Speaking Sensis

With the end of the year almost upon us, Sensis’ CEO, Bruce Akhurst, provides his first bi-monthly update.

Hi.

I thought it might be good to end the year by starting something… a regular report that I hope will give you a deeper insight into how Sensis is working to improve the value we offer all Australians.

New ways to help you find, buy and sell
Sensis is committed to helping you find, buy and sell. Our services help you find the suppliers you need right when you need them. In doing this, we help thousands of local businesses find their lifeblood – customers.

Our innovation programs reflect this commitment. How can we make our services simpler and more informative for buyers? And how can we build the value and simplicity of our advertiser services?

On this front, we’ve been particularly busy in the last few weeks. We launched the White Pages® app for iPhone recently. I was very happy to see that it reached the #1 free app in Apple’s App Store very quickly. This caps off an exciting quarter for our mobile sites, with usage growing off the scale. We launched White Pages® Mobile four months ago and it’s already delivering over 400,000 visits a month¹. At about the same time, we also launched the Yellow Pages® iPhone app. Since then, Yellow Pages® Mobile usage has more than doubled to over 650,000 visits a month²… in just a few months!  Clearly, Australians are connecting with these new generation mobile services and that’s great for advertisers. Our network strategy means that Yellow Pages® advertisers – print and online – can be searched through mobile and therefore can benefit from mobile usage growth.

We’ve also recently commenced delivery of the 2009 Yellow Pages®. This year’s book includes a more informative front cover and an expanded information section. Both of these enhancements were specific requests from Australians who participated in research we conducted earlier this year.

In Yellow Pages® Online, we’ve recently launched a new advertiser product – Purely Mobile Business, or PMB. PMB is designed for mobile businesses, like mobile mechanics, looking to reach out to customers in the areas they service.

We also recently launched Category Search, which is a new product that lets advertisers combine Voice, Whereis® and Citysearch® advertising into a single, easy to use product. Response has been strong, with hundreds of customers choosing Category Search in just a few weeks.

The Whereis® team has just released 3D City Maps for GPS to sat nav equipment manufacturers. 3D City Maps bring the Sydney and Melbourne CBD areas to life by providing a real-time 3D city-scape. 3D City Maps should be launched in popular GPS units shortly, and more cities will be ‘3D’d’ in the near future.

Finally, MediaSmart – our online and mobile display advertising business – has released new targeting capabilities. Working closely with Telstra, we’ve developed a segmentation capability that ensures mobile display advertising is more relevant and targeted for both mobile users and advertisers… like helping a major bank deliver specific branch manager contact details to customers mobile phones based on their location. This is a genuinely unique capability and I’m pleased to say the support from marketers has been fantastic.

In the field
Right now, our Yellow Pages® regional and local consultants are out talking to advertisers, as are our White Pages® consultants. We’ve been backing them up with new products, comprehensive training and a much stronger focus on engaging with local communities.

This local focus led to the opening of a new office in Penrith on November 10 (with offices in Ballina and Coffs Harbour also opening soon). We were really pleased to open Penrith by announcing a new community partnership with Great Community Transport. At the same time, we’ve been increasing our support for local businesses by regularly sponsoring and speaking at local events – over 80 in the last few months.

1.5 million calls… and counting
If you ever wanted proof of the value of Yellow Pages®, here it is. As you may know, we’ve been running a metered ad program for two years now. This program helps advertisers track the number of calls they receive from Yellow Pages® print.

In January, we began monitoring the phone calls delivered by Yellow Pages® print to a small cross-section of display ad customers (a sample of less than 1% of our total customer base). By early November, the number of calls delivered to these customers by Yellow Pages® print passed the 1.5 million threshold!

Imagine how many valuable phone calls Yellow Pages® is delivering to all our advertisers. Imagine how many more enquiries there are when you add people who are bypassing the phone and visiting the store or office. And imagine how that number could grow even further if you included all the other Sensis and third party online, mobile and voice services that form the Yellow Pages® network.

