If you’re a business owner in Lamerton keep an eye out for this email inviting you to ‘renew the listing and confirm the company’s contact details are up-to-date’.
In case you were wondering what this ‘Business Listing’ was – what it costs and whether you want your details stored on it please consider the following:
• The operators set up a website called anyplace.parish.uk/business-directory for every town and village in the UK. They’re entitled to do this.
• They populate every location with the publicly-available information of businesses operating in that location (again nothing wrong with that although it is unsolicited)
• They then contact you to offer you to renew or update your listing at a price (from what I can see from going most of the way through their process for my own business, it’s about £20 a year)
Please bear in mind also the following:
– This ‘directory’ offer has no connection with the Parish Council, Borough Council or UK Government regardless of the appearance of its website and forms
– There will be little or no commercial value to you from having your business in their ‘directory’; it is highly unlikely to generate you new business in return for the fee of £20
Little icons on browser URL tabs…
– While this ‘Lamerton Parish Business Directory’ approach is likely to be legal and probably not a scam (there are however plenty of similar-looking real, dangerous local Business Directory scams around btw – I spent a decade busting them between 2005 – 2015) – it is definitely an unsolicited and somewhat risky proposition.
All in all, my recommendation as a local business person with a fair amount of experience in online business directory scams and as a Parish Councillor is to read the above information carefully before deciding whether or not you want to pay for a listing in this ‘directory’.
My recommendation to the operator of this directory is:
a) To certainly make a greater effort to distinguish your offering from the kind of online business directoryscams that have been running for more than 20 years.
b) To ideally demonstrate clearly the mechanism by which a paid listing in your directory will translate into tangible business results for a customer
c) To consider re-designing your material to avoid any possible mis-apprehension that your business is somehow affiliated with Government, Borough or Parish.
The GOOD news:
If you want some free, tangible and effective marketing for your business you would do far better to register your business on Google Business:
https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/business/
When someone goes to Google and searches for (in my case) ‘Guitar repair near me’ or in your case ‘auto electrician / plumber / book-keeper Lamerton’ or ‘…near me’ then Google will return your business listing (complete with as much or as little business contact information as you want) AND a map showing exactly where you are, linking to your own website if you wish. There is no cost for doing this; it’s FREE and it actually works. I get real, paying local business now and then from having put my business on Google Business.
Councillor Sam Deeks