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Winning in Local Search – a conversation with entrepreneur Tobin Brogunier
11 Plays1 day ago
How can small businesses compete when on-line search is dominated by the big players ?
Tobin Brogunier is the founder and at the time of recording in 2023 was the CEO of Virtual Store Fronts.
Virtual Store Fronts is a localised search engine and marketing service.
In this episode of the Abeceder podcast The Independent Minds Tobin explains to host Michael Millward the problems that small businesses in rural communities face in competing in online searches and how Virtual Store Fronts levels the playing field.
During their conversation Tobin explains how the major search engines and social media platforms work, and how their business model makes it difficult for them to adapt to meeting the needs of small bricks and mortar businesses.
Tobin explains that instead of trying to convert small retailers into mail order companies Virtual Store Fronts aims to facilitate interactions at the physical store by supporting communities.
You will rediscover the better way to shop is one that involves face-to-face interactions between customers and retailers.
Tobin refers to a case study of Andrews Valley Rail Tours.
More information about Tobin Brogunier and Michael Millward is available at abeceder.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Independent Minds Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr. Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
00:00:22
Speaker
I'm your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida. In this episode of The Independent Minds, I am joined by Tobin Brogounier from virtualstorefronts.com.
00:00:36
Speaker
As the jingle at the start of this podcast says... The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr, the all-in-one podcasting platform on which you can make your podcast in one place and then distribute it to the major platforms. Zencastr really does make making content so easy.
00:00:55
Speaker
If you would like to try podcasting using Zencastr, visit zencastr.com and use my offer code. All the details are in the description.
00:01:06
Speaker
Now that I've told you how wonderful Zencaster is for making podcasts, we should make one. One that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:18
Speaker
As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we won't be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think.
Tobin's Media Technology Background and Virtual Storefronts
00:01:26
Speaker
Today, my guest independent mind is Tobin Brogounier.
00:01:32
Speaker
from virtualstorefronts.com. Hello, Tobin Hi, Michael. Please, could we start by you telling us a little bit about yourself and also then a bit about virtualstorefronts.com. Tobin Well, first of all, thank you for having me on Independent Minds. I think it's a great name for a show. And I think it's a great theme for people who need to move the needle in the future. So it's a great service that you're doing here. Thank you very much. Thank you.
00:01:58
Speaker
My background is in in in media. I worked as a commercial and editorial photographer in Manhattan and Minneapolis for about two decades. Now I run this technology pilot that's operating in the world of media technology. So it's kind of um a marketing project that is meant to fit into the current ecosystem that that we live in. My expertise is in both technology and media. As a photographer, you work with a tremendous amount of technology coming into this project, which we've been doing since 2021. What we've specifically done is taken what I've learned about how technology can be configured to create a network that is a very powerful networking tool for small businesses that are working together inside of a network to be bigger right and more visible. So that's my current job. I'm the founder and CEO of Virtual Storefronts. We're here in the Smoky Mountains in Western North Carolina. I live and work here running ops day to day. Great.
Challenges of Local Business Visibility vs. Big Corporations
00:03:03
Speaker
I will be honest with you. When I first saw the name of virtualstorefronts.com, I thought, oh, this is a website or a service which is going to help me create a webshop.
00:03:13
Speaker
But it is so much more than that. Yeah. What was the problem that you identified that you then thought, I can find a solution to this? The problem is really that a local shopper here in Andrews, North Carolina, here in the Smoky Mountains, we're way in Western North Carolina, two hours north of Atlanta.
00:03:32
Speaker
A shopper Googles TV stand. what What comes up in local results are Walmart, Amazon, all of the the usual suspects because those are very well indexed.
00:03:45
Speaker
Like though there's there's an army of white collar workers with millions of dollars at their disposal to make sure that when someone who's living in a mountain home outside of Andrews, North Carolina is Googling and looking for these things, that those are the results that they get.
00:04:03
Speaker
They go to the the big players. It's one of the things that I often say is that if I search for something online, I'm going to find the products that come from the suppliers who have the expertise in SEO, search engine optimization, have put all that to work in their website and they come up naturally in the search links, but they also have a budget for the advertisements. It seems sometimes that there are a lot of advertisements before I get to the search results and the search results focus on the big names rather than in more local businesses.
00:04:42
Speaker
Absolutely. So what we say is that Google knows what's available everywhere except local businesses. Like Google knows that the local brewery has beer. It doesn't know that the local brewery has like ah all kinds of different paninis and hummus and all of these other things, unless that brewery has a has published a menu that Google has aggregated. When it comes to local businesses and local shoppers and visitors to a place finding out what's available locally, Google simply doesn't know what's inside of a business.
