Speaking this afternoon at at The Kelsey Group’s Drilling Down on Local conference in Seattle, Kurt Weinsheimer, GM for Local Marketing Services at Spot Runner, offered a simple set of rules for effectively selling to small businesses. 

• Target the right customers. 

• Keep it simple. Get the sales message through quickly and clearly. 

• Manage expectations. “You have got to tell them what to expect. If you do not manage expectations, they will set them for you. And I guarantee you won’t like what they expect.” 

• Do as you say, and say what you did. “If you say you will hit results, you better do it. Otherwise they will be gone. If you don’t let them know you did it, it didn’t happen.” 

Weinsheimer was speaking on the panel “The Local Resellers: Taking on Goliath.” His company helps small businesses create and distribute affordable television advertising. 

The panel explored how media resellers interact with small businesses and channel partners. Much of the discussion centered on how to effectively manage relationships with partners, including how to effectively manage customer expectations without direct control of the sales force. 

Carey Ransom, VP of business development at WebVisible, acknowledged this challenge. 

“Yes it is impossible. We do spend a lot of time working with our partners to make sure they understand. We talk about how to compensate salespeople so they care, that it is not about selling it and walking away.” 

WebVisible works with a wide range of channel partners, including newspapers and Yellow Pages publishers. 

Alibaba, is China’s answer to Google and Yahoo!. The online site is 39 percent owned by Yahoo and recently entered a strategic partnership with Infomedia, the second-largest Yellow Pages publisher in India.

The agreement with Infomedia provides Alibaba access to the second-largest population in Asia. The deal with Infomedia opens the opportunity to sell online advertising to its more than 750,000 advertisers and leverages Infomedia’s sales force of 650 that can immediately begin to access a wider array of India’s SMB base.

According to The Wall Street Journal, “[Alibaba’s] move into India is part of its strategy to grow globally, as a large chunk of its revenue comes from domestic trade listings within China.”

As Google, Yahoo! and MSN continue to struggle in Asia and China in particular, homegrown Alibaba and Baidu continue to prosper in Asia. By tapping into population-dense countries, both Alibaba and Baidu have set themselves up for tremendous growth as both China and India’s middle class grows at exponential rates followed closely by the rapid adoption of broadband, mobile Web access and more stable business environments.  

There seems to be no shortage of announcements from local players that wish to increase incoming content and distribution. In the past few months we’ve seen Citysearch feed content and ads to Local.com, AOL and Marchex; Idearc do the same with Marchex and Local.com; and Yelp feed 2 million reviews to Local.com (to name a few).

The idea is, the source of content gets more distribution for its advertisers, while the distribution partner gets more content, enhanced user experience and sometimes a revenue share on performance-based advertising that now resides on its domain.

To continue this trend, Marchex announced a handful of content partnerships today to enhance some of the vertical content in its network of 150,000 sites (26 million monthly uniques). This will include reviews from Yelp and attorney ratings from Avvo. Altogether, the deals add 5 million ratings and reviews to Marchex’s network, bringing its grand total to 8 million.

The rest are below (from the press release):

Yelp.com: A site where people read and write reviews of their favorite neighborhood businesses. Yelp will be providing more than 2.5 million reviews that Yelpers have written about everything from restaurants and spas to dentists and mechanics. The site had more than 9 million unique visitors in the month of March.

Avvo.com: This leading attorney rating service, which profiles hundreds of thousands of attorneys using information from state courts and bar associations, Web sites and the lawyers themselves in addition to reviews from users, is providing its Avvo Rating and user-generated reviews for thousands of attorneys across the United States.

HealthGrades.com: Under expansion of an existing relationship, the leading health ratings organization is providing detailed listings for more than 750,000 physicians and will be adding more than 5,000 hospitals nationwide.

lilaguide.com: This resource site for local parents will provide more than 150,000 user-generated reviews and recommendations for parents on local shopping, baby gear, activities, restaurants, daycare and other parenting resources.

Restaurant.com: This online dining resource is providing reviews, restaurant photos, wine lists, links to menus and discounted gift certificate offers from thousands of restaurants across the United States. Restaurant.com customers have saved more than $50 million through their gift certificate program.

Gusto.com and Urbanspoon.com: These leading restaurant and travel sites are collectively providing tens of thousands of customer reviews of restaurants in select markets across the United States.

