| Advertising Online - A Guide for Small Local Businesses |
Local Internet Advertising - Differentiate or DieLocal businesses attempting to advertise themselves online face a number of challenges in sufficiently differentiating their messages from those of their competitors.Traditional local advertising mediums such as local newspapers and printed classified business directories enable businesses to cost-effectively purchase enough advertising real estate to make their ads stand out. The proven principle being that the bigger the ad, the more chance that the ad will be noticed. Advertising on the Internet however is a different story. Being inherently more fragmented in nature than traditional advertising mediums, it is not really possible for most businesses to afford the size, creative cost and frequency associated with larger format Internet ads, especially on higher profile sites. Accordingly, many smaller businesses are limited to cost-per-click advertising such as Google Adwords or online local business directories that limit the available space in which to publish an effective ad. Additionally, placement of ads in this kind of media is more often than not beyond the control of the advertiser. Competition, especially in Adwords, is also increasing rapidly, thereby further diminishing overall ad effectiveness. What is also different about the Internet is the way that people interact with on-line ads as compared to traditional display advertising. With traditional advertising, people notice an ad and then respond to a call to action, generally by making a phone call. If an ad is designed and written effectively enough people will be most of the way to making a purchase decision by the time they pick up a phone. Things are different on the Internet where often the amount of information contained in an ad such as Google Adwords is insufficient to in any way influence a purchase decision. People have been conditioned to click through to an information source such as a website or “landing page” for any additional pre-purchase information they require. The “first impression” created by the landing page has therefore become critical in determining whether a prospective customer will then pick up the phone and make the all important call. Create a decent first impression (ie highly relevant information, logical layout, professional appearance) and the chances are good that the page will be bookmarked (ie shortlisted) for a call – get the first impression wrong (muddled message, sloppy presentation, out-of-date information, slow loading page) and the opportunity is often lost in a matter of seconds. My observation is that many businesses, especially smaller local businesses, get the whole Internet advertising equation completely wrong. Not enough thought is put into ad placement (on what sites and in what order their ads will be displayed) and even less thought is put into the content of the landing page – the all important first impression. You don’t have to look too far to see examples of out-of-date website content, unappealing and even ugly graphic design, spelling errors and "Hotmail" email response addresses. Getting Internet advertising wrong may not be critical to many local businesses just at the moment, but will become a terrible disadvantage as more and more people turn to the Internet as their primary source of information when searching for products and services in their local areas. The messages to business owners wanting to effectively differentiate their online advertising are fairly simple: 1. Carefully research the available online Internet advertising options, both paid and free, to maximise potential ad exposure (known as reach) in appropriate web "neighbourhoods"; 2. Ensure that the key message used in all ads is highly relevant, up-to-date and above all consistent; and 3. Invest the time and effort in a professionally designed and written landing page that is optimised for keywords and phrases important to the business. Easier said than done, but the effort invested will be well and truly worth it in the longer run. The good news is that there are now a number of business directories that offer local business listings that can often be found quite high in the relevant search results of major search engines such as Google. 12:47 PM - 7/4/2008 - comments {1} - post commentIS YELLOW PAGES IN AUSTRALIA IN TERMINAL DECLINE?In days gone by, the Yellow Pages in Australia was the only horse in town when it came to directory advertising. As a virtual monopoly player, Yellow Pages Australia was able to charge pretty much what they wanted for placement in the printed directories that could be found in almost very household and business. And business was willing to pay handsomely for a presence in the directory that was practically a sure thing to deliver a steady stream of new customers and a healthy ROI on the listing investment.Then along came the Internet. Not the initially over-hyped version mind you, but the latest incarnation now being called Web 2.0. When dial up access was the only means for most Australians to access the Internet, the use of online business/phone directories and search engines was naturally limited. The time required to connect and then load the required pages was greater than the time it took to open the printed directory and find the required information, so people used the book. Now that most Australians have access to the Internet using some form of high speed broadband, the reverse has occurred - it is now at least as fast and convenient, probably faster and more convenient, to search for business information using the Internet. So people now use the Internet much more for directory based lookups. Whilst all this was happening, Google emerged as the heavy hitter in search engines. More and more people began to use Google as their main source of finding the information they required in their day to day lives, including the sourcing of services and products in their local areas. As the volume of locality focussed searches for products and services increased (ie "beauty salons in Chatswood"), Google and other major search engines responded by adding local search functionality such as Google Local (now Google Maps). Quite suddenly, some competition began to emerge in the Australian directory advertising market.  