BIA/Kelsey recently released the following slides about the local ad marketplace in the US.

A few interesting points they make:

1. It’s Big – The local ad market brings in $133 billion annually
2. It’s Fairly Traditional – 92% of local ad spending still goes to traditional media companies (TV, radio, yellow pages, etc.)
3. It’s Top-Heavy – 81% of the spending is by the largest 22% of companies

What are the takeaways? There is a lot of hype around ‘local’ at the moment, what with FourSquare, Facebook Places and the Google/Groupon non-deal, but for the companies that get it right there are huge real opportunities in local advertising over the next few years.

Google today announced ‘Boost’ a new, simplified self-service ad offering. It’s in beta for the time-being and only available in a few cities in the US, but it could be an interesting step in helping small businesses get started with online advertising.

Google have, for some time now, been encouraging small, local businesses to set up Google Places profiles with various information such as address, opening hours and phone number. Boost makes use of this information to help create relevant ads for the business. The business owner still needs to write the ad copy and specify categories to advertise under, but the tool apparently sometimes provides suggestions and then figures out the mapping to actual keywords and Google maps. The ads are charged on a pay-per-click basis with the business owner setting a maximum budget.

From the screenshots in Google’s blog post, it certainly looks like setting up ads through Boost will be less intimidating for the average user than going the standard Google Adwords interface. I suspect a service like this is still asking too much for most small businesses to attempt, but it’s certainly lowering the bar they need to cross and I’m sure that’ll be enough to encourage some small business owners to give PPC advertising a try when they wouldn’t have done so before.

If Boost helps significantly more local businesses advertise online then it should, in turn, help publishers of local and hyperlocal content generate more ad revenue. Perhaps it’s time for me to have another look at Localmouth…

Further Reading

• Google’s announcement of Boost
• Notes from interview with two Google execs about the Boost rollout

photo credit: Bdale Garbee

I spend a lot of time with people who know a lot about the web. They’re either building online businesses or they’re 30-something friends who live in London and who use the internet frequently in their day-to-day lives. That’s why I found it interesting recently to work with someone who’s outside of that circle, to help him put a website together, and explain to him a few of the things I’ve started to take for granted.

The guy in question is a joiner, working with wood to install doors, stairs and cupboards, repair furniture, etc. He is looking to develop his business increasingly into antique furniture restoration and uses the web, but wouldn’t claim to know about any technical details. He wanted a simple, affordable website as he knew it could help his business, but at the same time he was a little worried as he’d heard stories from other people about their bad experiences with having websites built.

Working with this small business owner was a good reality-check for me and along the way I realised three things about small business websites that I’m sure many designers of small sites will have discovered before me:

• Getting good photos is a pain – photos from stock photography sites can feel very cheesy and may not be representative of the business. Meanwhile, amateur shots taken by the owner or a friend are likely to be relatively poor-quality. How do people normally approach this?
• How to market their website isn’t obvious for a small business owner - a small business can get themselves listed in various local directories and perhaps ask some friends for links. Beyond that, most other techniques need a fair amount of knowledge and are likely to represent a larger investment of time and/or money than a very small business will to want to make.
• WordPress is a good small business CMS platform but it’s hard to find a good CMS theme – in my opinion, WordPress is a wonderful platform for a small business website. It’s stable, relatively simple to set up and use, and has a fantastic range of plugins. However, the selection of CMS themes that is available is relatively poor. There are a few people providing paid-for premium themes designed for CMS use, but I can’t help thinking there’s room for more. Perhaps the majority of people still don’t realise how effective WordPress can be for this sort of thing?

photo credit: stevendepolo

Very soon, together with my co-founders, I’m going to be launching a new venture.

Like VouChaCha, it’s going to offer local deals. And like MenuLover, it’s food-related. This time, though, there’s a new twist: group buying.

The group buying bit works like this: When you sign up for our service, we use the bargaining power of our large group of members to negotiate special deals for you.

Business owners, in return for lots of lovely new customers (like you), agree to offer discounts off their usual prices. They grow their business. You enjoy a good time out at a fun new place and save enough money to do it again very soon.

We’re focusing on food and drink-related offers so, for example, we might offer you 50% off a cookery class or half-price meals at speciality restaurants.

An important rule is that, if you sign up for a particular deal, you only actually get the deal if a certain threshold number of people sign up. e.g. you might get the half-price cookery class only if another 29 people also sign up. If not enough people sign up for a deal, you don’t get anything (or pay anything).

I’m really excited about this and can’t wait to see the site live and people getting deals.

The more people who join us, the better the deals we’ll be able to bring you, so if you like discovering great new places in London (and enjoying special discounts when you get there), then do head over to DealBunch now and be a part of it. Invite your food-loving friends, too!

You and your friends will get £5 of free credit if you sign up with the invite code M2777017 (a thank you for kindly reading my blog, and limited to 35 people, so get in quick.)

Without further ado, follow this link for some delicious London group-buying deals.

Nearly forgot… if you have any feedback on the site or any suggestions for us, then do let me know in the comments below. Thanks!

photo credit: Mendhak [???]

