Why Use Google Places

I wrote about Why Market Anything (see it here)

But this is a lot more specific.

Why use Google Places?

First, some numbers

According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm,
Internet Users | 1,966,514,816

Percentage of total Population | 28.7 %

Growth in the last 10 years | 444.8 %

The killer is in the growth. Everyone is moving online. With better services & connectivity this will only improve.

Local Search.

Google is already the de-facto go to page to search anything (although personally I like Bing for image search).  In fact 'googling' has become a verb and is used in everyday lingo.

So what does Google Places do?

It lets you create a place for yourself/ your business and it shows it along with a map (google maps)

this is local powerful search + listing on google maps makes it so effective.

People search on the move, and the google maps makes it easy to reach your business

Now, we come to the killer function.

Google lets you offer Promotions / Offers / Coupons that people can either use on the net itself (phone) or print (at home) and bring to you.

this is the marketing magic.

Free ADS + Business.

Not only is it marketing, I would go further and say it can create SALES for you too!