Interesting movements in the advertising market
Recently, we’ve seen some interesting movements in the media sector. The September quarter IAB report showed 3.3% growth in the online advertising market compared to the September quarter last year³. While this is a marked slowdown on last year, the results were really buoying for Sensis, as they show we are growing our share of the market.

Another interesting observation comes from our Adstream business. Adstream sits at the centre of the ad industry by helping marketers, agencies and media outlets, like TV, radio and newspaper publishers, manage and distribute their ad content. We’ve seen renewed growth in enquiries to Adstream recently. Could this mean the ad industry’s on its way back?

Our people have spoken
The other day, we received the results of our latest employee opinion survey. This is a global survey undertaken by Towers Perrin and it covers some of Australia’s, and the worlds, largest companies. In the latest survey, Sensis exceeded the Australian norm (the average of all Australian companies) in every category. Our results also benchmarked well among the world’s best employers, with results in a number of categories exceeding global norms. This is fantastic news. We work hard to ensure Sensis is a great place to work for our present and future employees. These results tell us we’re on the right track.

Sensis Sustainability Report
Finally, if you’d like to know more about Sensis’ strategy, operations, performance and impacts, I’d recommend you check out the 2008/9 Sensis Sustainability Report, which has just been launched. You can download it today from our newly upgraded corporate site.

Until next time
So that’s it for now. Have a happy, relaxing and safe Christmas and New Year. I’ll be back to you with a further update in February. In the meantime, thanks for all your support. You can rest assured we’ll be pulling out all stops to keep improving our value to you.

1: Omiture Site Catalyst, November 2009;
2: ibid
3: PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Internet Advertising Bureau Online Advertising Expenditure Report, quarter ended September 2009.

A high-tech, high-powered mapping vehicle will be putting areas surrounding Cunnamulla and St George on the map this week…quite literally.

Little-known Queensland towns in this area will be some of the many new inclusions that Whereis® – Australia’s local mapping expert – will soon be adding to its extensive navigation map database of Australian cities, towns, landmarks and roads.

“The Whereis® four-wheel-drive has a large, round Trimble GPS receiver on the roof. It’s been causing a bit of a stir as it passes through towns in Queensland as people try to work out what’s going on,” Adrian Tout of Whereis® said.

“People get quite excited when they find out we’re mapping most of Queensland’s roads and landmarks so that locals, as well as visitors, have access to the most up-to-date map information on Queensland in their GPS device,” he said.

“While Queensland is one of Australia’s most popular tourist destinations you wouldn’t know how to get to a lot of areas unless you had local knowledge. With Whereis maps in your GPS device, it’s like taking someone who knows the lay-of-the-land with you – with useful details such as the condition of the road.”

“Our team on the road is making a big effort to mark points of interest for travelers – boat ramps, highway rest areas, spectacular look-outs, motels and van parks, public river access points are all detailed for travelers keen to go off the beaten track.”

The Whereis® car has logged more than 245,000 kilometres of mainland Australian roads to date this year, and is on-schedule to log a further 6,500 kilometres in Queensland during the next few months. The Whereis team will then convert the data into digital maps to be used in GPS units, the online mapping site whereis.com, various navigation apps for the iPhone and the Whereis® Navigator application, which is accessible on selected Telstra mobile phones.

Andrew Wood, part of the Whereis mapping team has been assigned to this important mission. He has mapped thousands of kilometers of road for Whereis and has teamed up with a skilled driver to map Queensland. “This is the best job in the world – I get paid to drive around one of Australia’s most beautiful states,” he said.

“Some of the maps people are using to navigate Queensland today are extremely old and many have simply been digitised from older printed maps – and large parts of back roads on maps are also inaccurate. We also taking into account the many changes that have been made over the years with the development of intersection upgrades on main roads and new estates,” Andrew said.

The two-man Whereis team has already mapped more than 30,000km in south-eastern Queensland including Wallangarra, Gatton, Esk, Kingaroy, Chinchilla and Gooniwindi.

