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I've decided to try to get a jump on the usual year end prognostications for 2008, with the end of 2007 in sight, and the fourth quarter revenue push all but done, it's a good time to reflect on this year and think about what's next. What do I expect 2008 to bring? I think I can give you a better idea about 2008 than I could have about 2007 than this time in 2006.
Search Initiatives, from day one, has always been about building the next tier of online advertisers; which is to say local advertisers. The success that the big guys have seen over the past few years has been driven by the effectiveness of search as an advertising medium but it was deployed by hoards of advertising and marketing folks working for the top million or so, US businesses. The local market does not have access to those folks. Mom and Pop USA is busy and although they may well want to have a piece of the online pie, they are too busy and or too intimidated by the process to jump in.
Put simply self-service in the local online market does not work, well not yet. Write that down...memorize it, it's a truth that the entire market is coming to realize; millions are being wasted to prove it over and over again...local self-service does not (yet) work. I added the "yet" because it's likely that it will eventually. The success of eBay and MySpace proves that. The MySpacers and FaceBookers will grow up (one assumes) and will take their comfort with self-service with them into the work space. People punching at a higher weight than mine are predicting that local online will mature (which assumes a level of self-service) in about four years.
In four years the landscape will be unrecognizable. So rather than wait for that maturation to happen, we have taken the battle to the market and are phoning up America to explain the opportunity. In effect we are forcing the market...much as one forces a young plant. We are patiently coaxing local business on line. It's slow and sometimes painful but we have worked out how to do it, and it's working. Search Initiatives is now a significant local search marketing and SEO company with a strong in-house call center, and an army of partners that calls tens of thousands of US business every day. We carefully and patiently explain how they can join the online market. It's a crusade. We are winning the hearts and minds of every-town USA, one business owner, one call at a time.
The online SEO, Local Search and IYP market will continue to grow and there is every sign that growth is accelerating. Some folks are worried about an economic recession, housing values, sub-prime dominos, etc but even if that slow down happens, it is likely to have only a marginal impact on our vibrant SEO and IYP marketplaces. More and more consumers, and local businesses, are parking their big Yellow Books in the back of a closet or using them for foot stools.
Performance based advertising, especially search based ad placement in the major search engines and on popular local web sites will be a key goal for most savvy advertisers in 2008. The search market place next year is projected to grow in double digits again and much of that growth looks to be local. Our exponentially growing local advertising client base reflects the major trends in local search based marketing and advertising.
Hard to imagine those numbers from where we stood at the end of 2006. No doubt we will see more video, social media used in a business to business context meshed with other local business networking strategies. We'll be adding those sorts of features to our product set in early 08 to keep ahead of the trend.
We started with an advertising goal and it looks like we'll end up as something close to a full service online agency serving the marketing needs of the 17.5 million mainly small businesses in America. Our ability to dial America over the course of a year, and help small businesses get found on the major search engines, or on the sites of their local print publisher are key differentiators for us. As we add more features to our products and partner with more and more publishers, we see an emerging opportunity for local publishers to truly be the way that local businesses get online in a meaningful way. A year a go or so, we had a strategy, now we have a massively scalable solution which delivers against that strategy every day.
What will all this mean for Search Initiatives in 2008? It's hard to tell for sure. However, '08 will be a year of focus and large scale deployment; where what we have developed over the past year, is rolled out on a massive scale. We're ready for a significant push across all facets of local business in 2008. This time next year, I'd like us to be able to add our 100,000th customer to our advertiser network. |
