December
2006

My Online Christmas Wish List!

Dear  SANTA:

I’ve been a good Online Director all year, well almost. There was that one incident at the NAA Marketing Conference early in the year, but apart from that, I’ve been good. This year I would really like as many of the following as you can manage:

Oh yes, I also need a really good search for my site; preferably, one that won’t take lots of looking after.

Thank you!

Your Local Online Director

We aren’t sure what’s on your holiday wish list, but we are prepared to bet that there’s a good few folks wishing along those lines.

What’s Next and Where Do I Go for New Revenue in 2007?

If you have just survived or are coming to the end of that most wonderful time of the year---the budget season, you are probably facing just that dilemma. How do you raise the bar on online revenue? You have a pretty good handle on the larger, more traditional print advertiser. But, how can your paper gain a meaningful share of advertising ‘spend’ from small businesses with limited budgets? How do you take these smaller advertisers online and own the local marketplace?

by
Jeff Rapson

Trying To Get Your Management To Listen

Most newspaper markets have large numbers of small businesses that cannot, or do not use the newspaper’s advertising solutions. To date, if they advertise, it’s the coupon and yellow page media channels which have gained the lion's share of that budget. Typically, a small market of twenty to thirty thousand people, will support about 2,000+ small businesses. Very few of those businesses use the paper’s existing print offerings. The paper has to come up with a simple and affordable online offering or loose that battle to Google, Yahoo and MSN. A logical way to deploy a hyper-local online ad strategy is to form the “A Team”, an online, Ad Team. Generally, it would include a senior management sponsor, a new business or strategic business advocate, and local advertising reps, both outside and inside.

Key activities might include:

I. Workshop to brainstorm potential Local SME solutions
II. Interview small, local advertisers not in the newspaper but probably in YP
III. Assess alternatives
IV. Interview vendors
V. Design pilot activities
VI. Build market size estimates & revenue
VII. Create a version 1.0 plan with steps

The 2007 Plan --- Some Suggestions:

Plan to sell small businesses on a few simple concepts.

Presence: You need to be found locally if you’re a local business. Found easily in the newspaper’s search engine first, simply through a free form, natural language search. Google has trained the public to expect a certain experience in search, you have to deliver likewise.

Presence isn’t just in search. Most papers don’t have enough search traffic to be compelling. Selling the idea of obtaining presence on the regular page views on the site is key.

Presence builds brand. Your local advertisers need to be ‘top of mind’ when their potential customer is looking for that service, or product.

Shoppers are moving online, especially locally. Papers need to leverage that brokerage relationship between seller and consumer.

For sure, good local search drives a lot of this new revenue through, extended visits and a deeper engagement. Most papers have their ‘natural’ local traffic. Why not leverage it, and have good ‘natural’ language search too?

Don’t bet the farm (and all your new online revenue) on a fancy SEM play to drive bidded clicks to your competition at Google and Yahoo. That’s a risky strategy for three key reasons:

Best Practices in 2007 for attracting SMEs

Your new local offering should be designed to help small businesses generate new customers online and under your banner, not the competition’s. It should strengthen your position as a local market leader and secure for you a long term and scalable incremental revenue stream. The evolution of a local advertising platform and a listings play typically follows a predicable path, here’s how 2007 could look:

1) Set goals and budgets
2) Test discussion with small advertisers and potential early adopters
3) Select and deploy a vendor for project
4) Test marketing activities
5) Seed the market with outbound calls and simple listings and text ads
6) Promote the market on self-service basis
7) Review progress monthly
8) Depending on performance, extend product business models, more upsells, more recurring revenue opportunities and continue to use search to drive page views and user loyalty
9) Investigate next-generation business solutions—Click and Call
10) Explore other channels to reach small businesses; self-service marketing and push email models

Your commercial goal for 2007 should be to position your site as an integrated local search and listings destination. 2006 has taught us that you need to be much more than just another IYP player with a simple business listing. You have to have the tools to give IYP competitors a run for their local money. You already have great local content. Why not further enhance your site with great local search and sound underlying business models building new local online revenue?

Some initial conclusions to be drawn from early deployments of local search and ecommerce solutions:

1. There are quick ways to reach non- consuming businesses/non-advertisers.
2. Small businesses need to go well beyond advertising in IYP to be found.
3. Your customers want you to:

4. Learn from other newspapers; it can be very valuable. Other papers can validate your team’s assumptions. The two critical areas to address in 2007 are how to develop a low-cost sales channel and identify what would constitute a “good-enough” first step for SMEs.

5. Existing distribution channels for a paper can be an asset and a liability. A newspaper’s “feet on the street” are a competitive advantage when competing against IYP products, but the costs make it difficult to serve small businesses and these advertisers have limited budgets. New distribution mechanisms such as telesales and customer self-service solutions are critical to making a small business based offering profitable.

6. As much as the Internet has disrupted the traditional newspaper business, it has disrupted Yellow Pages, shoppers and other advertising vehicles for small businesses, too. Newspapers can use their assets and brands to gain access to these non-consumers/non- advertisers.

Dailies need to move quickly before other players take advantage of the local market opportunity. Newspapers need to be at the heart of brokering the relationship between buyers and sellers. This strategy will re-enforce the opportunity and your presence.

Happy Holidays and a prosperous 2007 from the Search Initiatives Team.

Jeff
Rapson

BOOK A DEMONSTRATION AND SEE HOW OUR LOCAL LISTINGS, TEXT ADS AND COUPONS PROGRAM CAN EARN YOU SIGNIFICANT, INCREMENTAL ADVERTISING REVENUE!

Search Initiatives Delivers on Local search for:

www.newhampshire.com
www.nashuatelegraph.com
www.rutlandherald.com
www.timesargus.com
www.trinidadexpress.com

Jeff Rapson, VP of Sales

email: jeff.rapson@searchinitiatives.com
phone: 603-689-7134
web: http://www.searchinitiatives.com