The impact of this new competition and user behaviour on Yellow Pages Australia has been quite dramatic if site trafffic details compiled by Alexa** are anything to go by (see chart above). Since peaking somewhere in the first quarter of 2006, the Alexa measured "reach" of yellowpages.com.au has fallen by something like 75%. Reach here is defined as the percentage of all global Internet users measured by Alexa that visit yellowpages.com.au. For any business, this is a crushing statistic, especially when more and more of your users are apparently abandoning printed directories in favour of Internet based directories and search engines. Interestingly, the most recent traffic data published by Yellow Pages Australia that I could find on yellowpages.com.au quoted "yellow.com.au averaging 2.5 million visitors each month" - with a source: Roy Morgan Single Source Australia, October 2005 � September 2006. Interestingly, this information kind of dates around the time that the Alexa reach figures for yellowpages.com.au began to decline. Surely some more recent data is available - especially as the site seems to have been recently updated. What really got me thinking about what was going on at Yellow Pages Australia, were a number of comments made at a very recent "Search Engine School" seminar held in Sydney. Yellow Pages Australia took a heavy pasting in uncomplimentary comments from a number of speakers in relation to the price and performance of Yellow Pages Australia, in particular yellowpages.com.au. A slide in one particular presentation showed a significant decline in site visits in the 12 months to August 2007. I decided to look into this a little further. After the seminar, I actually rang Yellow Pages Australia to inquire as to whether traffic to yellowpages.com.au had declined from the numbers shown in the latest statistics published on their site - the 2005/2006 numbers referred to above. After being unsuccessfully cycled around various telemarketing circuits for ten minutes or so, I finally got to speak to a warm body. Everything went smoothly as I enquired about pricing and package options in a somewat revealing discussion (more about this in a subsequent article) that lasted a good ten or fifteen minutes. When I asked for the latest traffic details though, things suddenly changed and I was told I would need to speak to a sales representative qualified to answer such a question. Quite surprised that I wasn't already speaking with one, I asked to be transferred to the right person. I was told that this wasn't possible and that I would need to arrange for someone to call me back. I said I was available for a call back right away, but was told that such a call back was not possible for at least 48 hours. Despite scheduling a call for a specified time 36 hours in advance, no call ever came. It would seem on the surface that Yellow Pages Australia is not a brand that has translated well into the online world, a key factor no doubt behind the recent, much more funky, "Yellow" re-branding campaign. Irrespective of this, Yellow Pages Australia is certainly far from being spent as a major force in local directory advertising in Australia. Based on it's previous virtual monopoly position, the profit margin of the business is still healthy although much greater than most businesses could ever hope to sustain in a competitive environment, it has a large field force of sales representatives that is probably key to selling Internet advertising solutions to smaller businesses, strong brand awareness and recognition, and importantly, probably still has the best (read most current, comprehensive and reliable) business database available in Australia. And crucially, there is still time before generational change in Australian business ownership fully kicks in. Perhaps one of the biggest negative facing Yellow Pages Australia is that their listings don't seem to appear at all in relevant Google local search results where one would expect to find them. This is a problem when 80% of Australian Internet search queries are made on Google and an increasing number users have Google search tools imbedded directly in their browsers. The recent Yellow Pages Australia partnership with NineMSN no doubt attempts to address this issue but truly, not being found in Google search results these days can't be good for any business. The word in the street, at least from people that I speak with, seems to suggest however that Yellow Pages Australia remain just a bit arrogant in their dealings and that their pricing certainly hasn't got a any cheaper relative to performance implied by the Alexa "reach" statistics. When long standing customers start giving up their quarter page ads in the Sydney Yellow Pages as the annual price approaches $AU 20,000 for some "headings", and then use the "saving" to fund alternative forms of advertising, especially online, there may be bigger problems down the track. Not the least of the problems