The marketplace is fracturing  into two functions – strategy and execution and what is unique about digital advertising is that these functions have a near zero barrier to entry. Therefore almost anyone can become a digital strategist, and a digital marketing expert. For better or worse anyone can be a digital marketing consultancy. Agencies have the luxury of Brand, which is ironic since they are in the brand building business, and large companies will tend to gravitate to well seasoned professionals to execute their multi-million dollar campaigns.

However the best independent consultants will be the ones innovating at an exponentially faster pace. They will implement light, quick, and efficient technologies and plans for small and medium sized businesses. It is the small and medium sized business consultants that are going to be driving innovation in the space. Why? Money.

Small budgets demand innovation, and doing more with substantially less is what independent consultants do best. They are more likely to share ideas with each other, and participate in collective work because their client bases are so unique that fear of  client and idea poaching are secondary to producing results.

For large digital agencies to thrive they must shrink in terms of their mindset and embrace the grass roots to see what digital marketing is becoming. They need to not walk so tall as to loose perspective of what is happening right under their noses. Agencies should embrace the innovative bleeding edge. If not for implementation, for the value that lies in awareness and inspiration.

It appears that presence in local-focused directories has provided a strong SEO impact for geotargeted search queries.When we placed local links into the local Internet yellow pages and business directories with geo-modified anchor texts we saw a substantial increase in page rank and traffic. An example is a Cincinnati Realtor whom we placed in  the Cincinnati Bell Yellow Pages as well as other local Cincinnati digital directories.

However the strategy becomes overly complex and cumbersome when we considered our national clients. Is local geographic targeting the best approach for connecting potential customers with our clients? Depending on the nature of the business and their target the decision could go either way.  We had a set of conversations to genuinely understand the target for the client and then balanced that with their needs with what we felt was the best use of their budget. One thing we found is that without a physical presence or sales channel in a locality the hyper local approach was less effective.