00:05:14
Speaker
Even businesses that have websites, they use it almost as a business card. If Google were to find out all of the stuff that's really available at these businesses in the form that they request, it would take many pages of of data, a very expensive solution. We are a shortcut to that because we actually just keyword the entire business.
00:05:37
Speaker
What I've seen is the local aspect of this which is so important, where shopping has become a function. We shop in order to consume. Whereas in the past, shopping was a social activity. you would meet friends, neighbours, people you hadn't met before in the shops, around the shops.
00:05:55
Speaker
We facilitate engagement. We measure engagement at the register of the local store. So we are almost the opposite of e-commerce. And slowly people are kind of adopting the idea. We call our product a storefront. It has three basic components to it.
00:06:11
Speaker
I like to think of it as simple, a simple product because our customers don't have to do anything and we build it for them. Just to give you an idea of what the product does, we are in Western North Carolina, which is extremely rural.
00:06:25
Speaker
Two out of three local businesses do not have a website. When you say that two thirds of businesses, or two out of three businesses in rural areas, don't have a web presence that builds the online communities and and communicate with customers in the same way as big organizations do.
00:06:44
Speaker
What you're doing with these smaller businesses is helping them to have an effective online presence. But one of the things you also said was that you measure your success with what happens at the cash register in the store. So it's not so much e-commerce that you're talking about, but actually getting people to go to the store.
How Virtual Storefronts Enhances Local Visibility
00:07:04
Speaker
The first thing that we do is we create the storefront as a website solution so that they have somewhere to put on in the newspaper, online, when they're when they're posting besides their Facebook page, which doesn't really work for a lot of just basic information that people need. so That's our number one kind of box that we check for our customers. We're an annual subscription service. So we build it and and and host it, and then we're paid as a SaaS product. The second function that we have is a keyword stack. So we keyword the businesses in a stack of keywords. Google technically does not accept these keywords in this form, but what we're doing is actually very unusual because we're We don't scrape the internet for all of the listings and then charge the businesses to be promoted. Instead, it's an opt-in collaborative process with the actual shop where we're building the storefront. It takes about five minutes to order. It takes us about a week to build it. And we have a real person who are working in the United States, building it in the backend. That person creates a list of keywords.
00:08:15
Speaker
to put in the keyword stack that describe the business. And those keywords are then indexed by Google to tell Google what's available at the store. Third aspect of this product, there's a live feed. You can actually post your own content that's not automated, but we include weekly announcements that go out to...
00:08:35
Speaker
three different feeds automatically from your storefront. Your storefront feed, which anyone can follow, is number one. Number two, it goes into a local only, 5, 10, or 25-mile radius from your town feed.
00:08:48
Speaker
And then it also goes into a nationwide feed. All of that's automated so that our customers don't have to do anything. So this is a solution that is low cost, takes five minutes to order.
00:08:59
Speaker
Once they order it, we build it and deliver it. Once the customer approves it, we publish it and then submit it to Google for indexing. it's Essentially, it's a three-part reinvention of local marketing for local businesses.
00:09:12
Speaker
What you're doing with virtual storefronts in the Smoky Mountains is that you are telling people that yes, you can get it online, not a problem, but down the road in that small village is that shop that you've passed several times and you can also get it there. So if you make the trip from where you are at home or at work to that store, You are helping your local economy.
00:09:41
Speaker
the The problem that you're describing, which is that you you type in that search term and and and you're looking for something local. Now, these companies have the budget. They're franchises. They're they're they're not nationwide, if not global. They can engineer the results that you're going to get.
00:09:57
Speaker
Ironically, it means that Google is not serving the answers that it really needs to be serving. It's not serving the customer very well. But Google doesn't really know how to interact with that local business unless they have a website solution. So what I like to say is that you know franchises have ah nation nationwide marketing and advertising campaigns, whereas on virtual virtual storefronts, local shops have each other and they work together to become a very large presence. So our vision is that when people, and our mission really at this point, is that when people type in what they're looking for,
00:10:34
Speaker
We intercept those results. We tell Google what's available. So currently, if you type in purses in Andrews, North Carolina, the local boutique will come up because we told Google that local boutique has their virtual storefront comes up informing the shopper that they can buy that item locally.
