:
    A.  These are people that mix up ugly for beautiful and beautiful for ugly.  This includes guys who think Drew Barrymore is attractive but kittens are hideous.  It also includes women that would date Donald Trump if he were poor and are repulsed by Tom Cruise.  This is a strange set of people who find that the theory of supply and demand often works in their favor.
   B.  These folks call pretty things pretty, but also seem oddly attracted to things that are not so pleasing.  If you can watch the initial audition episodes of American Idol without a barf-bag you may be in this category.  My first instinct is to pity this group of people, but they may actually be the most happy.  They like just about anything!  They are rarely disappointed at Christmas and have no trouble finding an "attractive" date or spouse.
   C. Here are the people who are properly repelled by the repulsive, but aren't naturally attracted to things that are inviting.  This is the group that deserves your pity.  They instinctively reach for the remote when re-runs of Rosanne come on, but find themselves endlessly channel surfing - looking for something to watch.  At the car lot their subconscious hurries them past the clusters of PT Cruisers and Scions, but they find themselves wandering aimlessly looking for something they really like.
   D.  I think that most humans naturally fall into this category.  They recognize beauty - even if they can't tell you why it is that way.  They can tell you that Joan Cusack ain't too good lookin' even if they can't put a finger on exactly why that is.  They listen to and appreciate the mastery of Mozart but can't quite explain why it sounds so right.  The most wide-spread exception to this rule is that most normal people can't seem to tell if their own child is ugly.
   E.  These people are pretty rare.  Not only do they know what makes something attractive - they can generally tell you why and create good looking things themselves.  These are artists, designers, decorators, cinematographers, and so on.  It's pretty easy for most of us to look at a user interface and say that it seems wrong, but it takes a great designer to know why it is wrong and re-design it to feel right.
   F.  Here is an odd group of people.  They are creative, but have a skewed sense of aesthetics.  I think that Pablo Picasso belongs here.  A lot of "musicians" also seem fall into this category.

So, why does this matter to Balihoo or people interested in local marketing?  The sad truth is that you generally are not capable of placing yourself on this curve!  You should always assume that you are farther on the left side of the chart than you think.  If you own your own business and you are considering producing your own ads you should think twice.  If you ever watched American Idol and asked yourself "how did that guy ever think he could sing?" then you should be able to understand this.  Just like the mother who thinks her hideous offspring is beautiful, you probably cannot judge your own creations.

When it comes to building ads you need help.  Most of us can tell within about 20 milliseconds when we are seeing, hearing or viewing a "locally created ad".  Do you really want 90% of your audience to turn the dial when your ad airs?  That's why we offer professional ad builder software.  Highly skilled designers and advertising professionals create the template and you fill in the details (pricing, business address, etc).

Premature optimization is a topic that most software developers have heard about, but I've recently been thinking about how applicable it is to other disciplines.  I'm not going to try and explain the connection to your line of work - as a practitioner in your own field you are best suited to do that yourself.  I'll just toss a few words at you to get you thinking about it.

A long time ago (in computer industry years) Donald Knuth warned that "premature optimization is the root of all evil".  Software optimization is the process of modifying a software system to make some aspect of it work more efficiently or use fewer resources.  Some lazy programmers use this statement as their maxim to justify writing slow, resource hogging code that never gets improved until someone else does it for them (usually after they have moved on to another project or company).  They entirely missed (or ignored) the point.

Optimization itself is not evil - doing it too early is what gets us in trouble.  If you haven't yet proven the relevance, usefulness, correctness or marketability of your application - you should be developing it in prototype mode until those things have been confirmed.  Most people would be surprised at how much code gets tossed out or at least heavily refactored as a product matures.  The first iteration is always a prototype, wether you are willing to admit that or not.  If your software team isn't tossing out code then I guaruntee that you have a lot of nasty legacy code and your product is evolving about as slowly as a fossil.

I used to work for a guy that was so hung up on performance and memory optimization that he was willing to sacrifice correctness and maintainability in order to eek out a couple more milliseconds and bytes of savings.  I don't think he conciously decided that those extra tidbits were worth messing up one thousandth of a penny in a treasury bond pricing model (which is a big deal when your talking about many large transactions).  He was just so focused on performance that everything else (correctness, maintainability, time to market) became secondary.  He was too proud of his code's performance to see the obvious flaws.
Franchise Marketing - Channel marketing software - Local internet Marketing
This principle is magnified at a startup.  You don't have the time, human resources or capital to try and perfect a product or feature that has never been tested in the market.  You have to learn to identify "good enough (for now)".  You have to get it in front of real users who really use it - or at least figure out why they refuse to us it.  For example, our print ad builder has been through countless iterations.  The first version wasn't too pretty, fast, or even very well thought through.  The fact that it kicks the tail of every other local marketing platform out there is because we were willing to admit that we wouldn't get it right the first time.  We have relentlessly refactored and modified it.

Think about how this principle applies to you and feel free to shoot me some comments (especially if you disagree with me on any of my points).