Now that the economy has gone sour and business people are looking for low cost marketing alternatives, millions of them are turning to the web to save money and find new customers.

Web marketers are constantly trying to carve out “niches” they can focus on. And almost always they have no (or very little) reference to location. Anybody who is interested in “dog training”, for example, can buy your dog training ebook or course or digital product, irrespective of where they live.

This clearly skews the whole online marketing focus to selling either ”soft” services that can be delivered digitally (ebooks, software, training courses, etc.), or “hard” products that are small enough or valuable enough so that shipping is not a significant issue.

This leaves out millions of local businesses - businesses providing goods and service to local customers - because, for the most part local businesses deal with people who like to walk or (more likely) drive to the business location and pick up products right there and then.

For local businesses there is none of this messy and expensive shipping of products across the country. Think of restaurants, for example. Or landscapers, contractors, chiropractors, hair dressers, plumbers, real estate agents, or lawyers. The list goes on and on. These are “niches” where there is no clear role for web marketing.

At least not until lately. The obvious role for web marketing in these locally-oriented businesses is promotion - the providing of information and advertising aimed at building a “presence” in the market. But this role has been dominated by local media such as local newspapers, specialized print publications, direct mail, and, most of all, the Yellow Pages.

Think about your typical real estate agent, for example. (I think about this a lot because we have three people in our family involved in the business.) Real estate agents spend much of their promotional efforts trying to build a “presence” in their local area. They spread printed flyers around the neighbourhood, they advertise on cable TV, they put their pictures on streetside park benches, they spend thousands on ads in specialized print publications (often their listings are sold before the publication hits the street), they hold open houses and agent lunches.

Many of them also have elaborate websites and a fairly sophisticated web marketing system where they try to capture Google rankings and local searches. Why? Because they know that about 80% of people looking for real estate services look online first - not in print, not in the newspaper, not in the classifieds, not at the TV, not at park benches, and certainly not in the Yellow Pages. They look online.

That makes real estate agents somewhat unique amongst locally-oriented businesses. Most of them do not do a very good job of online marketing, but many of them are far, far ahead of virtually all other local businesses.

This move to online marketing has been driven by cold hard facts: people look online for real estate services. So if you want to be visible to these online lookers you’d better have a presence.

The same thing is very quickly happening in all other areas of local business. As long as there are viable promotional alternatives such as newspapers and Yellow Pages that’s what people will use, and that’s where local businesses will advertise. But what if the local media market gets splintered so there is no longer a single Yellow Pages publisher? What if the local newspaper loses its role as the “go to” source for local news and information? What if specialized print publications and direct mail become so outrageously expensive that smaller local businesses can’t justify the cost?

And the $64,000 question… what if people - potential customers - actually start using search engines like Google to find local suppliers of products like pool cleaning, landscaping, pizzas, groceries…?

Well, guess what! They’re already doing it. Consumer surveys have shown that in North America last summer web search engines pulled ahead of Yellow Pages as the most frequently used source for local business information.

For web marketers and providers of web marketing services like web design, SEO, search marketing, etc. these are indeed very exciting times.