What is an inbound call from a prospect worth in terms of money for a Mover? A first page listing in a local search engine for one keyword is priced in the area of €5 000 for a yearly subscription. How many new customers would you like to receive for that market spending? Moving all your stuff from one house to another normally costs you about €1500 inc VAT. If the gross margin is 50%, a new customer is worth €750. Is 20 new customers enough, generating gross revenue of €15 000? Three times the market spending.

A regular broadcast Ad in a local morning paper would cost you the same. What do you get for that? Branding?

Let’s say this Mover has a bad answering ratio, and he is not that service minded either. He closes 5 out of 10 inbound calls. Hence, he would need 40 (20*10/5) calls in total to be happy about the spending in local search advertising.

If I say that a first page listing in a small Swedish town for the keyword “Mover” generates 10 times as many calls during a year, would you believe me? Hence, for those who only believe in Adwords, you don’t know your figures!

Recap from the EADP conference we just attended:

“So how do we move from a process based industry to a knowledge based industry?”

Jim Easton, AMR Research: “Measure everything, track everything!”

When the first release of Freespee came some 14 months ago, we learnt from our users that once you track everything, there is no point of return. It is like loosing your eyes.

Mattias is meeting with some of the largest directory services at the EADP conference in Prague. He is keeping us updated every once and then by posting voice blogs on Talky, the voice micro blog service we are soon about to release. It is a great experience to follow him that way.

And Tuesday was a great day for Freespee, I will tell your more about that in a couple of weeks.

Yesterday I was going through some of the statistics we gather from our search engine customers. Many SMEs limit their Online Advertising budget to Google and their AdWords offer. Hence, are all potential customers only using Google? Our statistics show that Global search engines are used for information gathering, which we all already new. However, when you have made your decision and want to proceed with you purchase, local search engines are used to find a service provider near by you, offering the product you want to purchase.

I was looking at a small car repair service in the small town of Strömstad in Sweden. They have purchased a top position in one of the largest local serach engines in Sweden (that use Freespee Publisher). They have more than 100 unique inbound calls from new customers per month.

Let’s say each call is worth in general €200 in new business, with 80% gross margin. Hence, they win new business worth up to €20 000 per month by spending some money on local search engine advertising.