• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 11, 2014

A mobile search strategy for local stores has become more important to national retailers wanting to connect with consumers in their neighborhood. Building out this model to connect more closely with local consumers may present a challenge, but Sears Hometown & Outlet Stores CMO David Buckley says the company's catalog business model plays on the trend.

Sears Hometown does it partly through showrooming. In fact, more than 1,000 local stores allow consumers to touch, turn knobs and test the doors of merchandise before purchasing items in the physical store. The company has capitalized on that model in search results by adding the word "showroom" to the URL. While there's nothing to take home, and all orders are delivered, the store is a showroom for big-ticket goods. The model works with search engine, mobile and local marketing.

National brands are spending more in local advertising channels. BIA/Kelsey Managing Director Rick Ducey said that overall, U.S. local media revenue will reach $139.3 billion in 2015. Location targeted ad spend will more than quadruple from 2014 to 2019, from 13.25% to 43%, respectively.

Many of Sears Hometown's stores are not located in malls where one would expect to find a Sears. At the Search Insider Summit, Buckley sat down with Search Marketing Daily to discuss the strategy. When asked how local-discoverability works, Buckley said unlike a Sears store located in the mall, an appliance showroom located in a neighborhood mall doesn't benefit from high foot traffic that would keep the store top of mind. All content and all listings must remain consistent. Every store has a Facebook page and a Google+ page, and the company uses a vendor to manage a large number of local listing sites. All of the sites point to the same URL for the local store page on the company's Web site.

Local inventory ads also help by taking advantage of the store-level product feeds that Sears Hometown already uses for searsoutlet.com. The retailer can show the product within Google Shopping rather than send the consumer to its Web site to look for local availability. Basic product information, pricing and local availability are all part of the local product listing. Buckley said this provides an "exceptionally" clean mobile experience.

One of the more difficult challenges is determining how to optimize mobile inventory ads compared with product listing ads -- which do not optimize in the same way -- and Buckley says this keeps him up at night. "One is very measurable, because it's tied to conversions on the Web site, and the other is going into a black box," he said. "We have to make some assumptions for the data that goes into the black box."

Measuring the store sales from mobile isn't as easy as many think. "We are working with several different vendors who help us measure this including 9th Decimal and YP," he said. "We have been doing extensive testing, altering the level of different types of search advertising to gauge the in store impact and we see that mobile ads convert to online commerce at lower rate than desktop ads, the in-store impact is significantly higher."

Buckley said Sears Hometown measures this by changing the mix of desktop to mobile search ads for specific locations and watch the impact to both online and store sales. When they do this, with big enough changes in investment, the marketers are able to tease out store sales impact. When they shift the mix to mobile, we are able to see a 50% increase in the impact in specific stores from search advertising.

When asked what Buckley will concentrate on in 2015, he said a few themes emerged from holiday shopping trends such as the way Black Friday shopping has changed and that it's not as concentrated on one day. He has been focusing on the difference between mobile and desktop, such as what consumers researched at home before going shopping vs. what they searched for in the store while shopping, and how to capitalize on that trend.