Speaking Sensis

I’d like to officially welcome Yelp to Australia today, a global leader in local ratings and reviews. I encourage everyone to visit www.yelp.com.au and share their experiences of local businesses by posting ratings and reviews.

Why rate and review? Aside from the fact that it’s the fun and easy way to talk about great (and not so great) local businesses, it’s sites like Yelp that are playing a big part in how we Aussies make purchasing decisions these days.

According to the Sensis® Social Media Report, social networkers read an average of six reviews before making a buying decision. So rather than waiting for a review of a business to be published online or in the local paper and then deciding whether or not to give the business a go, we are getting on the front foot and seeking these reviews out for ourselves. Yelp.com.au makes this very easy. 

Yelp first started in San Francisco in 2004 and today’s launch in Australia marks the 13th country it has opened its online doors in. In Q3 2011 the online ratings and reviews company received an average of 61 million visitors a month (up 63 per cent from the same time last year), has generated 22 million reviews on its global network as of September 2011 (an increase of 66 per cent over the same time in 2010) and saw an average of five million unique views a month on its mobile app. With results like these, it’s evident that ratings and reviews are becoming an increasingly important component of consumers’ pre-purchase behaviour.

While I’m personally excited about Yelp’s launch in Australia today, it’s also a big coup for Sensis®’ Yellow Pages®, after announcing our ground-breaking partnership with Yelp back in July. 

Yellow Pages® local business listing data has been integrated into Yelp.com.au (including mobile site and apps), which means our Yellow Pages® advertisers will be able to be found by more potential customers. And in a couple of weeks, Yelp Reviews and Ratings will be displayed on Yellow Pages® Online and Mobile. I’ll tell you more about that shortly. In the meantime, visit www.yelp.com.au to rate and review a local business near you.

Today we announced the expansion of our search engine marketing (SEM) product offering, with the launch of ClickManager Express – an affordable, entry level SEM product focusing on exclusively advertising through Google AdWords.

This is pretty exciting for small and medium sized businesses that want to give SEM a go but haven’t done so yet. Why? Because it’s cost-effective and we’re here to manage it all for you. We don’t expect you to be an expert on SEM – all you need is a website and we’ll take care of the rest.

We’ve noticed significant growth in the SEM industry within Australia over the last 12 months. While it’s still a relatively new area for many small businesses in Australia, as the number of businesses with websites grows, so does the need for SEM products. There are so many SEM suppliers that it can be a bit overwhelming for small businesses to know who to turn to.

We believe the combination of our partnership with Google and Yellow Pages being such an established and trusted brand provides businesses who want to give SEM a try with the confidence to do so.

The 2011 Sensis e-Business Report found the proportion of SMEs with a website continued to increase over the past year from 61 per cent to 67 per cent , while Frost & Sullivan found 32 per cent of small businesses and 43 per cent of medium businesses planned to increase their search engine marketing budget in 2011.

Furthermore, of the businesses that indicated an increase in their search advertising budget, 32 per cent indicated that the budget increased by more than 25 per cent – which shows that a significant portion of advertisers continue to make good increases to their search advertising budget allocations.

It’s really important that SMEs don’t miss out on the market opportunity available to them – having a website without SEM is like opening a shop and not putting any signage up – nobody knows you’re there. The ClickManager Express product starts from as little as $110 including GST a month and provides SMEs with an affordable, entry level solution.

The ClickManager Express product is sold by our Yellow Pages media advisors and requires the business to have a website. Sensis also offers a website solution called SiteSmart for businesses that are not currently online, so a business can go from no website and no SEM to having both in a very short period of time with Sensis.

For more information, visit www.clickmanager.com.au.

Last week, the Google AdWords Authorised Reseller program was rebranded to the Google AdWords Premier SME Partner Program (PSP). The reason for Google’s new AdWords program name is to reflect a more accurate picture to customers of companies like Sensis, who do far more than just resell AdWords, as well as reinforcing the program’s specific focus on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

As the team at Sensis is all about making marketing easy, especially for SMEs, we were very excited about the new branding.

