DMR #11: Calin Yablonski – Is local marketing very different from global digital marketing?

David: Is local marketing very different from global digital marketing? What are the best sources of traffic for local businesses, and what digital marketing strategies work best for local businesses in 2014? Those are just three of the questions that I intend to ask our special guest today, Calin Yablonski. Calin, welcome to DMR.

Calin Yablonski
Calin Yablonski

Calin: Hey, thanks a lot, David. Thank you.

David: I’m trying to focus on pronouncing your name correctly there.

Calin: You did a pretty good job. It’s Calin Yablonski. I know it’s a bit of a tongue twister.

David: Calin’s founder of InboundInteractive.ca providing local businesses with a professional suite of digital marketing services. Calin, I’m impressed that you actually called it Inbound Interactive back in 2009 because was that not actually before the term “inbound marketing” was really coined?

Calin: Actually, Inbound Interactive was a name that I came up with about three years after I officially launched my business. I’d like to pretend that I was really insightful and ahead of the curve, but no. “Inbound” was a term that we came up with as we saw the transition towards inbound marketing.

David: That explains it.

Calin: Yeah. It takes some of the mystery out of it.

David: It’s very interesting actually the difference in Google trends between what people refer to certain services as because obviously internet marketing was probably something that agencies called it seven plus years ago, but now it’s probably more associated with making money online and move to online marketing was popular for a while, digital marketing. Now, it’s really breaking down into various segments and niches, and by marketing is obviously one of them.

Calin: Yeah. It’s been really interesting even looking at where we generate a lot of our traffic to our website and our leads from. Five years ago, if you ranked for internet marketing in Calgary, you were generating a lot of customers from it, and that just isn’t the case today. Where like you mentioned, a lot of the services have started to segment where now customers are more in the loop with what they should be searching for, and so you’ll see people optimizing for local SEO, or organic SEO, or even more specific for things like penalty removal or Google AdWords consultant. There certainly has been a transition that we’ve noticed over the last couple of years for sure.