This past week, one of our favorite local gurus, Mike Blumenthal, brought together his favorite local talking heads to provide their take on the themes that shaped 2011 in Loci 2011.  We’ve analyzed their observations to shape our predictions for local marketing tactics and shifts in the way the industry will approach geo-social over the next year.

Back to Basics

Provide information about your business.  The heart of local search remains the same. Give the searchers what they want-a great user experience and information about your business. David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors lists 79 factors that may affect local business listings.  However, the themes throughout the ranking factors are similar:  provide robust, accurate, consistent, and local data to the search engines and your visibility will be positively influenced.

Interact with your customers.  The venue may have changed but their needs remain the same.  If they aren’t happy, they will tell you, although now, it’s from behind a user id on various review sites.  However, they still want to be interacted with.  Changes like the option for business owners to respond to reviews in Google reminds us how talking with your customers is one of the most important tactics to keep their business and attract new clients.

Loyalty rules.  Don’t get me wrong, everyone loves a deal.  However, if your deal strategy doesn’t involve a tactic to keep your new customers, at some point, you will run out of new customers and be left with…well, you get the idea. The slowing down of deal hyping and the emergence of loyalty programs like shopkick really hit this home.

Know your Client.  We are so concerned with the rise of mobile, the influx of social and the thriftiness of consumers that we forget that what they do on a day-to-day basis determines how we will reach them.  Learning about your potential touch points and your customer’s online behavior will help you prioritize.

Simplify:

One technology for all efforts.  The days of advertising on multiple engines with different reps and many IOs is over.  Just like the DSP revolutionized display advertising, the local listing agencies will one day rule the world.  They already have relationships with various directories, IYPs and more. Plus they provide strategy and reporting that may not be feasible to put together with multiple touch points.  Companies really moved forward in 2011 by creating partnerships and becoming one-stop shops for SMBs and multi-unit businesses.

Along the same lines, we saw a huge burst in geo-social startups in 2011.  Although we feel like we dug through the weeds pretty well to pick out some strong partners, there will be a time when only a few of these start-ups remain because they did not think through the whole local picture when creating a product.

Un-marry our data, please (or, be straight with me on who you syndicate to).  I am waiting for the day when I go to an online directory and I can actually change the data on that directory and not wonder, where else is my data incorrect.  Advertising is just as bad.  “Added value” becomes extremely hard to track when ads from one site could affect paid ads on another.  Although various local dataverses have been created, they are only as accurate as the information given to us by our partners.

Come Together:

Less enemies, more friends.  2011 saw the beginning of a trend that we feel is here to stay-the merging of companies through acquisition.  Zagat and Google, Gowalla and Facebook, and OpenCal and GroupOn are just a few examples of how our advertising lives will be simplified.

Let us manage our content, please:  Not only is our data tangled but, it is extremely hard to manage.  The idea of community content tools like Google Map Maker have made business owners and advertisers alike frustrated.  Please make it easy for us to own our data or our client’s data (for free).  Also, the lack of customer service and the influx of sales pitches makes this a rant commonly heard across various circles.

Make it easy to use. The total lack of intuitiveness in some of the advertising options available for businesses on popular geo-social applications is limiting our strategies.  Facebook is one that comes to mind here.  Although they offer amazing targeting options, the lack of an easy bulk management system and the fickleness of their ad serving make it difficult to run advertising for franchisees and multi-unit businesses.

Lines are blended. To put it frankly, services in the marketing world are on their way out. Soon, gone will be the days when you have separate SEO, PPC and design agencies. The digital partners of the world have understood for years that you can’t have a successful online strategy without including every possible consumer touch point. Using tools like the Web Equity graphic reminds us that there is no longer a line in the sand.

As I think about what was next for local marketing, I picture this year being like a rebuilding period for an NFL franchise. Yes, we had some good years until the solid players lost their touch and the new ones came in thinking only about their salary. We won for a bit, but then we started fighting and not showing up to practice and the fans said they’re not buying tickets anymore. We, as an industry, are at the tail end of that cycle, recognizing that it’s time to step back, focus, and rebuild so that we can be solid team that people want to pay to see.