Sensis entered into a strategic agreement with Google to become an Authorised Reseller of Google’s AdWords advertising program in Australia earlier this year. The agreement allows Sensis to sell Google AdWords to our SME advertisers and gives Google the opportunity to make its AdWords product more accessible through our sales force.

As a Premier SME Partner, Sensis is recognised in the market as meeting Google’s highest standards and criteria for qualification, transparency, and customer service. This includes completing extensive Google product and account management training.

The PSP connects Google’s trusted and experienced AdWords partners, such as us, with small and medium-sized businesses that want expert help in creating, managing and optimising their online advertising campaigns. This ensures we can provide small businesses with the most effective AdWords advertising solutions.

In addition to in-depth AdWords expertise, with Sensis’ ClickManager and Digital Plus products we provide full-service campaign management, detailed reporting, one-on-one customer support, and broad marketing guidance to help advertisers make the most of their campaigns. 

It was also great to hear what James Sanders, head of Google’s APAC channel sales partnerships, had to say about it: “We are excited to launch the Google AdWords Premier SME Partner program with hand-picked, highly qualified companies like Sensis. Small and medium-sized businesses will not only benefit from Sensis’ in-depth training, but from their years of experience in the local market.”

You can take a look at the Sensis Premier SME Partner page here, visit www.clickmanager.com.au for more information about our SEM products or contact me with any questions.

I’ve seen a lot of changes in our business over the years. We’ve launched websites, we’ve gone mobile and in Adelaide you’ll notice a significant change to the Yellow Pages book that’s currently being distributed.

Adelaide is the first city where the new compact-size Yellow Pages book will be distributed – the height and width of the book has been reduced by 15%.

The change to the new format is one of the biggest transformations in more than 80 years of the Yellow Pages. However, the most exciting thing is that it’s a win-win for people who use the Yellow Pages and people who advertise in the Yellow Pages – our customers.

The compact size book is easier to handle, it’s lighter and we’ve also made a number of new design and layout changes to help users find what their looking for. Things like:

• the use of colour to highlight the suburb names in each line listing;
• stronger and sharper heading blocks;
• improved Fast Find Index;
• colour highlights in the Teltales at the top of each page; and
• the inclusion of web and email listings. 

And, if we’re making it easier for users to search the Yellow Pages book, it means they’re looking for our advertisers’ content and will hopefully go on to purchase a product or service.

The transition to the new compact format Yellow Pages has involved a lot of research over the past 12-18 months. Last year, we trialled the compact-size Yellow Pages book with more than 25,000 users in Sydney and there was strong support for this format – moreso than the existing format.

This result was consistent with the feedback we received from several market surveys and focus groups that were held with our users.

Globally, compact directories, along with other book changes, are already being used by several companies including in the UK, where users and customers are responding more favourably to the new compact-size format directories.

Following Adelaide, the new format book will also be distributed in Brisbane, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne between November 2011 and February 2012.

It’s a fact that consumers don’t always do what you think they’ll do. That’s because they’re people… individuals… not robots. In this new series for Speaking Sensis, Bri Williams talks about Behavioural Economics, or how a real understanding of consumer decision making can benefit your business.

Some days it just seems too hard. You offer deals to your customers that should work but they just don’t fly.  And then other days, for no apparent reason, customers are beating down your door looking to do business.   How on earth can you get into the minds of your customers to find out what’s going on?

Welcome to Behavioural Economics.  An increasingly popular field, used by both UK and US governments to affect policy change and advertising agencies to improve marketing effectiveness, Behavioural Economics nestles in between economics and consumer psychology. The central mantra of Behavioural Economics is that we humans are irrational. Now, before you get outraged and debate the point, research from Behavioural Economics is about our economic irrationality. In other words, the decisions we make don’t always result in the best economic outcome for ourselves. 

