In recent years Britain’s high streets have been deteriorating at an alarming rate. Following the oft-mentioned demise of Woolworths, 2012 saw high street mainstays such as Clinton Cards, Peacocks and GAME all go into administration. Powerful ‘high street’ brands like Marks and Spencer, Next and New Look have in fact increasingly been abandoning the high street in favour of out of town shopping centres.
In 2011 TV presenter Mary Portas was made the Government’s High Street Tsar, charged with setting out plans to rejuvenate the UK’s ailing high streets. The self-styled ‘Queen of Shops’ proclaimed that the British high street has been subjected to decades of erosion, neglect and mismanagement and is now on the point of extinction, but she’s overlooking a very simple truth. British consumer habits have changed as shoppers have increasingly migrated online.
The Government recently announced that 15 towns would join the 12 towns that have already been declared as ‘Portas Pilots’. These towns are now benefitting from the first steps outlined in the Queen of Shops’ 2011 report into the state of British high streets. The towns will receive mentoring and funding to drive customers back into the UK’s struggling high streets and into neighbourhood stores. However, 400 other applicant towns are missing out on the Portas scheme, meaning businesses across the country must look for other ways to revitalise their high streets. To do that these towns need to look online.
Ofcom figures released in 2012 show that the average Briton spends about 15 hours a week online.UK high street businesses need to get people out of browser windows and into browsing their shop windows again, and to do this they have to reach that audience in its digital environment. Locally targeted online advertising should be the answer, but a lack of systems that work well for advertisers – particularly Britain’s smaller, local high street businesses – has constrained widespread adoption.
Britain’s smallest businesses are often reticent to advertise online because many aren’t ecommerce companies, but it’s a major misconception that online ads are exclusively for online services. Look at Starbucks. Their primary business is offline purchases – after all, you can’t buy a cup of coffee online. The UK website doesn’t have a store at all. However, the coffee giant recently ran an extremely successful campaign in which they gave a free latte to anyone who got to a local store before noon. Businesses don’t necessarily need to give stock away, but alerting people to offers and events at the local store can help to drive online customers to make offline, instore purchases.
In fact, while a website helps, ads don’t actually need to have to have an online destination at all. Global advertising marketplace Ad Dynamo ran a rich media campaign for EA Games on msn.co.uk with no destination and no call to action – the ad simply introduced a new video game and allowed customers to explore some of the key features. On the day of the game’s release instore sales went through the roof, garnering 2 million sales within the first week.
Online ads don’t just work for big brands though. Businesses such as cafes, bars and boutique shops should be targeting local customers with online ads, and driving the online community to their premises to make offline sales.
Pop up shops and other micro businesses taking high street retail space have been rapidly increasing recently, yet over 60 per cent of the UK’s micro businesses don’t use online advertising to reach customers. Micro businesses make up 95 per cent of UK businesses, accounting for nearly one fifth of the economy and turning over an aggregate of more than £613 billion each year. To coax local shoppers out from behind their computer screens and back into high street stores Britain’s micro businesses need to reach customers online, but they also need to be assured that their ads will be seen by local customers.
No Birmingham based greasy spoon wants to plough money into advertising half-price bacon butties to hungry patrons in Bristol– all that will achieve is greater traffic for a Bristolian buttie vendor. It’s important that locally targeted online ad services guarantee local ad views, so that the advertiser ensures that those bacon butties end up in Brummie tummies. Online ad services should be able to guarantee thousands of local ad views each month. Ad Dynamo Local Beta guarantees 50,000, delivered through a wide, quality network of local publishers and social networks like Facebook.
Online ad services should also come with guarantees that help Britain’s smaller businesses to meet budget objectives. Most small, local and micro businesses don’t have time to worry about designing online ads, monitoring performance or any of the other stuff a larger company’s marketing department would take care of. Online ad services should cut out the hassle, and provide simple monitoring reports that enable small businesses to let the ads do the work so they can get on with serving customers.
Britainis migrating online, and it’s important for businesses, however small, to reach out to them online. Online ad systems need to provideBritain’s smaller businesses, as well as the best known high street brands, with assurances, guarantees and, above all, highly effective results. If they don’t then small, local businesses will die out, big names will decamp to out of town shopping centres and the high street will find itself a deserted, lifeless ghost town. Ad Dynamo Local Beta enables businesses to target audiences with highly specific, locally targeted online advertising on a budget, but crucially without sacrificing reach.
If Britain is serious about rescuing its high streets from extinction, it absolutely must look online to save itself. Effective use of online ads can contribute cash to high streets over and above the £100,000 grants awarded to successful Portas’ Pilots, while online ad systems that reach local audiences can help UK businesses to inspire those local audiences to get back out into high street stores. This will help to boost local business and prevent high street greats like Woolworths from being purely consigned to nostalgia and news about notable economic failures.