Andrew counts seeing two kangaroos going head to head in the middle of the road as one of the most unusual things he’s seen during his travels to date and is looking forward to visiting the Gulf and Cape York to try his hand at Barramundi fishing.

The Whereis car began its Queensland adventure in Stanthorpe, mapping an old road that had been re-opened. Over the next few weeks, the car will be focusing on the areas surrounding Cunnamulla and St George with travelers and locals in mind.

Yesterday, Sensis launched a new website, White Pages® Community, an extension of White Pages® Online.  White Pages® Community has been created to share three key types of information with the Australian community:

Key contact information for the public in emergency situations;
Information about our Directory Covers Program, and;
White Pages® News.

Bri Williams, White Pages® Usage Manager, spoke about the initial driver behind the development of the site being the important role of White Pages® in connecting Australians in times of crisis.

“We know that when a crisis happens, like bushfires or flood, it is vital that people can get in contact with the organisations they need.  In these times in particular White Pages® wants to be able to help. It’s a role we’ve played for more than 129 years, and we are really proud to be taking it a step further.

“In times of large scale public emergency we will have a highly visible link from White Pages® Online to White Pages® Community. From here, people will be able to find important contact information for emergency service authorities so they can find the right details quickly and easily.  The site will not focus on emergency status updates – that’s the role of the emergency management authorities.

“We are also really excited that the Directory Covers program will now have a fitting online home.  This is a hugely successful community based program which pays tribute to extraordinary Australians by giving them pride of place on our regional and metro White Pages® directories,” Bri said.

Nationally across 56 regions this year the campaign, which profiled Creative Australians, reached an audience of millions of people.  White Pages® Community will grow this audience even further by featuring the stunning cover photography (including covers from the past 3 years) and telling the stories of our cover heroes. It will also provide information to the public on how they can nominate a Covers hero.

White Pages® News is the third section of White Pages® Community.  Here people can read about how they can get more out of White Pages® products including the print directory, online and mobile sites.  For example, you can read about ht e newly launched White Pages® iPhone app as well as about the White Pages® Community site itself.

If you know of an organisation who may wish to be considered for inclusion on White Pages® Community in the event of a public emergency, please drop us a line via the comments box.

The latest Sensis® Business Index recorded the third successive quarter of growth in confidence amongst Australia’s small and medium businesses.  Report author Christena Singh takes us through the key results and some of the challenges facing SMEs and the economy going forward.

It was really encouraging to see the Sensis® Business Index record the third successive quarter of growth in confidence amongst Australian small businesses.  SME confidence has now risen by some 40 percentage points in the past three quarters, to a net balance of 52 per cent.

And while the continued increase in confidence and performance is good news, it is important to realise that we are still only partly down the path of economic recovery.  If you look at the indicators compared to their long term averages, you can see that while confidence is now four percentage points above its long term average, all performance indicators are still tracking below their long term average levels.

For example, as you can see in the attached chart, the sales performance indicator is some four percentage points lower, profitability five percentage points lower and capital expenditure nine percentage points lower.  The indicator that is closest to its long term average is employment, which is only one percentage point lower.

And all of these indicators with the exception of capital expenditure have risen in the past quarter.  So Australian SMEs have made good progress on the path to economic recovery but there is still some way to go.

And this is perhaps emphasised by the fact that SMEs are expecting conditions to moderate over the next quarter to some extent, with more thinking that the Australian economy will be weaker in a year’s time.  While many SMEs are still facing challenges such as reduced demand and cash flow, others are already facing the “problems” of economic growth, including difficulties finding staff.

Six months ago the Australian economy had to face the challenges of economic downturn.  We have seen the Australian economy and Australia’s small and medium business meet this challenge.  But in many ways the challenges of economic recovery will be more complex, with the need to tackle both the problems of growth and decline at the same time.  This will be the challenge the Australian economy will face for the year ahead.

