Sam’s Club, the Wal-Mart owned mega store which is a godsend to small businesses looking to stock locally breaking dependency on wholesale distributors, is now offering a search marketing service targeted towards those same small businesses.
Sam’s Club’s LeadConnect, which seems to be a resold version of Innuity LeadConnect, offers McMarketing for the small business which does not have the time to conduct search marketing themselves and sees an easy $25 per month payment plan for their site as an alternative to the Verizon Superpages and other pay-per-month services which are actively targeting this small biz market [thanks Karl].
These small business services have been in existence for a long time and basically submit sites to search engines (which is an outdated practice) along with listing them in local search databases and business profile pages.
Of course an upsell may also include monthly AdWords ads or locally targeted advertising; but such services are not a replacement for smart or aggressive search marketing and intelligent SEO.
But how many times are we going to be in discussions with leads or prospects who ask that same question; “Why should I pay you when I can pay Sam’s Club $25/$50/$100 per month?” [Which would be an excellent white paper]
What do you think? Does Sam’s new search marketing service open new doors for the search marketing industry or will it lead to unknowing businesses being content with 5% of the pie?