00:10:54
Speaker
We want to make... the inventory using keywords without specifically using individual items, but using keywords inform Google about everything that's available all over the place, um all around these shoppers so that they can then make the choice to go and engage at the local business, which just to bring it around to your original point,
00:11:19
Speaker
is a relational transaction not um ah not transactional which is what we get more of um it's a relational exchange right you do it with another person as opposed to yet another purchase of gloves on amazon where you just click and you never see someone So we have an abundance of that, but we have a scarcity of face-to-face interactions. So developing technology that enables technology.
00:11:51
Speaker
human interactions that enables human experience that facilitates people getting to the store to make a purchase at the register is is a priority for us.
00:12:02
Speaker
And your description of theto the store, like the stores on Main Street working together gives me the idea that what you're doing is creating almost like the department store on the on the Main Street.
00:12:14
Speaker
So all of the different stores that are on Main Street become one department store that you can see oh yeah go to that shop for that particular item another one and but you're you are as a result of that you're being part of a local community and interacting with your local community it reminds me today i live in a little village not in the Smoky Mountains, but in the fantastic Yorkshire Dales, blessed with ah a good selection of shops in our little village. It sounds lovely.
00:12:48
Speaker
we Well, you know, it's it's the land of all creatures, great and small. and it's english It's English countryside. I mean, truly. Yes. Well, actually, it's Yorkshire countryside, if you don't mind me saying that. Thank you. But it's, you walk into a shop and as as you walk through the door, somebody says hello to you and they know you by name. It's a bit like the theme tune from the comedy program Cheers. You know, you go where somebody knows your name. And as you walk past the window, they can wave at you as you you know as you walk past.
00:13:18
Speaker
What you're doing is is the technology, but using the technology to be social, to get people out and into their communities and interacting with other people, whether they're in a shop, whether they're somebody that they meet outside the shop or in the shop, you're you're helping to build communities.
00:13:40
Speaker
That is a great kind of visual of what we're doing. And there's two things that I would like to respond to on that. One is that there's a tremendous amount of research that the problem that many of the social problems that we have um in terms of like mental health in the Western world at this advanced stage of technology is that people are living in isolation behind a screen. and they aren't actually having conversations in real life.
00:14:05
Speaker
If you look at training videos for younger, I know that you're in HR. So if you look at, you know, there's a lot of case studies of like 20 year olds coming into the workplace and not really having the social skills to be able to interact with people directly, even if they're in a remote situation. So what we need is we need people talking to people because we're not computers. We are people with built-in inefficiencies. And what we need is technology that facilitates human life as opposed to human life facilitating technology.
Social Media vs. Virtual Storefronts: Different Goals
00:14:37
Speaker
um That's why our product is also no work product. like we don't There's no tasks that we require from our very, very busy ah merchants so we because we don't want to put anything on their plate because everyone else making technology um like Facebook. if when ah When a business owner goes on to Facebook, Facebook's goal is to keep them there for 50 minutes and waste their time, even if they're just trying to post for five minutes about ah the the soup special today.
00:15:06
Speaker
Facebook doesn't look at them as like a business owner that has priorities. Facebook looks at them as a a monetization opportunity. So there's really just no respect for the human, for what that person's priorities are. So getting that person lost in Facebook gives Facebook 10 times as much revenue if Facebook manages to keep them distracted for 50 minutes.
00:15:28
Speaker
You go onto a website for one reason and and before you know where you are, without realizing it, you can be on them for a long period of time. A lot of social media has become like TV, all sorts of different things to keep you engaged with them. The longer you're there, the more advertising you'll see and the more revenue that the yoga organization will make. That is absolutely the case. And when you said all the the video streaming sites and all the social media sites, I was like, wait a minute, they're all the same at this point. Facebook and Instagram, they're all video streaming sites at this point as well. YouTube, of course, its primary business is that. But if you if people who are spending a lot of time on these social sites, so Facebook, I mentioned Facebook because it's really the network of record in this area. We're not in a major city. We have a kind of an older demographic here.
00:16:20
Speaker
But what you're saying about the purpose of Facebook is something that's called the attention economy. Now, the attention economy is the idea that if you can keep people looking at the product, then you can serve them more ads. And what people don't really understand about technology and networks in 2021, or maybe some people do, but it's kind of a finer point, is that their business model is exactly the same as television.