That maybe true of others, you’re thinking, but not me!  Well, think about owning a car that you use only occasionally instead of renting one when required; paying for a 2GB data plan when your internet usage is nowhere near that level; driving an extra 10 minutes to get a 4c off a litre of petrol (the equivalent ‘discount’ you could have saved by spending a few dollars less at their supermarket),  saving your bonus pay money (in your mental bank account) to buy something special rather than using it on bills and buying something special later.  All of these simple, almost daily decisions are prime examples of economic irrationality.  

My favourite example is the TV show “Deal or No Deal”.  Seeing the contestants reject diminishing “bank offers” as their odds slip away in the hope of their fortune changing – despite the economic benefit of taking the deal – is both infuriating and hilarious.   But let us not get cocky.  We all are influenced by factors other than pure economics, your customers included.  And therein lies the opportunity.

There are tried and tested techniques in Behavioural Economics that will help you understand consumer irrationality and then use that knowledge to appeal to customers.  Behavioural Economics sheds light on what makes group buying compelling, how to structure sign-ups for marketing, the role of “free” and discounting, how to communicate a price rise, improvements to loyalty programs, what your customer service consultants should be saying…the list is expansive.

Sound good? Well, in the coming series of Speaking Sensis we will be examining these and other business tips from the field of Behavioural Economics, so look out for our next edition coming soon.

Very interesting to hear about how US Yellow Pages businesses are transforming the solutions that they offer small businesses at Kelsey’s Directional Media Strategies Conference in Colorado last week.

Like us at Yellow Pages in Australia, our US peers know that marketing for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) has gone beyond simply making the phone ring. With consumers searching in more places across more platforms for products and services, SMBs need to rethink ‘set and forget’ advertising solutions and move towards a multichannel approach with more engagement opportunities. American SMBs are allocating approximately 40% of their advertising budget to digital.

With so many marketing options, this is a complex place for SMBs. Yellow Pages businesses are playing an increasingly important role in bringing these pportunities to the SMB. Insights from the conference can be found on BIA Kelsey’s blog.

We had some terrific news last Thursday night at the 2011 Australian Mobile Awards, with three Sensis brands winning four awards, including:

• Whereis® iPhone app, winner of the Navigation award category
• Yellow Pages® for iPad won the Best New Service or Application award category
• White Pages® iPad Site won the Best Mobile Expanded Services or Application
• White Pages® iPad Site won the Best Mobile Web Experience. 

Our job at Sensis is to ensure our advertisers can be found by potential customers, wherever they are and however they like to search – so mobile is an integral part of our growing portfolio of digital marketing products and services. For our products to be recognised as best in class at a new industry awards program such as the ‘Mobies’ was a real coup. 

‘Search’ and apps go hand in hand and mobile is another way we are helping businesses be found on new digital devices. Now that we have the Sensis API – we are working with the developer community and hope to see more apps in market powered by our content.  

Our commitment to help advertisers harness the power of digital marketing is well on track. Congratulations to the White Pages, Yellow Pages and Whereis teams, as well as all the other finalists at the ‘Mobies’ last week.

Carl

Sensis’ and Yelp partner to create new opportunities for Australia’s local searchers.

Today is an exciting day for Sensis as we announce our latest ground-breaking partnership between Yellow Pages® and Yelp, the global leader in local reviews and ratings. Together we’ll work with Yelp to launch an Australian version of the Yelp website, where Aussie’s will be invited to rate their dealings with local businesses and write reviews about their experiences.

Ratings and reviews are growing in popularity in the Australian market place. Did you know that, according to the recent Sensis Social Media Report, almost two thirds of social network users (63 per cent) read online reviews before they make buying decisions? Or that they read an average of six reviews each time? Given this enormous interest, we believe this partnership will be a huge win for the Australian community.

When Yelp launches in Australia they will integrate Sensis’ Yellow Pages® local business listing data into yelp.com.au.and, tap into our leading local sales force to launch and embed yelp.com.au in the Australian market. 

Not only does this mean the launch of a leading new ratings and review website in Australia, but through the partnership, Sensis will syndicate Yelp content, ratings and reviews to yellowpages.com.au, Yellow Pages® Mobile and the Yellow Pages® iPhone application.