Charles Wright recently wrote in The Age how the benefits of search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) for one small business provided a far better return on investment (ROI) than advertising in the Yellow Pages®.

It’s easy to find one example of a business that’s been successful with any sort of advertising. The challenge is to find lots of them. Yellow Pages® has hundreds of examples of advertisers who get a majority of their business through Yellow Pages®. We even put some in our TV ad earlier this year.

Charles’ article was based on a simple assessment of ROI: cost of SEM outlay and the return in website traffic compared to the cost of advertising with Yellow Pages® Online and the subsequent website.

Where his case fell down is that it left out a number of costs a small business faces when gearing up for effective SEM and SEO activity.

These include the costs of building, hosting and maintaining a decent website, and possibly the cost of an SEO/SEM consultancy (or a significant time cost if you are able to do it yourself).

Sure there are online businesses that can manage all this and find customers. But there are a lot of businesses that can’t. Which is where the Yellow Pages® network can deliver real value.

Through its network, Yellow Pages® provides an effective multi-channel solution. With one Yellow Pages® ad, a business goes in the Yellow Pages® Book, Yellow Pages® Mobile, and the 1234 and Call Connect phone services.

In addition, Yellow Pages® also gives businesses a significant online presence by putting them in yellowpages.com.au, whereis.com and by making Yellow Pages® listings available to be searched on Google Maps and Bing Maps.

In fact, if you add up all these print, online, voice and mobile services, you find that Yellow Pages® advertiser content can be searched for through services used by almost 65% of Australians every month.

And that doesn’t include search engines. Recognising their significant value, we’ve made Yellow Pages® content not only searchable through the major search sites but we’ve optimised the content for search engines as well. That’s why over 2.5 million referrals come from search engines to Yellow Pages® Online every month.

People searching Yellow Pages® are buyers, not browsers. And they are often serious buyers who are ready to make a major purchase such as buying tyres for their car, booking an appointment with a dentist, booking a function at a restaurant or hiring a tradesman for work on their house.

The Yellow Pages® network helps puts businesses in more places customers are looking – including major online sites – with ease and convenience, leaving them to get on with running their business.

It was interesting to observe the Digital Gurus panel conversation about the role that mobile advertising and social media will play in the foreseeable future at Monday’s Digital Marketing & Media Summit in Melbourne, and to compare this to what’s been said recently at similar forums in Sydney and published in marketing journals. It seems Melbourne’s marketing community is still treading with quite a bit of caution, perhaps waiting to see what others are going to do before going for broke and full integrating mobile and social media into their digital strategies…

A couple of the panellists observed that rightly or wrongly, mobile is still viewed as a bit of a ‘bolt-on’ to traditional marketing strategies. Sensis’ Cheryl Vize and a representative from Google agreed that we’re only just starting to see what mobile can achieve in terms of its ability to target consumers by personal profile and location. A major travel provider said they still a way off viewing mobile as a viable means for booking travel. This is interesting considering research such as the Sensis e-business Report based released in August revealed that 31% of male mobile users and 26% of female mobile users are accessing the internet on their mobiles and 41% use it to look for information on products and services and 25% have used it for banking. So it seems (and Google made this point) that mobile has a growing role to play where functionality and utility meet the consumer. Sure there’s a role for brand campaigns on mobile, but there’s also a massive opportunity to make services available via the most convenient and personal medium around. Perhaps major service providers just need convincing that device functionality can offer their consumers an optimal user experience…hopefully their digital agencies were listening!

On the social media front, key players in the travel and health insurance industry are realistic in their views that consumers don’t want to be their ‘friends’, but there’s a growing trend towards communities of people wanting to talk about travel and healthcare/insurance matters…so by monitoring this activity, and perhaps even setting up the infrastructure for discussion forums etc, brands can benefit by learning from their comments in order to better understand their consumers’ wants and needs.

