Why Local Search is Big Business, For Wal-Mart
Surprisingly, SEOs are surprised that the world’s largest retailer wants in on the world’s newest opportunity: search marketing!
News Flash: Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club division efforts to help small businesses on the Web is old news.
Way back in In 2004, the warehouse retailer asserted its intention to be a service vendor of choice for its small business membership, brokering health insurance:
Providing insurance is one of the biggest challenges when competing for quality employees and improving retention. As the purchasing agent for small businesses nationwide, Sam’s Club continues to add services that benefit small business owners and enable them to improve their business efficiencies.
Sam’s Club sponsors the Small Business Administration’s annual Small Business Conference, underscoring “Sam’s Club serves more than 47 million members nationwide and nearly half are business members including entrepreneurs, owners and business operators. In addition to exceptional values on supplies and merchandise for small business, Sam’s Club also offers health insurance, health care services, merchant credit card processing and other marketing programs through a network of providers.”
What “other marketing programs”? 2004 also marked Sam’s Club entry into the Web services business, the company introduced a low price point hosted Business Web Sites service to members of its premium Business Plus program:
Sam’s Club is dedicated to providing a smooth, easy channel for businesses to grow using the resources of the Internet. Close to 70 percent of small businesses do not have an online presence because it’s just too costly or difficult to build and maintain a site. Our new Business Web Sites offering brings online promotion capability to even the smallest business in the true spirit of our low-cost philosophy. Companies typically would pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to develop a professional Web site, plus pay for ongoing support. Sam’s Club has dramatically reduced the cost to a price any business can afford.
Naturally, online marketing of Websites is a natural product extension to a Web development service package.
Rather than making for a “good laugh,” Sam’s Club savvy private label cross-selling of Web products to its engaged base of open-to-spend small business customers makes for good prospective business.
Sam’s Club Online Services is a smart move, for Wal-Mart and for its Web services supplier partner, Innuity:
Innuity is a publicly held, Software as a Service (SaaS) company that designs, acquires and integrates applications to deliver solutions for small business. The company’s Internet technology is based on an affordable, on-demand model that allows small businesses to interact simply with customers, business partners and vendors and efficiently manage their business. Using Innuity’s on-demand applications, small businesses can grow their revenues, reach and serve customers and run everyday operations.
Leveraging its reseller deal with Wal-Mart, Innuity aims to increase its “mass market retail distribution” in 2008. Amerivon has been retained by Innutiy to “broaden its mass market distribution strategy”:
The Amerivon retail agreement to further penetrate the mass retail market with our small business information solutions puts Innuity on an accelerated customer acquisition path. We are extremely pleased to have partnered with such a respected leader in the mass market distribution community and are looking forward to establishing long-term relationships with a wide variety of mass market retailers.
Mass market SEO/SEM? NOT such a novel concept. SEE: Local Ad Sales War: Why Google is a Guaranteed Winner
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