Speaking Sensis

Okay. So, hopefully my last article established that print isn’t a spent force in local search… it’s actually growing.

Having done that, however, I now need to change tack a bit and proffer a slightly different view: that this whole ‘print vs online’ debate is all a bit of a pointless exercise.

For the best part of a decade now, local search players of various persuasions have been running around with their chests puffed out, proclaiming to anyone who’ll listen that “my channel’s bigger than your channel”.

But the sad truth about this posturing is that it’s all pretty much irrelevant.

The bottom line is that buyers are exercising their right to choice and searching for local businesses across all sorts of different channels – like print, online, voice and mobile.

Here’s a case in point.

If we cut the print vs online usage of all the print and online services containing Yellow Pages® advertiser content, we find an interesting set of numbers(1) :

• 41% of the audience use print only;
• 32% use online only;
• 26% use both.

Clearly, in this environment, you can’t truly optimise a local search strategy by choosing between print or online (or any of the other channels).

You can only do that by choosing them all.

Or course, that’s not such an easy thing. If you start toting up the number of vendors offering local search services across all these channels, you’ll quickly find they number into the hundreds.

If you tried to deal with all of them, you could end up spending so much time finding customers that you’d have no time to serve them.

So, the ideal solution in local search ends up looking a bit like this:

1. Provide a wide range of services to buyers so they can choose the way they want to search. That can ultimately lead to a larger audience;
2. Syndicate advertiser content across as many of those channels as possible so advertisers can optimise reach and still get some sleep.

That, in essence, is what we’ve tried to do with Yellow Pages®.

When you advertise in Yellow Pages® today, you’re not just advertising in the print directories. Your advertising is syndicated across a broad network of different services that spans not only different channels but different brands as well.

This includes not only the Yellow Pages® print directories, but the yellow.com.au and whereis.com.au web sites, the 1234 and Call Connect voice services and the Yellow™ Mobile and Whereis® Mobile sites as well.

And it also includes sites from other vendors. Today, Yellow Pages® advertiser content can be searched for in Google Maps, MyLocal, LiveLocal and the new Bing Maps site.

The net result of this ‘one ad, many avenues’ strategy is that advertisers can reach out to a much larger base of potential buyers through the one campaign.

In short, the potential for more reach, more easily.

And the impact of this sort of multi-channel strategy is pretty significant. The bottom line is that syndication through a range of brands and channels leads to a total potential reach for advertisers that no single channel local search solution can come close to matching.

In online, for example, there are six local search sites that individually hold more than 2% share of online traffic in Hitwise’s business directories category(2). They are yellow.com.au, whereis.com.au, whitepages.com.au, Google Maps, TrueLocal and Hotfrog .

Because of Yellow’s syndication strategy (allowing Yellow Pages® content to be searched for through yellow.com.au, whereis.com.au Google Maps as well as Microsoft’s local search sites), Yellow Pages® advertising could appear on sites that generate 64.5% of this traffic. White Pages® Online accounts for 22.5% and the other sites 13%(3) .

In other words, the multi-brand online syndication leads to a massive share of the traffic generated by these major local search sites.

But then you have to figure in print, voice and mobile as well. These add something like 15 million searches to the potential reach of Yellow Pages® advertising every week(4) .

Clearly, being able to advertise across multiple brands and channels is a major advantage in local search.

Which, as I said before, kind of renders this whole ‘print vs online’ debate as moot.

The bottom line here is that people aren’t turning into online zealots, no matter how much some wish they were.

Instead, buyers are showing their preference for choice.

The local search providers and advertisers who recognise that are the ones most likely to win.

Related links

Sensis on local search 1 – BIG

Sensis on local search 2 – GROWING