So our advertisers can be really excited about the opportunities this partnership presents to them in the form of a deeper way to engage with potential customers online.

Yelp is a really exciting business to work with and I’m personally looking forward to the next couple of months as we work together to bring this leading product to market.

Yelp launched in 2004 and has rapidly expanded its user-generated ratings and reviews websites across North America and Europe. In fact, in June 2011, Yelp had more than 53 million unique visitors worldwide and to date more than 20 million local reviews of businesses have been posted to Yelp sites.

We anticipate yelp.com.au will be fully operational by the end of 2011 with Sensis’ Yellow Pages® media advisors offering Yelp advertising options to customers in 2012.

Simon B

Today my team cut the ribbon on the latest addition to our growing portfolio of digital marketing products and services with the launch of our new iPhone app: Sock Assist.

What’s exciting about Sock Assist, among other things – is that it’s one of the first apps in Australia which gives all iPhone users access to a world leading voice concierge information service.

Why have we produced the Sock Assist app? Because it’s another way we can help our advertisers connect with customers. The app helps to make it easy for potential customers to find advertisers’ businesses – wherever their customers are and however their customers prefer to search for information.

iPhone apps are one channel we are using to expand our increasingly diverse network of products that spans  print, online, voice, mobile, Telstra’s T-Hub and satellite navigation devices. Our network has an average of 23.6 million visits per month for the last 12 months .

You can download the app for free and it comes with three free calls to start you off (mobile charges apply (legal: tick)) and you can then purchase call credits . It provides users with business searches and need-to-know-now content such as directions, sports scores, movie times and find-a fact-searches.

Sock Assist joins a successful family of apps at Sensis, including: the Yellow Pages iPhone app (667,871 total downloads), the White Pages iPhone app (443,261 total downloads) and the Citysearch iPhone app (74,274 total downloads) .

So our latest addition has a lot to live up to but we think people are going to like the idea of having a personal assistant on their phone. In two taps of your iPhone screen, you will be in touch with someone who can search for the information you’re looking.

We’re constantly reviewing ways to ensure our advertisers can be found where their customers are looking. Our product development pipeline is influenced by customer trends, both within Australian and from monitoring the overseas advertising market. We make it our business to ensure we stay ahead of the game in terms of what we can offer our advertisers. 

So, download the Sock Assist app and let me know what you think.

The Sensis® Social Media Report backs up the views of social media experts by showing that engagement is critical to social marketing.

One of the most significant findings of the Sensis® Social Media Report is that consumer uptake of social media far outstrips business uptake. This leads to the conclusion that Australian businesses need to do more to ‘follow the audience’.

But, how?

For a long time, the experts have been telling us the secret is engagement: being able to connect with consumers in a relationship that benefits all.

And the Sensis® Social Media Report bears this out.

Overall, Australian social media users seem roughly split on the legitimacy of advertising in social media. About half don’t like it, while the other half either don’t mind or welcome it.

That’s not so bad. But the skies become less sunny when you consider that only 29% of people say they take notice of advertising on social media. And (coincidentally), only 29% say they sometimes click on social media ads.

In other words, while the acceptance of social media advertising isn’t too bad, we’ve got a fair way to go before it becomes really effective.

So does that mean the social media doors are closed for marketers?

Absolutely not!

You see, in the midst of all this advertising apathy, 63% of social media users say they read online reviews and blogs when searching for information about products and services.

And those consumers expect to read an average of six reviews before making a decision.

But that’s not all. Social media users also have a voracious appetite for something extra. 57% want discounts, 45% want give-aways, 41% want invitations to events and 36% want coupons.

In other words, while social media users aren’t reacting to ads, they’re really big on information and incentives.

And that’s where the opportunity lies. There’s value to be had for marketers who try to be useful, rather than try to be snappy.

And that value can be magnified if you can meet people’s needs so well that they openly advocate for you. That’s because, 27% of Internet users have provided online ratings while 24% have posted an online review or blog.

As everyone keeps saying, the potential for social media marketing is huge. But to unlock that value, we need to see consumers as targets for service, not targets for spin.