14.6 million small to medium sized businesses are bracing to triple their web marketing budget according to Borrell & Associates in a recent report entitled: “Main Street Goes Interactive”. While these companies have traditionally spent their advertising dollars in the Yellow Pages, Direct Mail or Coupons, they now realize they receive better, more cost-effective, immediate, and measurable results online. In fact the report says that this group invests 11% of their advertising dollars online, up from 4% three years ago. The report also indicates that local interactive marketing budgets will rise from 8% in 2008 to 18% in 2013. Unfortunately online display advertising is not popular and has seen a decline in spend of 54%.

At PCM Interactive we have seen these research trends to be true as clients have most definitely gravitated to technology-supported marketing initiatives such as web site reengineering, search marketing and customer database marketing.

Google Ad Words has been an enormous hit with this group as well, especially in these tough economic times. You pay only when someone is interested in your product or service and clicks on your ad. You can control your budget for each day, and create custom ads and landing pages for different searches. The flexibility and instant ROI is what makes it attractive.

So, with the majority of searches online its pretty tough for the old Yellow Pages to compete. Yellow Pages Publishers have, in varying degrees tried to stay in the game with online directory versions but these sites for the most part are still cumbersome for the searcher who is looking for relevancy and speed. The Yellow Pages used to be where people went to when they needed a service. Now that same searcher is going to Google (72%) and other search engines.

However, Google is not the end all and be all in search. There is still lots of room for innovation in the online space. In fact recent advances in semantic search provide alternatives to Google that are mind boggling. We are moving very quickly into Web 3.0 and as such more players are in the game trying to figure out how to filter the web. It reminds me of the old gold rush days with some guy handing out flyers and yelling; “Figure out how to filter the web and you too could be Rich!”

Well until we get there there’s some panning that needs to go on first.