Why the Math is Against You

Aug 22, 2018

Ok, lets imagine that you are searching for new tires for your car. You go online, type “best prices on tires” and see what pops up. There’s Walmart, Firestone, Tires.com, and other national tire stores, including a whole bunch who only sell online. Not one truly local tire retailer appears.

Now change your search to read “tire retailers near me.” A bunch of new names appear—including local stores that have been serving your area for decades.

So now ask yourself, how did this happen? All the local tire retailers have websites and do local advertising. In fact, some of them are doing paid search to move up in the ranking. And yet, the first, simplest search brought up only national chains.

Well, it’s a function of two things.

First, search companies like Google and Yahoo let advertisers bid for top placement, and the big guys obviously have big budgets that allow them to bid more for search terms like “best price on tires.” That means they come up first, even if they are a less likely, less intuitive solution for the shopper.

But the second and more insidious answer is that the internet runs on numbers—or more specifically, the number of clicks—and the math is against those local tire stores. Consumers who do a search get shown both the paid ads, and what are called “natural” search returns, or organic searches from shoppers browsing on their phone, tablet or PC. What comes up in a natural search is not paid for by advertisers, but it’s still impacted by advertising and brand power because it’s generated from an ever-changing algorithm that is the result of all the combined searches “most humans are likely to click on.” Big companies get credit for all the clicks they get locally, as well as nationally. Its why sometimes you see search returns for stores not even in your city; because your local search is bumping up against the total number of search attempts from shoppers everywhere.

And the short of it is that the math hurts independent retailers. No matter how much marketing they do locally, no matter how cool their websites or applications are, they are in competition against the collective weight of national advertisers. And that means working alone, IGA independent retailers will never build up enough clicks to compete with national and regional brands, even though we have more stores and more collective sales.

But here’s the good news: we have a solution that will fix the problem. Our new IGA national digital ad gives IGA—for the first time ever—a national ad presence. So instead of building media audiences one store or market at a time, we’ll be building audiences on the scale of our entire brand.

Let me repeat that. We use IGA’s brand power to take the weight of audience building off your shoulders, so pretty soon, the math of the Internet starts working for you instead of against you. IGA ends up with millions of weekly impressions, and suddenly we are on par with any national brand out there.

Like the way that sounds? Take a look at the feature story in this newsletter for more details on the on the IGA’s first-ever national ad, and find out how you can make the most of this amazing new opportunity.

This is our moment, and we want to make sure you’re along for the ride.

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