Yellow Pages Australia must be grappling with is volume of saleable inventory - in the good old days, they just needed to print more pages to create more inventory, raise the price, and then try and sell bigger ads so that customers could still get noticed enough. These days, when more and more businesses are increasingly focussed on an online directory presence, premium online directory inventory is heavily restricted to the first, and maybe in some cases the second, page of search results. Even on the first page, differentiation from competitors is extremely difficult and listing number ten or twenty can often look exactly the same as the first listing (although arguably being towards the top of the page may be better than being positioned lower in the page). At the same time, emerging keen competition now caps the kind of prices that businesses are prepared to pay for listings - a potentially nasty business environment for Yellow Pages Australia management to deal with. Is Yellow Pages in Australian in terminal decline? It is probably way to early to tell, but the early signs may just be starting to be written on the wall. I will return to some of these issues and problems referred to above in later articles. (**For information about Alexa visit: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/yellowpages.com.au) 10:31 AM - 21/11/2007 - comments {3} - post commentDoes Local Newspaper Advertising Work?The other day I was doing some pricing of trades and services classified advertising in local newspapers in the Sydney metro area. I called a number of local papers, and to be honest, was a bit shocked at the price of what seemed like very small ads that did not exactly jump off the page and grab my attention. Lots of ads all looking the same, all with pretty much the same message - call me please!This really got me thinking as to whether or not local newspaper classified advertising actually worked for small businesses. It also got me thinking in relation to how people who read the ads actually made a decision as to who to call, and after making their call (or calls) how they selected a service provider or tradesman. After all, one single column, 3cm ad for a plumber looks very much like all the other single column, 3cm ads for plumbers. And each ad cost a couple of hundred dollars to run for a month or so. I can only surmise as to how people relate to local newspaper classified ads and make their buying decisions, but I did ask one of the call centre operators a rather blunt question - do you think the classified ads in your paper work? Her response was interesting. She quite openly stated that she personally would never actually read a local newspaper, and if she did, she would certainly never use local newspaper classified ads, preferring to use a search engine instead to find the products and service providers that she needed. She actually went so far as to recommend that I put my money into search engine marketing rather than an ad in the local paper she represented. Admittedly, the person making these comments was in her mid twenties, but nonetheless you don't need to be Einstein to work out where all of this is going. Just take a look at your own kids if you have them. Even at a very young age, they are already well versed in the use of search engines to find everything from information for school projects to tracking down where to buy the latest video game. I am also sensing much greater use of the Internet by older generations, no doubt fueled by wider penetration of broadband Internet connections. The reality is that it is probably much quicker these days to click on a search engine link and type in a search term than to find the paper or directory and trawl through the results. Taking all this into consideration, its not a real stretch to see that printed local newspapers probably have a very limited future and that performance of advertising in those papers will probably continue to decline. The takeout from all of this is that there are a number of potential problems that smaller businesses in particular are now facing in relation to getting found, much less noticed, by consumers - the performance of tried and true forms of traditional local advertising is continuing to wain and this situation is not going to improve, but only get much worse. The alternatives really seem to lie in online advertising - a far more complicated affair than simply making that call to the local newspaper and dictating the same ad used last time. To get it right, business really needs to think carefully about online local advertising and consider all the options before devising a strategy. What business really seems to need is a local online advertising service that can enable them to cost effectively transition from traditional forms of local advertising to online local advertising. One such service is a local business directory called LivePages that lets businesses of all sizes create and manage listing pages that can be increasingly found on major search engines. Best of all an annual listing in the LivePages directory can cost less than a single column, 3cm, black and white nondescript classified ad run in a local newspaper for a month. More on this later. 