00:16:47
Speaker
in the 20th century, which is keep people watching so that you can serve more ads and make more money. The business model of these major networks is actually a holdover from the last century. The technology itself is very new, but the purpose, what they're going for is exactly the same. So that means that Facebook is becoming the new TV. Everything's like the new TV because That's where the vast majority of revenue comes from. I think 99% or something like that is maybe more than that of Facebook or Meta's revenue comes from advertising.
00:17:27
Speaker
So it's really just kind of TV. What's really interesting about that is that when you talk about what it costs to run these companies, The last time I crunched the numbers on Facebook's annual budget or quarterly budget, I believe it's 2022, fourth quarter, Facebook was spending, or meta, their budget to keep the lights on each day is $240 million per per day When you need to make $240 million dollars a day to keep the lights on, right you don't have a lot of flexibility in your business model. So even if Facebook wanted to make local marketing better for local merchants, or Google could somehow start interacting with local merchants to solve this problem this persistent problem that they've given them of like building a website, you know in order to be discovered, like even if those companies could solve the problem, they don't have a lot of wiggle room because they got to pay the bills. they they they're they The amount of money that it takes to run the company is so so high, and they're so deep into this attention economy, aka advertising business model, that they don't have a way out, really. Even if they wanted to all of a sudden turn altruistic, they're kind of locked in, whereas our company is completely different.
00:18:45
Speaker
We are not part of the attention economy. In fact, the less time people spend on the network, it's almost like better for us. We we look at ourselves as an enterprise solution for the smallest businesses. So our customers pay us a small small fee per year. They pay us a very low rate and they work together to become a large web presence.
00:19:05
Speaker
But at the end of the day, what we want to do is not waste their time. That's why we create automation. That's why we set it up for them. And then on the shopper end, the shoppers can follow simple announcements just to easily get information. And we also filter everything that's happening outside of your local community. So it's like, ah we don't give you the world, which is what is the promise of social networks and why they're so distracting is like, you can have everything in the world on your on your network, which is true. They have a huge amount of content.
00:19:40
Speaker
But what we are doing is we were inverting that and we're showing people just what's available in their local town so they can monitor, get that information in ah in a simple way.
00:19:50
Speaker
that's the live feed aspect of what we do. And all of that is is automated. We hand off automation. to we we We create three weekly posts, three weekly announcements that are automated.
00:20:04
Speaker
And it's just something very simple. it's you know We don't have to compose the most engaging post ever written. You just need to remind people that local businesses are here and that it's trivia night tomorrow night at the brewery.
00:20:21
Speaker
Right. I just I just need to know that, you know. Yes. And then way we go. the The local stores work together.
Improving Local Search Results with Genuine Data
00:20:30
Speaker
So are your customers the individual stores or are your customers the Chamber of Commerce, the local trade association? Do stores buy into this collectively or individually?
00:20:43
Speaker
So the stores buy into it individually themselves. Chambers of Commerce and other economic developers are partner organizations that refer their membership to us, or we can be an add-on to a economic development organization. Like they can include a storefront with their membership. They can include, we can provide a discount for certain, you know, they can negotiate for some kind of credits or whatnot. But what what they're What we're doing is this gets into the whole opt-in. this is the This is the magic of all of this, which is that because we don't promise the world, we're just're we're promising to deliver for our customers. So we index our customers and it's that consensual relationship that we have with the merchant who has hired us to create this identity for them that makes the data that we put together so valuable.
00:21:37
Speaker
right Google is looking at real authentic data about about businesses it knows little or nothing about. Google, I would say, is like the Yellow Pages from the last century. Google knows the category. you know Google knows that um the bakery has bread, but we tell Google that the bakery has woodworking crafts.
00:22:01
Speaker
which Google couldn't know unless we told Google that. So we're like the yellow pages for the 21st century. We're using 21st century technology to index the local community. And as you were saying before, they all work together. So we want to look at downtown as its own, and and excuse the parallel, but like there's thousands of of items that are available, these local businesses that people don't know until they walk in, until Virtual Storefronts tells them, we want downtown to be, want to make want to make
00:22:35
Speaker
we want to make What is available downtown known, almost like you were saying, like it was all as working together. They're all one giant department store or something.
00:22:47
Speaker
that's that's our That's our vision. So that when you're searching being in your area, virtual storefronts tells you every business that has jeans locally available to you. And you never have to walk into the store in advance to know that, but you learn because we told them.
00:23:03
Speaker
Yeah, I see what you mean. Let's get to down to like the, well, I was going to say the pounds and pennies, but it's the dollars and the cents where you are in the Smoky Mountains. So what sort of financial returns are the stores that you're working with seeing as a result of being involved with virtual storefronts?
