While Yellow Pages continue to be one ofthe most widely-used mediums for local business search, the industry’s offerings are rarely discussed in college and university marketing and advertising classes— leaving the next generation of advertisers and marketers in the dark about the benefits of multi-platform local advertising.
Five years ago, the Yellow Pages Association launched a competition designed to raise awareness for print and Internet Yellow Pages advertising among college and university advertising and marketing students, as well as increase the likelihood that instructors would cover Yellow Pages in their course materials.
The Yellow Pages Advertising Challenge asks undergraduate students at two and four year U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities to create print and Internet Yellow Pages advertising for a local business. The program provides valuable “real-world” experience for students just starting their academic careers in curricula including marketing, advertising, and graphic design. It also increases their exposure to Yellow Pages, their overall positive experiences and/or attitude towards its offerings, as well as their perceptions about the role Yellow Pages plays in the advertising mix.
In addition to having their work showcased on the YPA Academic website, and competition winners and faculty sponsors share nearly $10,000 in total award prizes.
Back in January, we talked about The Berry Company’s transformative effort to put itself in a stronger position to assist small businesses in developing a multi-platform approach to their advertising, including print directories, Internet Yellow Pages, Web sites, search engine marketing optimization and video.
Now the company is expanding its relationship with Yodle, an emerging local online advertising company, through a strategic partnership that will give Berry’s approximately 260,000 small and medium-sized business clients access to Yodle’s Web site creation and search engine marketing and optimization offerings.
According to the joint release, while more than 82% of all consumers search online for local services, only 56% of small businesses providing these services have a Web site – and just a small percentage of these sites are properly optimized.
Today’s partnership gives local businesses the opportunity to expand their online presence in ways that will give them more exposure to the growing online market – and put them ahead of some of their competitors lagging in the space. It’s also well-structured in that it combines Yodle’s technology products with Berry’s existing sales channel, giving local businesses the online reach they’re looking for without the hassle of looking outside of their existing Yellow Pages relationship.
With Berry’s hybrid model, local business can combine online advertising with the print options they’ve used for years, creating an integrated message that reaches a larger audience of potential customers. I look forward to hearing how this partnership creates new leads for Berry’s local business customers.
In our “Locals Only” column for Search Engine Land this month, we talked about growing online demand for digital coupons and the opportunities this presents for local businesses. According to BIA/Kelsey’s User View Wave 7 Survey released last week, 58% of respondents reported using an online coupon when shopping for products or services in their local area in the past year.
SuperMedia.com, which launched a local search Twitter channel last September (@sp411), announced yesterday that it’s tapping into the coupon trend by launching a new initiative on Twitter to drive more leads to its business listings. In a release, the company said that it has started distributing thousands of coupons from its local business listings to 72 city-specific accounts on Twitter—at no cost to business owners.
Businesses which upload coupons to their Superpages.com business profile page will see their coupons tweeted on their local SuperMedia Coupons Twitter channel. Among other options, businesses will also be able include a promotion code to track specific offers.
This is just another example of how Yellow Pages companies are taking advantage of new online tools to generate value for their business and consumer customers. We look forward to seeing how both sides take advantage of this new program.
Recently on this blog, we’ve focused on the growing importance of online and mobile opportunities for Yellow Pages companies and their small business advertisers. Recently, SuperMedia (formerly Idearc) emerged from bankruptcy with a commitment to developing those areas of its business.
But in Baltimore this month, the continued importance of print Yellow Pages as an marketing medium became clear after a legal battle emerged over which local law firm would be allowed to advertise on the back cover of this year’s directory.
The dispute, though unfortunate because it involved an error on the part of the local directory publisher, nonetheless emphasized the high regard small businesses still hold for print Yellow Pages.
I came across this article on Search Engine Land today from product marketing expert Lore Weimann, “Protecting Your Brand On The Online Yellow Pages” advising business owners to review their listings online and take a few steps to ensure they “get the best exposure on local yellow pages search” for their brands.
Weimann’s tips include:
Running a search of your top generic terms on the popular yellow page search pages and make note of the results including yellowbook.com, yellowpages.com, and superpages.com.
Being sure to advertise on your top terms.
Controlling your resellers and/or affiliates so that their advertising efforts, ad copy, and offers, are consistent with your own.
While I agree with this advice, I think it also highlights the need – more than ever – that yellow pages representatives provide informed marketing counsel to their customers.
As an industry, we’ve spent the last year transforming our approach to a more customer-centric consultancy model. Taking that extra half hour to walk through the what’s and why’s of a robust online search program really helps our customers achieve the maximum results online.
As Weimann notes – the local search space is growing every day. It is also changing by the minute, and the more guidance we can offer to deliver results in an integrated print, online and mobile world, the better.
Following up on our post about advertisers’ growing interest in social media, I wanted to share this new study by BIA/Kelsey that finds small and mid-size businesses are increasingly leveraging social media in their marketing approaches.
Here are a couple interesting stats from the research:
32% plan on including social media in their marketing strategies during the next year through social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Specifically, 9% are currently using Twitter to marketing their brands.
39% plan to include customer ratings or reviews on their Web sites, 23% plan to incorporate video on their sites, and 31% plan to include links or ads placed on social networking sites or blogs.