7:28 AM - 16/8/2007 - comments {1} - post commentThe Difference Between SEM and SEOI have been meaning to write an article on this topic for some time, but until I get to it, the following definitions of SEM and SEO will suffice. Apologies to the original author, but I lost the URL reference. The link to the original provider of the definition is however linked. The snipped article has been italicised to differentiate from my comments.Hope someone finds this useful! The Difference Between SEM and SEO June 19th, 2007 I have had many ask me what the difference between Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, so I thought I might throw a couple of definitions out there. I am going to start with SEO, as it is a part of SEM. SEO is the act of optimising the html and other content of your website for relevant, targeted key phrases in order to attain higher natural listings than competing websites. SEO provides a cheaper long term solution for increased qualified traffic and generates customer enquiries that ultimately convert to sales. Thanks to ihaveawebsitenowwhat for help with a definition. Now SEM is broader than SEO. It includes SEO and other areas to improve a sites visibility in search engine results pages, like paid listings and paid inclusions. You can think of SEM as more expensive and quite possibly more targeted, while SEO is free (not counting your time of course) and its purpose is to obtain better free search listings. Personally, I would start with SEO and then move onto SEM. Of particular interest to me is the relative marketing value of free organic search results on major search engines, as compared to paid or sponsored search results. I guess each have their place, but I will explore this in more detail in a later article. 8:50 AM - 26/7/2007 - comments {0} - post commentLocal Internet Advertising ChallengesWhen it comes to executing locally focussed advertising strategies in the Australian market, the Internet could be considered both a good thing and a bad thing for businesses, especially SME's (small to medium enterprises).In days gone by, the advertising options for SME's everywhere was pretty obvious - place a listing in the local phone directory once a year, perhaps do the occasional local letter box drop at the beginning of the busy season, place a classified ad in the local newspaper if when business tailed off a little too much - but the Internet has finally started to fundamentally change the required approach to local advertising in the Australian market. These changes have coincided with a consolidation of a number of business categories such as food and liquor into very large conglomerates wielding significant market power. This has had the effect of progressively strangling such small business institutions as the local liquor store, the local butcher, the local green grocer and the local service station. In pursuit of corporate growth, more and more categories are being consolidated into ever larger businesses that then set out to compete directly with remaining small businesses. Sound familiar? So what has all this got to do with local advertising? Or the Internet? On these questions, there are a number of factors to be considered. Principally, it is my opinion that there has been a significant change in the way people (or more disrespectfully consumers) now go about sourcing products and services in their local area. Until quite recently, the first (and often only) point of reference in this sourcing process was the local phone directory. Open up the directory at the required alphabetically listed category and literally hundreds of businesses could be quickly scanned for relevance. The bigger, more expensive, listings may have gotten greater attention, but all the listings had a fairly decent chance of being found. With the benefit of it's monopoly, the Australian yellow pages directory could create endless new inventory simply by running annual fear campaigns that businesses would miss out badly by not listing. Thanks mainly to growth in domestic broadband penetration and Google, more and more people are now using Internet search engines and business directories to source locally available products and services. This eventuality should have been a blessing for smaller businesses, however, the search engine results paradigm - that is, people don't often go past the first page of only 10 or so search results - contrasts dramatically with the printed directory outcome referred to above. Throw in the fact that Internet users don't follow neatly alphabetic categories when searching, and it seems very clear that there has been a significant decline in the amount of effective directory inventory available in the Australian market. The knock-on result of this reduction in effective inventory is two-fold - firstly, only businesses with a decent web presence can be found in search engine results (generally speaking) - secondly, only those web pages that are quite highly relevant to the search criteria (and have a decent page ranking) will get close to the first page of search results. Both of these requirements can be very expensive to fulfill - I have seen a Cost per Click search engine marketing service that starts at $300 per month - so expensive that a heck of lot of small to medium sized businesses simply cannot afford get found on the Internet. The decline in valuable directory listing "inventory" has forced the price of Internet yellow pages listings ever higher, to the point where many small businesses that I have spoken with can no longer realistically afford to compete for directory prominence in their respective categories. By and large, the cost of an effective online yellow pages listing far outweighs the possible return on investment for many smaller local businesses. It is the ever growing conglomerates, category killers and franchise groups referred to above that can afford to compete aggressively in directories and search engine marketing. When this competitive advantage is combined with access to mainstream media campaigns on