Speaking Sensis

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.

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

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.

As a self-professed iPad convert, not only is this week exciting for me personally but it also marks a milestone for the team here at Sensis as we’ve just launched the much anticipated Yellow Pages iPad app.

The app, developed by our talented in-house team over the past few months, brings together for the first time our digital and print content in the one device. It also adds another layer to our multi-channel platform strategy – now spanning print, online, mobile, search engines, iPhone, Android (to name a few!) and now… iPad!

So, the reach of Yellow Pages print and digital products extends to another new audience this week which means Yellow Pages advertisers now have even more ways to reach consumers, and people searching for businesses now have a new way to access the information.

A bit about the new app – it’s free to download and includes all the information you’d expect from Yellow Pages, and it comes in two versatile views so you can choose how to search and view businesses on your iPad:

Business listings are displayed on an interactive combined map and list view

Or you can check out the business ‘ad view’ which displays Yellow Pages book ads based on relevance to the search term – in other words, it’s the digital version of a print search for many of our ads

The app allows you to FIND businesses nearby, SHARE them with friends and SAVE them for later.

And we’re not talking about one-line listings here either! You should check out the content – the listings can include contact details, product and service information, a photo gallery, videos and links to social media.

The app lets you search by name, category or keyword and as you type a list of possible options are presented so you’ll find what you’re looking for faster. There are a number of other helpful features:

See results for businesses ‘nearest to you’ (your current location) or at a predefined location

Share listings with your friends using Send to Mobile or Send to Email

Save business details to ‘contacts’ so you can access them later

We can’t wait to get this app out amongst the iPad community and hear what people think – so make sure you download it now and post your feedback after you’ve used it.

You’ll find the app under Yellow Pages in the App store.

Is traditional media bowing before the online juggernaut? Don’t you believe it.

Well, trounce me with a tablet and tell me I’m a technophobe.

In contrast with the armies of ‘gurus’ claiming an increasingly irrelevant traditional media is on its knees begging for sweet mercy from the digerati, out come the following two reports.

In February, The Nielsen Company’s Australian Internet and Technology Report 2009 – 2010  found that “the continued increase in time spent online amongst Internet users has, overall, not been at the expense of other media.”

Nielsen found that, while, time spent online grew by over an hour in 2009, consumption of traditional media (like TV, radio and newspapers) actually grew as well.

Go figure!

In fact, Nielsen’s results over several years suggest that, while Internet users tend to spend less (but still substantial) time consuming traditional media than non Internet users, the actual time they spend with traditional media has remained pretty well flat for quite a few years now.

In other words, while time spent online has risen massively, time spent offline hasn’t fallen in response.

Then in March, way over the other side of the world, KPMG UK reported a similar kind of trend.

Their Media and Entertainment Barometer for March found that while time spent online grew by 74 minutes in the six months to March, traditional media consumption ALSO grew by 33 minutes.

So what?

I can’t help thinking there’s a really simple, but really important, message in this data.

That traditional and digital together is far more powerful than digital alone.

Digital media is a massive part of our lives today and will play an even bigger role in the future.

But it won’t be alone, because people want choice. They want a paper in their hands and on their mobiles. They want TV in their lounge and on their iPad.

And the more choice people get, the more media they consume.

In short, the future is everywhere, not just online.

Maybe we should put an end to these phoney media wars and start realising we’re all in this together.

Because, clearly, that’s what consumers (and advertisers) want.

The last six months of 2009 was a mixed bag for the Australian media market. While a number of media are experiencing real challenges, the sector as a whole showed slight improvement in the December half, with the Internet and TV (particularly pay TV) being the big winners.

So, do you like a good roller coaster? Well, the ad industry has a pearler for you.

According to the December 2009 CEASA Report – the ‘bible’ of revenue in the Australian main media market – the GFC gave the ad industry a not unexpected whacking in 2009. Advertising expenditure (covering newspapers, magazines, directories, TV, radio, online, outdoor and cinema) fell by 8% during 2009 to about $12.6bn.

Ouch.

Mind you, just like all good roller coasters, just when the slippery slope looks like slamming you into the soil, up you go again. The CEASA report pointed to a slight improvement in the December half. And while things still looked weak, they weren’t quite as bad (in most places) as the June half, suggesting a recovery maybe in play.

To reinforce this trend, the latest SMI report, which came out a few days ago, suggested that the media market gathered the upward force of your average space shuttle in the March quarter, with growth of approximately 10% compared to the same time last year. Mind you, the SMI report doesn’t cover the full market in the way CEASA does, so you can’t directly compare the results.

While this is good news for a media sector that did it tough during 2009, the champagne corks aren’t popping everywhere. In fact, when you look under the hood, you find that the results across different sectors of the ad industry are going up and down like a … well, this is a family blog.

So who were the big winners and losers in 2009?

The Ups

Not surprisingly, online was the only major sector to grow in 2009, although it clearly wasn’t a great year by Internet standards. In fact, the industry looked quite weak in the July and September quarters before staging a strong recovery in December.

And, although it still declined by 6% for the year, TV – that other big screen – was also a winner. That’s because TV did a lot better in December (down 2.9%) than June (down 10.6%). This result was heavily supported by pay TV, which grew by 5% for the year.

In fact, TV revenue did so well compared to other the rest of the market that it actually out-muscled newspapers in 2009 to become Australia’s highest earning media sector, possibly for the first time in history.

The Downs

Of course, what goes up must come down … and there’s a few different media that lost big in 2009.

Newspapers were down almost 16% in 2009, although, like TV, they showed a reasonable overall improvement in the December half. But suburban newspapers defied that trend: the 21% decline they experienced in the December half was actually worse than June.

The other big loser was the magazine sector, which went from a 9% decline in the June half to a 26% decline in December.

But the really big loser has got to be classifieds. All newspaper and magazine revenues tend to be a mix of display advertising and classifieds. And while the display ads didn’t do too badly (national newspaper ads were down 5.6% for the year), classifieds took a bath, with newspaper classifieds down 32% and magazine classifieds down a blood curdling 45% (although they are a small part of the overall magazine revenue base).

Directories down? Well, yes… but not all is as it seems

The other segment that was down in the December half was classified directories, which includes print directories and used to also include The Trading Post print. Although there’s some pretty clear reasons why.

Firstly, the Trading Post print publication was closed during the year. This of course heavily impacts the result.

Secondly, Yellow Pages® and White Pages® print revenues are recognised in our accounts mainly in the half of the year following the sale. So the decline you’re seeing in print directories was actually the decline in sales experienced in the June half, when everyone else also fell.

So that’s it:
•    A media industry that’s coming out of the GFC with what looks like a sudden growth spurt in the first three months of this year;
•    And results across the industry that are so topsy turvy they’ll have your cheeks flopping about like a parachutists’ in no time.

Which leaves me with one final question.

Can someone please pass me that brown paper bag?

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.

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.

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