The use of social media is more prevalent among younger businesses: 16% using social media have been in business for three years or less, while only 2% using social media have been in business for more than 11 years.
Social media is continuing to attract larger online audiences. Facebook’s U.S. growth increased by 8.6% in September 2009 to 88.3 million visitors, according to an analysis by InsideFacebook.com, which tracks Facebook’s self-reported demographic statistics for the U.S. market. Twitter had 23,5 million U.S. monthly users in September 2009, up more than 700% from its unique audience in September 2008, according to Compete.com, a web analytics company.
At Kelsey’s DMS conference last month, social media was a big topic of interest, and I think the findings of the survey show why. A third of small businesses plan to include social media next year, and it’s only likely to grow from there. This important shift in how newer companies are prioritizing their marketing strategies is a sign of bigger things to come, and a critical trend for Yellow Pages companies to consider. After all, shouldn’t we be there when the consumer comes looking for information?
In my “Locals Only” piece on Search Engine Land this week, I take a look at the national healthcare debate and the continued importance of local search to connect individuals and families with the right medical professionals.
Regardless of where national health care is headed, all Americans share the same challenge: finding good healthcare providers. According to a recent study by Knowledge Networks, 14 percent of all Yellow Pages usage, or roughly one out of every seven, is related to healthcare. In 2008, there were 2.4 billion references to healthcare headings. And in recent years, there has been a proliferation of vertical Web sites that offer local search tools, ranging from Angie’s List and City Search to webMD Physician Finder.
This means that local healthcare professionals or practices wanting to build a clientele of patients will need to take stock of all the tools available to you, from print yellow pages, internet yellow pages, city listings sites and local search verticals to determine which will reach your intended audience.
You can read my full piece at Search Engine Land here.
Internet Yellow Pages partnerships with social media was a hot topic at DMS this year, so this caught my eye this week: According to a new study from Nielsen, online advertisers are quickly ramping up spending in social media as consumers devote more time to the space.
The report found that social network and blogging sites accounted for 17% of user time spent on the Internet in August 2009, three-times the percentage of time spent on the sector a year ago. The spike generated a 119% increase in ad spending on top social media sites, from approximately $49 million in August 2008 to about $108 million in August 2009. The share of ad spending for social media with regards to total online spending has more than doubled, from 7% in 2008 to 15% in 2009.
While overall online ad spending dropped year-over-year in many sectors, social media ad spending increased in every industry in August 2009. Top sectors included:
Entertainment – up 812% on social network sites vs. up 40% on all sites
Travel – up 364% on social network sites vs. down 11 percent on all sites
B2B – up 184% on all social network sites vs. down 8% on all sites
Automotive – up 178% on social network sites vs. down 26% on all sites.
“In the past, advertisers had significant concerns with social media advertising,” said Jon Gibs, vice president, media and agency insights, Nielsen’s online division. “The considerable increases we’ve seen in ad spending over the past year suggest that many of these concerns have subsided or been addressed.”
Every month we take a look at interesting headings data. Since cold and flu season begins as early as October, we thought it would be appropriate to look at the ”Pharmacies” heading this month.
As it turns out, “Pharmacies” ranks 17th out of more than 4,000 headings and generates 129 million references annually, with the highest frequency coming in October and November. Yellow Pages are one of the primary resources for consumers, in fact, 90 percent of Yellow Pages users who refer to the Pharmacies heading followed up with a purchase with 19 percent of sales generated from new customers.
In addition to October being the highest usage for the Pharmacy heading, it is also American Pharmacist Month, as stated by the (APhA). The month-long observance is a time to recognize pharmacist’s significant contributions to health care and the commitment to patient care in all practice settings from around the country.
Pharmacies know that Yellow Pages advertising will reach the local consumer at the precise moment they are ready to make a purchase, thus generating qualified leads. These purchases, based on local Yellow Pages display ads, result in more than 175 sales per year and over $38,000 in sales revenue for pharmacies. In addition, the average return on investment received from these local display ads at the pharmacies heading is $11 of sales revenue for every $1 spent.
I recently ran across a Wall Street Journal piece about the credit crunch’s continuing impact on small businesses.
Of course, there’s been significant talk about economic recovery lately, and the government had made a number of moves to unfreeze credit. So it might be easy to think that our small business clients see a light at the end of the tunnel. But Meredith Whitney, CEO of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, LLC, warns that we’re only about halfway through this credit crisis, and this is bad for small businesses.
“Since the onset of the credit crisis over two years ago, available credit to small businesses and consumers has contracted by trillions of dollars, and that phenomenon is reflected in dismal consumer spending trends. Equally worrisome are the trends in small-business credit, which has contracted at one of the fastest paces of any lending category. Small business loans are hard to find, and credit-card lines (a critical funding source to small businesses) have been cut by 25% since last year.”
She also says that home equity loans are still hard to come by, which means even less money available to small business owners through that credit line.
Since a critical component of our business is helping other businesses generate leads and grow sales, these predictions should be top of mind for all of us.
Our sales teams in the field working with business owners must understand that their advertising resources might continue to be tight for some time to come. As always, that means the responsibility is on us to demonstrate value and ROI to our clients. Now more than ever, we must present solutions that address the specific objectives of individual businesses, and we must demonstrate that those solutions help our clients achieve their goals – however idiosycratic they may be.
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