We are only now learning how to sell audience based on what we know or surmise about our audience. But we moved beyond even that on Saturday, focusing on the messages businesses want to communicate to prospective customers, most of which should be...Small business solutions: Beyond the click
Our group considering options for small and medium businesses started by putting ourselves in business owners’ shoes, imagining:
- A handful of employees, if that many
- Probably only one location, and probably not exactly where we’d like it to be
- Little time to just think or plan strategically
- A total marketing and promotion budget less than $1,000 a month
- Disruptive pressure from “big-box” retailers
- A tendency to spend marketing dollars on the “squeakiest wheels,” meaning sales reps who come calling consistently and insistently — Yellow Pages, maybe radio, maybe the local paper (depending on market size)
Web banner ads probably don’t help small/medium businesses much, especially if the message is poorly crafted, includes no calls to action, or points generically to a “brochureware” Web site.
That annual Yellow Pages ad fills the name/address/phone/category need well enough. What Web advertising should do for small businesses is deliver the message they want to deliver to prospective customers right now, not what they put in the book once a year.
What’s the deal? What’s the special offer, incentive, promotion or value proposition that brings customers in the door this day, this week, this month?
The deal should be the next thing beyond the click for small/medium businesses, and that’s what we created — a way to aggregate, browse, search and promote the best deals from the businesses in a newspaper.com’s community.
A typical newspaper.com — pretty much all of them, honestly — places banner ads in a way that makes them blind spots for Google, Yahoo! and the other search spiders. We don’t treat the advertising messages — the deals — as content. We should. We should put them in databases that are at least as well optimized for search as news articles. Then we should promote the best of them as chosen by users (via printing/redemption of coupons), the most urgent of them by creating limited-time or limited-number coupon offers, and the latest offers placed by advertisers.
We built some wireframes (download the PDF here) that show how these indexes might look and work, how they would connect to advertiser brochure pages, and what we and advertisers could accomplish from them. One appears, below.
So much more to say, and we’ll lay out more details in the coming days, including:
- Evolving services for small/medium businesses to include reputation management – showing business owners what people say about them all over the Web, whether they have a site of their own or not.
- How this works underneath banner ad servers, targeting techniques, even ad networks — because the focus is on services for small businesses beyond the introductory message couched in a banner.
- How it scales up to larger businesses, and to different size newspaper companies.
Stay tuned, check out the PDF examples, and add to this discussion. We need your help to make this practical and profitable!
23. March 2009 at 9:42 am :
The really great thing about this is it moves the newspaper away from “web site” thinking.
This looks like sophisticated Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It holds value for ad clients for several reason, the least not being the major search engines are providing more localized results. Therefore, with this we have the newspaper sales force fighting Google with judo—using Google’s power to sell against them.
Newspapers have GOT to establish themselves as innovators on the web. In today’s NYT, David Carr does a column on the success of The Austin Chronicle. In the middle of it, he tosses off this comment: “It’s hard to think of another American city where the newspaper has served as an engine for innovation.” That’s the reputation newspapers have, right or wrong. Each newspaper needs attack that issue immediately.
There is money to be made for the firm that is seen as the local digital leader. Here’s a touch of research from Borrell research that came out last week that backs this view up:
“Last year (small and medium-sized businesses) spent $6.7 billion on online advertising and are poised to spend even more in 2009. In addition, we expect them to triple their annual spending in the next few years on their own Web sites– something that doesn’t count as “advertising” at all, though the SMBs see it as such.
“The concept of saving Main Street is not only in vogue, but is also turning out to be a noble cause for local agencies and media companies trying to help their customers — and themselves — survive a brutal economy.”
http://www.borrellassociates.com/report_details.aspx?prodID=173
Newspapers need to offer a portfolio of different digital products to help with “reputation management.” (I prefer “branding” myself, the brand being about competence, integrity and caring.) The more digital products, the better.
I’m looking forward to seeing more.
23. March 2009 at 10:19 am :
What I liked most about this session - aside from the chance to meet so many talented designers and Web developers - was the reception to new or different ideas. Just saying “ads can be content too” was not dismissed or brushed off.
Once an idea was floated, others took it, riffed on it, polished it and then got it on paper. I was truly impressed by many of the people in my group and in the room. It was a great experience.
23. March 2009 at 2:56 pm :
I’ll vouch for that, Chris. Our group turned a couple of idea sprints into wireframes and concept taxonomies that resemble — in my view, at least — a completely workable approach to SMBs. The beauty is, this isn’t a technology platform arms race, it’s a human services and skills solution.
24. March 2009 at 5:38 am :
What I like most about this is that it begins to leverage the one strength that local papers have that they don’t explicitly sell: Google Rank.
Of course, it would be a good idea to reach out to Google to be sure that this is built in such a way that it doesn’t unnecessarily set off any scam alarms at the mothership, but the notion of organizing commercial content in the same way that news is organized and exposed to search just might have legs.
30. March 2009 at 10:39 am :
Ads are content…..how many web searches a day are people trying to figure out what car to buy, where to find a local plumber and who has the best pizza in town? I’d say as a %, many more than who would actually be navigating to a local newspaper site. So, let’s take it a step further and put the advertiser in control of their content area as well. Let them self manage their ‘ad’ on an ongoing basis. Reputation management obviously must be left to the user, but allowing the purveyor to respond to comments and update their image is an option that already has developed a huge fan base on sites like Trip Advisor and Yelp. So, stand up the local business directory data base, create an ability to open up a user generated advertising community where small to mid size businesses pay a nominal monthly fee to dramatically enhance their listing, and allow the audience to support/promote/demonize a local biz…….your new environment becomes a more robust element of the general busisness directory, constantly provides fodder to the search engines and offers a great way to derive low investment new ad dollars from clients that you’ve never previously had.
16. May 2009 at 10:39 am :
An interesting idea. However, given the immediacy of the Web, I believe only a few types of “deadline deals” would work. And those are for purchases that don’t cost a lot of money.
With larger purchases, folks may want to do their research before making a buy. But this could be a good play for grocery stores, etc. announcing deals.
However, I’d want to see the sales strategy for this. The Web is always a tough sell, and something like this seems a bit disruptive. How would it be sold?