television and in metro newspapers, SME's are simply finding it more and more difficult to find a meaningful advertising voice. Further compounding the dramatic switch in directory medium usage (from print to the Internet), is the dark, or at least slightly grey, side of online and search based advertising - bait and switch tactics, anonymous Internet shop fronts that conceal the identity of the vendor, alleged brand hi-jacking and other search engine guerrilla tactics - have probably muddied the waters from a consumer perspective. Anything that doesn't look entirely solid is probably treated with a healthy degree of scepticism in the world of Internet advertising. New small businesses with no brand value need to be very careful! There is perhaps some hope for SME's on the horizon as more Australian Internet users being to grasp the potential value of social networking sites that have been springing up for some time now. A number of independent local business directories of various flavours have emerged in the US market, some with the capability for users to leave comments, make recommendations and post reviews - favourable or otherwise - about local businesses and their products and services. So, at least in theory, if enough people care and take the time to voice their opinions, the Internet may provide a means for smaller businesses who do a great job of providing products and services to their local communities to get noticed and stand out from the pack. Quality of service could once again become paramount, not size and marketing budget. This however will take some time - perhaps a half generation or so - to have any discernible impact on the local advertising scene in Australia. In this market we are somewhat disadvantaged by a lack of readily available quality, comprehensive business databases that can form the cornerstone of an viable alternative to yellow pages. The few local Internet business directories that have emerged in the Australian market suffer from a lack of current, detailed information about the businesses that they list. Often the data is simply purchased under license from telemarketing operators (or perhaps even worse offshore sources), massaged into categories and inserted into moderately smart database and web software to form Internet directories. They all tend to look the same and provide the same disappointing level of results. Just try searching any second tier Internet local directory (as in any local directory other than yellow pages) and see how much value adding information about local businesses you can find. I am sure, like me, you will find mostly just a (registered) business name, an address (that may or may not be correct), a business type sourced from generic SIC information and very little else. In some cases, it seems the main purpose of these types of directories is to carry Google ads and not to provide any meaningful business information at all. Where Australian local directories do provide an opportunity for users to leave reviews etc, there is mostly very little in the way of meaningful content - cynically, you could form a view that what reviews are written are so scant and meaningless that they could have been penned by directory staff themselves just to provide a semblance of credibility for their service (but that would never happen, right?). But all this may change as the next generation of consumers emerge from their MySpace and YouTube pages. So what is the point of my ranting here? After much thought, it is my considered view that the future of effective local advertising is indeed on the Internet. The level of effectiveness, however, of the advertising will be largely up to local businesses themselves. They will need to become way more pro-active in relation to how they and execute local advertising strategies. They will need to embrace all the potential opportunities offered by Web 2.0, in particular social networking sites, blogs and streaming media. To counter the very fragmented nature of the Internet medium, they will need to learn to diversify their advertising spend, try new services, and above all, contribute and manage content such that their business profile and marketing message is consistent across the web. It is to be hoped that more directories like LivePages emerge to facilitate this opportunity. Although in its early stages, LivePages does provide businesses with the opportunity to build and manage their own comprehensive listing pages for very reasonable prices. If indexed by major search engines these listing pages could form affordable, flexible search engine "ads" optimised around key words emphasised in the listing itself. The development of these kinds of sites should be watched closely. There are so many other topics that I want to tackle in this article, not the least of which is the effectiveness and expense of search engine marketing advice in Australia. My admittedly somewhat limited personal experience in this key area has left me with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. God knows what is must be like for non-technical small business proprietors to deal with. Sounds like a great topic for another article at some time. 4:00 PM - 25/7/2007 - comments {1} - post comment |
Description Local Internet advertising and search engine marketing issues and pitfalls in the Australian market. Home User Profile Archives Friends Local Business Directory Recent Entries - Local Internet Advertising - Differentiate or Die - IS YELLOW PAGES IN AUSTRALIA IN TERMINAL DECLINE? - Does Local Newspaper Advertising Work? - The Difference Between SEM and SEO - Local Internet Advertising Challenges |