00:23:20
Speaker
Most of our revenue stories are coming out of live feed purchases. We have a live feed for each town that we work in. So there's a live feed here for Andrews, North Carolina. We had a monitor of the Andrews Valley Rail Tour, which is a local tourist destination.
00:23:37
Speaker
We had that monitor up and essentially information was coming up like on a Sunday afternoon, information would appear on to live feed, which just ah it's live. So the the next thing pops up that there'd be live music and a food truck and all of this other stuff that's available like right up the street from the rail tour right here in our small town. So people would get off the rail tour. They would immediately see in this live feed, which is only dedicated to what is happening within a five mile radius of where that person's standing. right
00:24:12
Speaker
And they see that live feed and they say and and and then it pops up and it says, you can go and make purchases, buy food right now. And so we have documentation that of multiple occasions of people taking groups up to there just by connecting the dots, essentially.
00:24:29
Speaker
In search, it's harder to track, um but I can tell you this statistic, which just came up. In the past three months, 125 businesses in our pilot, which are pilot pages,
00:24:42
Speaker
ah hundred and twenty five pages they came up ninety eight thousand times in google search results So if you're, this is this is a very large number to give you an idea, that's for 125, technically they're pages inside of this website. We're getting, I think over a thousand clicks over that period as well. And all of that is traffic to these businesses, to their storefront.
00:25:07
Speaker
So the the metrics are are kind of off the charts. We're up 600% from January. And our vision is, you know, when someone types in purses in Boston, they don't just get Kohl's and Macy's and Amazon. They get all of the boutiques that have purses around them as search results because we told Google everyone that has purses in Boston.
00:25:36
Speaker
in that local town, that local area. was just going to say, so as of October 2023, Virtual Storefronts is available across the United States. Yes, exactly. Right. we had tet we So we tested it here. We tested it as of October, 2023. Virtual storefronts is available across the United States. We tested it in our pilot. We redeveloped it. We perfected the product based on feedback from the merchants to make sure that we had the right product. we tested
00:26:06
Speaker
are We tested virtual storefronts in other geographic markets to make sure that it was turning up for search results. So virtualstorefronts.com is a collaborative tool. It helps local stores connect with local residents, or helps to get people into the stores. But also because of the search engine capabilities that you have built into virtualstorefronts.com, you also help those smaller stores to get a better presence, better ranking within search engines, and to be positioned alongside the big stores, the big online organizations.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:26:42
Speaker
You know, Tobin has been really interested. I know we've only scratched the surface, really, of all the things that you're doing, but it is really interesting of how you are working with these smaller communities to, I suppose, in many cases, you could be helping to keep stores open in those smaller communities as well. One way to look at it is these these stores are essentially invisible. What's inside the stores is not visible to Google, and we make it visible to Google so that they, as you said, can compete.
00:27:14
Speaker
We want to facilitate offline shopping, but the reality is you need to meet shoppers and you need to meet tourists and visitors where they are. Where they are is on a device. So we we want to intercept them before those shoppers, before where where they're where where they are discovering things. And that's in search. That's why we focus on the search. Give them information that they otherwise would not have. And those businesses would otherwise be invisible.
00:27:39
Speaker
But it working together, they aren't just visible, they're massive. That's what's great about it. Yes. but You have to be big to to survive in the world. that You have to be big. Yeah, it's it's a way for the little guy to be big because they work together. be Very interesting to see. But for the moment, really appreciate helping me to create ah such an interesting episode of The Independent Minds. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me, Michael. ah you've been ah You've been a great host and and some excellent questions.
00:28:08
Speaker
Great discussion. Thank you. Thank you very much. I am Michael Millward, the managing director of Abbasida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Tobin Brogonnier from virtualstorefronts.com.
00:28:24
Speaker
You can find out more about both of us at abbasida.co.uk. There's a link in the description. Also in the description, you'll find information about the organizations that help make this podcast possible. Tobin is based in North Carolina, the Smoky Mountains. If you fancy visiting North Carolina and the Smoky Mountains, the best way to plan your travel is with the Ultimate Travel Club. You'll find a link and membership discount in the description.
00:28:51
Speaker
If you've liked this edition of The Independent Minds, please give it a like and download it so that you can always listen. To make sure that you don't miss out on future episodes of The Independent Minds, please subscribe.
00:29:03
Speaker
And remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. Thank you for listening to The Independent Minds.