Insight for Small Businesses from Mega-Conference 2014
Ironically, advertisers continue to pay 4X more per minute of usage to reach the users of one medium: Yellow Pages. This is because of intent. Users tend to be ready to buy. For an average $3,200 investment advertisers got return of $81K from their Yellow Pages ads. In contrast, 82% of people who go online can’t recall the ads they saw.
When asked where they prefer to look for local businesses or services, respondents answered: Yellow Pages 65%, Google 12% and online directories 3%, according to a survey in small markets.
With all of this in mind, Gordon Borrell recommended:
- Decide what you want to be.
- Recruit younger staffers and/or people well-versed in digital marketing and listen to them.
- Be aggressive, clear marketers.
- Build new products around user intent.
- Focus more on share than year-over-year growth.
Session: What Will the Digital Natives Do?
John Temple, founding editor of Pierre Omidyar’s Honolulu Civil Beat and former managing editor of The Washington Post, commented: “Our audience is really ‘us.’ We all look at smart phones every day.[As publishers,] we see ourselves as pushing out content when that is not how it works anymore. New platforms come out of nowhere and attract 40 million people. This happens because they have recognized and tapped into a need. There is a nexus of technology and communication.”
This means we have to do a better job of thinking from the perspective of what our customers want or need. We have to respect them and the communities in which they reside. For example, an author published a book on media with a draft chapter so the audience could help him make that section better. The writer approves comments and attaches them to the appropriate content.
Regardless of your industry, go beyond publishing content and have a conversation. We spend time building an audience with engaging content and then we irritate visitors by cramming in promotional messages that disrupt or even ambush them. This approach doesn’t work anymore. Display advertising is not the future. In fact, Melissa Meyers said the goal for Yahoo! is to make the ads as engaging as the content. Advertising has to become intriguing and beneficial.