Making Stuff Happen in 48 Hours

The last couple of days I was involved in another “build a website in 48 hours” event. This time, it was Launch48, organised by a couple of friends of mine, Ian Broom and Adil Mohammed. Thanks to lots of great work from Ian and Adil, some generous sponsors who provided important things like office space and free pizza and drinks on the last night, and the boundless energy of around 70 enthusiastic participants, it was a great weekend.

We started on Friday night with a vote for our 4 favourite ideas out of a series of rapid-fire elevator pitches by anyone who fancied suggesting an idea. Excitingly, my idea was one of the four that was chosen. 15 or so people duly signed up to work on the idea over the weekend, and a whirlwind 48 hours was underway.

Local Vouchers

Our idea was to let people find vouchers for local retailers using their mobile phones. So you might, for example, be out in cental London and decide you want to get lunch somewhere. You pull out your phone and our service tells you that the cafe round the corner is offering a free dessert with their lunchtime menu. Great. You ignore the Starbucks next to you and head off to claim your bargain.

It didn’t take long for our team to get stuck into the problem at hand, figure out everyones’ talents and get to work. Luckily we found that we had a really nice spread of skills and abilities. Two intense days of design, coding, business planning, market research, PR, sleep deprivation and burrito-consumption later, VouChaCha was born, destined to bring local vouchers to your mobile phone.

A million thanks to the VouChaCha team for your immense efforts over the weekend. You were amazing! It was an incredible couple of days and a pleasure to work with you all.

What’s Next?

Well done to the other three Launch48 teams, CharityPie, DecisionsDecisions and ILikeUCoz, too. It was inspiring to see so many people come together (some having traveled very long distances to be there) and producing such neat things. What I liked best was the simplicity of all these ideas. I think they all have the potential to go somewhere.

A follow-up meeting is planned for 6 weeks’ time, so it will be exciting to see where we can all take these ideas between now and then.

—

Can You Help an Exciting New Startup?

If you think you might be able to help VouChaCha out in some way, we’d love to hear from anyone with experience/contacts regarding:

• partnering with retail chains, especially restaurants, cafes, pubs and bars
• vouchers, especially mobile vouchers

We’d also love to hear from any companies interested in sponsoring us by providing a few hundred pounds to cover our costs for the next 45 days. This is a fantastic sponsorship opportunity for somebody and you’ll be really helping us out.

If you think you can help with this or anything else, please get in touch. Thanks!

The numbers regarding consumers’ choice of research tools (generic search engine vs. vertical search engine vs. internet yellow pages) are particularly interesting as there’s quite a lot of variation between verticals.

The article also has some good data about the types of terms people tend to search for.

Useful reading if you’re marketing local services.

Do the updates to their local review system mean they’re keen to get into the space that the likes of Qype and TrustedPlaces are currently battling over?

photo credit: Mr. Siegal

According to Journalism.co.uk today, hyperlocal news site Outside.in has confirmed that it will be launching a UK version. They report that the UK site is currently in beta.

Outside.in currently powers ‘buzz maps‘ for the Washington Post that show which places are currently being mentioned most by local bloggers. No doubt they’ll be looking to set up some similar partnerships when they launch here in Britain.

photo credit: Peter Ito

The Guardian’s Oliver Luft reported on Wednesday that the Trinity Mirror-owned Liverpool Echo has launched a map-based news service where they are geotagging news stories and allowing for postcode-based searches.

According to the article, Trinity Mirror have plans to roll this out more widely.

Trinity Mirror also have other experiments with presenting news at more focused local levels, so it will be interesting to see how they get on.

(Thanks to James Thornett for mentioning the Guardian article.)

Greg Sterling has an interesting post on his Screenwerk blog on the challenges of selling SEM to small local businesses.

He argues that most small businesses don’t understand enough about SEM and all the metrics involved to evaluate an SEM service except by trying it. When they do, often the ROI is not great because several parties have to take a cut of the ad budget.

Greg goes on to suggest that SEM is probably too complex to be sold to many small businesses whose ad budgets are simply too small to get reasonable results:

It’s a disservice to sell traffic at pricing levels that are too low to deliver volume or to create unrealistic expectations with inflated claims about results. Both drive churn, which is inefficient for everyone.

I tend to agree with what Greg’s saying there, but I do wonder whether there’s an opportunity to provide low-cost templated or even fully self-service SEM services to specific verticals by providing standard sets of keywords and just varying the location that is targeted.

We could imagine a service for plumbers, say, where they would click a few checkboxes to say which, out of heating, bathroom installation, emergency call-out, etc., they provided, then select their target town and monthly budget.

That would be enough to set them up with a suitable PPC campaign with a relevant set of target keywords and monitoring tools. By automating the process, the cost could be kept low and hopefully the ROI would be more attractive.

A few questions:

• Are good SEM firms doing this anyway?
• Is the main cost involved in small business SEM actually the cost of selling to these small businesses in the first place (rather than setting up and managing the campaigns?)
• Would this even just be more or less equivalent to vertical directory sites buying traffic and selling it on?

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

photo credit: mandiber