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Aug

14

The Lack of Innovation in Local Advertising Products

Posted by Tom Young, Manager, Director, Online Marketing & Product
Filed Under Click Marketplace, Lead Quality, Online Marketing, Research, Search, Tradeshows | Leave a Comment 

While attending the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose this week, I couldn’t stop thinking about the lack of innovation in online marketing products geared towards local advertisers. Buying local display inventory is next to impossible, and buying local traffic from search engines is sloppy and inefficient. Creating local SEO pages is helpful, but is still very difficult to do in a scalable and sustainable manner. I believe the future of online marketing is in delivering geo-targeted advertising products that level the playing field for marketers with budgets of all sizes. I’m still stunned I didn’t see a single vendor focusing on geo-targeted consumer acquisition for new product launches (besides Reply!).

What really confuses me is the direction in which the major search engines are going. They’ve placed their focus on allowing consumers to find local products and services, but there’s a significant lag in allowing advertisers to profitably acquire consumers who are conducting localized searches. Why is it so hard to find consumers who are searching for specific products or services in specific geographies? Solving this problem will not only help local advertisers, it will provide more value to consumers who want to find and compare local products and services.

I consider myself to be somewhat of an online marketing expert. I manage a marketing team and a large corporate advertising budget; we’re profitable and we find creative ways to grow revenue and profits each month. I say this to set up my next point, not to gloat. My father is an attorney, and I manage his website and small advertising budget in my free time. I’m failing when it comes to delivering local prospects at a reasonable cost. This isn’t because I’m an unsophisticated marketer; this is because the major search engines are failing local advertisers. The major search engines can’t deliver significant traffic in the areas I want and they make changing geo-targets a painful process.The inflated cost for going local is disturbingly high. Simply put, online marketing is geared towards national advertisers. Local advertisers are at a severe disadvantage.

Large ad budgets understandably influence product changes and innovation for companies offering online marketing solutions, but we’ve reached a point where advertisers with small budgets need to be heard. Their needs should be driving innovation. The next wave of growth in online marketing needs to come from providing valuable products to local advertisers. This growth will help shift $10 billion in ad spend from offline to online services. I would be willing to grow my father’s ad budget if I could find a way to do so profitably, but this just isn’t the case. This means the major search engines are leaving my (and millions of others’) unspent ad budget on the table. It also means the door is open for an innovative product to sweep through this virtually untapped market.

To learn how Reply! is solving the problems with local online advertising, you can read any of the following posts:

Tom Young
Director, Online Marketing & Product
Reply! Inc.

Jun

17

Third-Party Lead Quality

Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under Interesting Companies, Lead Quality | Leave a Comment 

I recently came across LeadIDentity’s press release and found it interesting. They are launching a third-party lead identification service that is trying to promote self-governance in lead generation. Companies that participate have the ability to obtain and verify an unique identifier associated with the company that generated the original lead. This unique identifier, or LeadID, is assigned before the consumer or business enters and submits the lead form, and will be associated with the lead throughout its life, providing a layer of authenticity to the lead. As many of us know, leads may be bought and sold multiple times. With the lead gen industry now providing controls to buyers of leads, the focus will shift from quantity to quality.

Reply! has chosen to deal with quality differently. We communicate quality across multiple verticals, based on a ranking of 1 to 5 stars. The star rating reflects the likelihood of converting a particular seller’s leads into a purchase. We consider a number of factors in generating the star rating, including validation rate of the lead source, quality of the data provided by the seller, and feedback from the buyers of the leads.

Buyers now have the ability to cut out specific types of leads (like a consumer who wants a $100k home in a zip code that requires $350k). Ultimately, the system is built to allow lead buyers to focus on leads that work for their business and cut out leads that do not. As a result, lead buying within the marketplace will become highly effective and driven by the actual return on investment.

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