A Successful Digital Presence
There is a lot of value in your directory database, but it is only valuable when potential buyers can find sellers. Helping make this connection is what provides value to both buyers and sellers and is the primary source of revenue for you. Exploit this potential first. It can be tempting to try to create an “end-all” website, but you need to first create a tool for driving revenue, and then that revenue can be used to fund the expanded development of your website to add as many bells and whistles as you want.
Connecting Buyers and Sellers
The directory business has always been about connecting buyers and sellers, and that has not changed. But it is no longer the “one size fits all” world that we enjoyed with print. What has changed is that now there are a lot more ways to make connections and the competition is steep. What you need to keep in mind is that usage is situational. You need to expose your advertisers to all potential buyers at any time, anywhere, under all circumstances, and on all platforms. This means that you have to present solutions online, on mobile, social, and in print. Which platform will be used depends on many factors where, in most cases, you have no choice but to cover all of the bases.
Know Your Demographics
Who do you want to use your site? Learn what you can about the target audience. Age differences reflect what platforms are accessed and result in the different ways the sites are used. And there is a large disparity of usage between urban and rural users for print vs. digital. Do they have smartphones? Is there good cellular coverage? Do they have data plans or do they mainly use SMS? What is the percentage of broadband Internet connections into homes? Are they Cable, DSL, fiber, or what? All of these and a lot of other factors will determine what devices will be used and what will yield a good user experience. Tailor the site to service the demographics of the users.
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Book View vs. Listing View
Showing the actual look-and feel of your printed directory has many advantages. Tests have shown that if all the user wants is a telephone number, listing-type results yield faster results, but if the user is trying to evaluate numerous sellers, the traditional layout and rich content of the printed book results in a phone call or purchase much faster. How often have you searched on your computer for something that you thought was
going to be fast and simple and 20 minutes later had not called anyone or bought anything? But by contrast, how often have you opened your printed book and still be staring at it 20 minutes later? The print format
provides more information in a more efficient format for helping make comparison buying decisions. By adding links, buttons, banners, menus, etc. to a digital book view format, you can have the best advantages of print without the cost of print. And additionally, it provides the ability to sell additional content and sell year-round if you have the right tools.However, the graphic-rich images of a book view require greater bandwidth and so those with slow connections will probably prefer a list view format, which also provides the same up-sell potential.
Track Usage
It is not enough to just build a web site and hope that it is used. More than just knowing how much it is costing you vs. what revenue it is generating, you need to know if the site is successful, and whether traffic to it is growing or not. You need to know how it is being used. You need to be able to prove to yourself and your advertisers that you are successfully connecting buyers and sellers. You need to know what people searched for and whether or not they got meaningful results. If they are not getting good results, you need to be able to refine the search experience by adding cross references, keywords, aliases, etc. to improve the performance of the site. It is only when you can prove to advertisers how well the site is working with the use of metrics that you have a strong argument for advertisers to choose your site over another’s, instead of just saying “Trust me, it works.”
Ramp Your Sales
There are a lot of new and different things you can sell with digital products vs. print. With print, sellable items include type size, color, ad size, tabs, banners, inserts, and a lot more. However, now there is a new array of advertising opportunities for the digital realm, and they can be confusing to both your sales reps and the advertisers. Your site needs to include anything a savvy online advertiser may need to be successful. But you don’t need to push all of your sales features to everyone and certainly not all at one time. Start out by selling things that are easy to understand and easy to sell such as keywords, banner ads, buttons, and links. Save things to introduce each year as new features to simplify the learning process and to continue to be able to offer new options to expand an advertiser’s advertising program. Perhaps offer item bundles that range from the basic essentials to a customized mix of multi-media features.
Make Your Site “Sticky”
Internet usage is fickle. It is so easy to go anywhere. In the past, branding your print directory and making it an attractive, good, useful, complete, and accurate directory was the key to repeat usage, and that hasn’t
changed much. But now, more than ever, you need to give visitors to your site a reason to keep coming back. The basics cited above still apply, but now you have much stiffer competition. You need to not only make sure that users find what they want, but you also have to surprise them with more than they expected.
And that means do the best job possible. Don’t try to be everything to everybody. Some sites just grab data and content from wherever they can. But that is just what Google does. You need to be better. You have better, more complete, more recent, more relevant, more accurate data than anyone else in your area because you live there and talk to every business every year. And an extremely high percentage of all money spent is spent in close proximity of the buyer. Don’t worry about having listings outside of your area. Just have the best listings and ads in your area and concentrate on your target market.
Once you have your web site looking very attractive and delivering results for local searches, then it is time to add more bells and whistles. Then you can start making your site a local portal with more community information, more local information like weather, news, events, points of interest, maps, and anything else that you think the people in your target market would like to see and know.
Add links to other web sites and ask them to add links to yours. Sell and create web sites for local businesses that don’t have websites (there are some great tools to do this in a cost-effective and profitable manner) and link them all to your site. Generate free profile pages for everyone from the data in your directory and sell enhancements to it.
And then you can start offering coupons or even daily deals or other specials. And don’t let the site be stagnant. Keep posting new things and keep it current so that people will want to return to see what is new. Give them a reason to visit your sites often.
Summary
You need to have a digital presence. It needs to look professional and it has to appeal to the users in the market served. You need to provide access to as broad a spectrum of users as possible with different devices and platforms. You need to supply search results that are head and shoulders above other sites, especially the organic search engines. And you need to make the site “sticky” to assure repeat usage. But above all, it needs to generate revenue and should complement, not cannibalize the print product.
Related Reference Links
http://blog.supermedia.com/news/internet-yellow-pages-usage-statistics/
www.YellowMagic.com
http://adp.org/sites/default/files/Life%20Guarantees%20YP%20Usage%20Dennis%20Fromholzer%203-9-12.pdf
http://searchengineland.com/yellowpages-sites-beat-google-in-local-data-accuracy-test-118467
http://adp.org/sites/default/files/CRM%20Associates%20Yellow%20Pages%20Value.pdf
http://bit.ly/Yj5zY4
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