Google is relentless in its efforts to control local marketing. Here’s a new beta program for their city pages that is only available in four cities nationwide ( Austin, New York, Portland and San Diego). Go to the Portland City Pages and you’ll see how Google is trying to put all of their local services onto one site by connecting local Places, Offer pages and more.
Digging a little deeper into the site I found this page where Google offers to send a Google Places business specialist to your place of business (if your a small business) to help you take advantage of this site. Imagine Google representatives on the street selling Google services all across the country. Billions of local advertising dollars would shift to Google products.
However, like so many things with Google, you never know how long or how much effort they will put into this new service but you can rest assured that Google is looking at lots of different ways to capture local advertising dollars.
The takeaway for brand managers is that this is just another reason why you have to be providing tools for your retailers to take advantage digital marketing. Banner ads, Google AdWords, Landing Pages, E-promo pages, Places Pages, E-mail, Microsites, the list of digital opportunities goes on and on.
The best place to deliver these assets is in your ad builder or marketing portal.