What about smaller businesses wanting to reach their consumers via their channels? Cheryl said she sees Sensis’ role into the future as collaborating with them to help them understand how all of the different advertising channels, including emerging channels like social media and mobile, can help them and guide them through the maze of options.

As everyone kept coming back to over the course of the day, it’s not about jumping on the latest trend for the sake of it. Any marketing strategy needs to start with an understanding of who your consumers are and where they are looking.

I went along to the 15th Telstra Business Women’s Awards National Awards Ceremony on Thursday 12 November and was overwhelmed by the achievements of the inspiring business women in the room.

Christine Nixon, Head of the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority and former Police Commissioner made a great speech, telling the room about her experience joining the police force as a 19 year old woman in 1972.

She spoke about the importance of respect and courage in the workforce, and how there weren’t too many people in 1972 telling her that one day she could be the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police.

She recounted a time in her early career when she was being harassed by a more senior policeman and two of her male colleagues overheard. They marched straight in and made it very clear to the harasser that – “We don’t do that around here.”

At risk of sounding a little bit Sliding Doors I wonder what the impact of that situation and those six words have had on Christine Nixon’s career. If her colleagues hadn’t overheard the situation and 19 year old Christine had continued to be harassed, would that have changed Christine’s path?

I wonder if WA’s Gina Rinehart has ever been bullied? Gina, Chairman of mining house Hancock Prospecting was announced as the 2009 Telstra Australian Business Woman of the Year. She has being working in a heavily male dominated mining industry since 1992 and successfully transformed the small prospecting company into a growing mining house.

The awards followed comments from Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard from 10 November, lamenting the status of working women.

“A lot of progress has been made for women at work over the last 20 or 30 years, indeed all the world has changed in many ways.

“But there are still some troubling sings, there is still a pay difference between men and women, there is still a clustering of women tending to be in low-wage, low-skill occupations,” Ms Gillard said.

The latest Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data reported the average hourly gender pay gap was 13.1 per cent in May 2009, the biggest gap since 1996.

It’s figures like these that reinforce the importance of continuing to recognise and celebrate the achievement of women in business.

The Telstra business Women’s Awards have recognised the achievements of more than 400 women in business since its inception in 1995.

Sometimes the numbers just talk for themselves. Take Yellow Pages® Mobile usage data…

As you all become devoted (hopefully) readers of the Crunch! column, you’ll begin to notice that my articles all take on roughly the same formula.

Obviously, there’ll be stats… a no-brainer considering this column is meant to be about stats.

But those stats will be surrounded by witty (hopefully) witticisms and insightful (hopefully) insights as well.

There’s a simple reason for that. To the vast majority of the world (i.e. the majority of people who aren’t bone fide pen-holder-carrying geeks), staring at a bunch of numbers is like watching grass grow.

But, every now and then, you come across a set of stats that just talk for themselves – no frilly additions necessary.

Here’s an example.

1.    In October, the Yellow Pages® Mobile audience hit half a million unique visitors for the first time¹.

2.    All up, it’s taken Yellow Pages® Mobile a touch over 18 months to reach half a million unique visitors¹. By comparison, it took Yellow Pages® Online more than five years to reach that mark².

Still think mobile marketing’s sitting on the runway?

Think again.

1.  Omniture. July to October 2009
2.  RedSheriff 2004/2005 data

So you think office workers sit at their computers writing Word docs all day? Forget that. According to the latest Sensis® eBusiness Report, we’re all going shopping!

There’s something distinctly Escher-like about the Sensis® eBusiness Report.

Okay, so comparing the mind-bending explorations of the impossible created by Dutch artist Maurits Cornelius Escher with an Internet survey might sound a stretch (although the cover of the Sensis® eBusiness Report does have a freaky picture on it).

But, there is method in my madness.

The thing is, the longer you look at the Sensis® eBusiness Report, the more interesting little tidbits pop out at you.

Just like Escher, eh?

Every year around August, the Sensis® eBusiness Report comes out and gets its fair share of headlines – usually focussing on one or two key observations.

