With the first decade of the 21st Century behind us, local businesses and local media companies are facing unchartered waters. As the internet has developed into a new advertising medium, small businesses are faced with an expanding marketplace to spend their ad dollars. Add to that the constant drumbeat of the decline of print media and the growing buzz surrounding digital and social media, the marketplace is forced to evolve. Small businesses must learn to spend their marketing dollars effectively and wisely, and local publishers must grow and enhance their digital offerings to meet the needs of these small businesses.

The average small business in America spends $5,6701 per year on advertising, but overall those small businesses create over half of the entire nation’s Gross Domestic Product2 and spent an estimated $13.3 Billion on digital marketing last year (a number expected to grow by close to 70% over the next 5 years). Selling to these businesses comes with a high cost of sale and their budgets do not typically fall into the range print salespeople are used to selling, creating an entire segment of customers either under-served or under-serviced, if you are reaching them at all.

The Local Life has created a platform that solves this problem for local publishers by giving your salespeople a very powerful small business tool which they can sell once and let the small businesses manage. Its not self sales, its self service. A few sales calls a year to keep a relationship, but no ads to traffic or schedules to negotiate.

The Local Life Small Business Marketing Platform provides local businesses an all in one solution to their digital marketing needs. Developed from 4 years of in market research, practice and experience, the TLL platform has become an essential marketing tool for small businesses in our cities. Businesses can post to Twitter, maintain their own personal event calendar, post articles and build a blog, as well as email their fans. Through one dashboard, a TLL customer can post an event to the public calendar, add an article about their chef’s favorite recipe, update their menu for the season and then tell all of their followers about their business through Social Media and E-Mail marketing. We didn’t re-invent the wheel, we just put 4 of them together.

Publishing:

We believe in building local content ecosystems. Our proprietary publishing platform gives local businesses a voice in the community and makes your brand the center for that community to form. The combination of a robust local event calendar, contributions from businesses and users on the community blog, coupons, menus, specials and constructive reviews create an essential place for locals to find the latest specials and best deals. As the eyeballs grow, the power of one post grows, and the value to the business grows. As more content is added, the eyeballs grow, helping our local content ecosystem thrive.

Search and Intent

Our local sites aggregate motivated, local buyers taking the powerful content that our small businesses create and putting it in front of the people who matter. We believe that Clicks, Calls and Impressions are important but getting them from the right people is crucial. By combining social and email marketing, along with Search Engine Optimization, our platform creates the ultimate place for local businesses to share vital information about their establishments with ready and willing customers, actively seeking information.

Social Media

Social Media has become a mainstay in every keen businesses marketing plan. Our platform allows businesses to consolidate many of their social marketing efforts within our dashboard. Businesses can their add their Twitter stream to their profile, post updates and share links from their dashboard and add customers as fans. We have active Twitter feeds that highlight key information added to our sites, and a constant stream of data being collected with every user action. By consolidating the social media actions of your small business customers, your brand becomes their gateway to social media and thus a marketing partner rather than a vendor or supplier

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is one of the fastest growing and largest forms of digital marketing for small businesses - 78% of small businesses reported that they plan to continue or begin using email marketing in 2010. We take this and help small businesses combine all their publishing efforts with a simple place to send emails to their fans. By helping our customers promote their business through content publishing and social media promotions, we give them a central place to manage an additional marketing tool they’re already using or interested in.

Revenue

What does this all mean to a publisher? We provide a fully functional, proven local marketing platform your brand can use to leverage the need small businesses have for online, digital marketing to create new revenues for your company.

Our platform provides small businesses a tool to merge several of their already active digital marketing efforts into one convenient dashboard. Once small businesses realize the power of the tool they make it part of their weekly routine to update the calendar, post articles, add coupons, etc… Imagine dozens of customers adding fact checked, important pieces of community information to your site without a single key stroke from an editor or ad traffic person. Then we amplify those efforts with the power of search and the power of your local media brand, creating an essential place for small businesses to promote all their events and happenings. The new hub of local information, created by local businesses and curated by your brand; building brand affinity and boosting sales through a new customer segment.