This year was no different. The main focus of reporting was on the uptake of mobile data services by Australian consumers.

But some other really interesting findings hit me as I stared at the report recently. They relate to the way eBusiness has evolved in Australia.

The rise and rise of eBusiness
First up, it’s clear that eBusiness has had a real growth spurt over the last two years.

There’s four distinct activities related to eBusiness measured by the Sensis® eBusiness Report: two (research and buy) sit on the ‘buy side’, while two (sell and promote) sit on the ‘sell side’.

And, as the table below shows, all of these activities have really packed on the muscle over the last two years: albeit at different rates. In fact, researching potential purchases has reached the point of near-ubiquity in Australia, with the buying and selling activities not far behind them.

Businesses placing almost a third of their orders online
The second observation is that the SMEs who have cottoned onto online ordering are using the web for an average almost a third (31%) of their orders.

Ponder that for a moment. 78% of Australia’s SMEs are placing, on average, almost a third of their orders online.

That’s staggering and it underpins just how far eBusiness has come in this country.

Having said that, it does look like online’s share of orders may have hit a bit of a ceiling. While the number of SMEs placing orders online has grown rapidly since 2007, the average percentage of orders they’re placing (31%) has remained static.

Around the world? Nup… around the corner
One final observation. Back when the web was a toddler, the talk was of globalisation. If I recall, the thinking went something like ‘anyone could sell anywhere so everyone will sell everywhere’.

And while the web certainly has given birth to a new generation of multinationals, it pans out (perhaps not surprisingly) that the overwhelming bulk of businesses remain focussed on their neighbourhoods.

In fact, it turns out that two thirds of SMEs mainly sell to local customers – in the same city or town. 11% mainly sell elsewhere in the state, 12% interstate and 4% overseas.

So there you have it. A growth spurt in the uptake of eBusiness; a high (although static) share of purchases being placed online and a real focus on the customers just around the corner.

The Internet may not have changed the face of business in the way we once believed, but it sure has changed the way we do business.

Anyway, enough said. I’m off shopping (click, click, click).

The AIMIA Digital Summit in Sydney last week included presentations from the likes of BBC, Facebook, Viocorp and Microsoft, research presentations from the Internet Advertising Bureau, Nielsen Online and Research International and case studies from Aussie, Witchery Holdings and Tourism Queensland. To sum up some of the key themes that emerged over the two days… online usage is flattening out but continuing to grow and mobile internet usage is on the up. Companies like Aussie and Witchery Holdings now attribute a significant proportion of their revenue to online retailing.

But, 97% of Australian retail sales are still occurring offline. This highlights the importance of local search services like Yellow Pages, which provide the link between online purchase research and the bricks and mortar supplier.

Jonathon Stinton from Research International explained that with so many channels at the disposal of the consumer and the advertiser, it’s getting harder and harder to determine what the key influencers are over a purchase decision. He calls this the “Twilight Zone of information”. So what are influencers as far as we can tell? Consumers are strongly relying on the web to research retail buying decisions and social media is having a minor but growing impact on this phase of the purchase cycle. With the phenomenal rise in social media traffic, brands want a piece of the action and are exploring ways to tap into this and develop relationships with consumers.

So what should an advertising and media company take away from this? We need to be focused on providing choice to both buyers and sellers – and hence our multichannel strategy. With digital such a major part of many Australians’ search repertoire, Sensis needs to provide the most relevant online and mobile local search experiences possible to bring buyers and sellers together. Speaking on the closing panel, Sensis’ GM of Digital Development Cheryl Vize said this is why Sensis is so proud of innovations like the Yellow iPhone app and why we’re absolutely determined to keep “raising the digital bar”.

One thing seems clearer than ever: there may be no crystal ball, but it’s never been as important as it is now for a business to get the magnifying glass out and really examine the DNA of its target market and what media they are consuming where, when and for what purpose in order to determine how to get the best cut-through.