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Related: Marchex Chief Search Arcitect Matthew Berk will speak at next week’s Drilling Down on Local conference in the following session. Hope to see you there:

Wednesday April 30, 2:15 pm - 3:00 pm
The Online City: Close Up on Seattle

Seattle is the real thing as a tech capital. It is also our muse for new ways to present local news, information and services. Who better to discuss “the online city” than Patricia Lee Smith, The Seattle Times’ online leader (and a creator of The Times’ great NW Source). Joining Smith is Marchex’s Matthew Berk, the Seattle-based creator of OpenList and a creative leader in providing new ways to access local information.

Speakers:

Patricia Lee Smith, Vice President, Interactive Media, Seattle Times Co.
Matthew Berk, Chief Search Architect, Marchex

We thought there must be a reason why VoiceStar, Marchex’s pay-per-call unit, had such a prominent presence at the North American Dealer Association show in February. Now we know: The company has just formed a reseller partnership with The Cobalt Group, which provides services to 40 percent of U.S. auto dealers.

Internet marketing solutions are increasingly important, but “dealers are adamant about making their phones ring,” pitches VoiceStar President Ari Jacoby. Under the new deal, they’ll have “tens of thousands of custom, trackable phone numbers to use in offline and online campaigns. They’ll also have ads for the pay-per-call services placed across several search engines and Web sites.

Cobalt’s emphasis on driving trackable phone calls gibes with a new Kelsey Group survey of auto dealers and their use of new media. When it comes to calls to the dealer, the top-line finding was that 51 percent come from classifieds, 48 percent from Internet Yellow Pages and 33 percent from e-mail.

Lawrence, Massachusetts-based Yellow Pages publisher LocalTel has partnered with Google’s AdWords program to sell keywords on Google and Google Maps, and for ads to appear on partner sites within Google’s AdSense network. According to the press release, “ Through a new strategic relationship with Google, LocalTel has become a Google Adwords authorized re-seller allowing businesses of all types and sizes to easily and effectively advertise on the largest search engine on the web.” 

As independent publishers struggle to build their own online revenues, partnerships with major ad serving networks are key alliances. Using strong local brands combined with the brand appeal of Google allows smaller publishers to build online revenues without relying solely on their IYP properties.   

Local.com and Idearc Media today renewed their relationship that distributes Superpages ads on Local.com. Superpages advertisers get premium placement on Local.com, while Local.com gets more content in its network and a rev share.

According to the release:

Under the renewed agreement, Superpages.com’s performance-based advertisers will continue to receive preferred placement on the Local.com website. Performance-based advertising products generate revenues when consumers connect with advertisers by clicking on their advertiser listing or by calling their businesses. The expanded agreement also includes preferred placement on Local.com’s network of more than 400 regional media sites, which is one of the largest local search syndication networks in the U.S.

This follows Local.com’s similar deal with Citysearch in December, and its integration of 2 million Yelp reviews in January. It also follows what seems to be an uptick in distribution partnerships like this lately. Many of them have involved Citysearch, including recent deals with Marchex and AOL’s Local Network.

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Local.com COO Bruce Crair will sit on a panel that The Kelsey Group is running at SES New York on this very subject. Hope to see you there.

Monday, March 17, 9:30am - 10:45am — Local Search: Are Partnerships the Key to Success?

Ninety percent of consumer purchases are made within 20 miles of a person’s home or office. Not only are millions of small businesses vying for the attention of ready to buy consumers, but so is virtually every national business selling products locally. The Kelsey Group forecasts that global local search advertising revenue will grow from $21.B in 2007 to $6.6B in 2012, a CAGR of 25.5%. How are online firms aggregating content and selling ads?

Speakers

Bruce Crair, COO, Local.com

Justin Sanger, founder and president, LocalLaunch

John Keister, president, Marchex

A couple of weeks ago, Citysearch formed a distribution deal with AOL that pushed its content and ads throughout the AOL Local Network. As we wrote here, this had a close resemblance to the December deal the company formed with Local.com.

The formula is: Citysearch gets extra distribution for its content and ads (a better value proposition for its advertisers), while the distribution partner gets extra content to boost its user experience (and a rev share). Because of Citysearch’s related efforts over the past year, this content includes video and reviews — both rapidly increasing in value in the local space.

So it comes as no surprise when the company announced a similar deal today with Marchex to distribute its content throughout Marchex’s network of 150,000 local sites. This isn’t to say Citysearch is exercising tired business deals; these are rather beneficial arrangements for the city guide and its advertisers.

And speaking of recent parallels, this also resembles the deal Marchex formed with Idearc Media last month to plug Idearc’s ads into Marchex’s network. Both will work toward beefing up the huge network of local search sites and geodomains the company launched last June.

Of course each distribution deal isn’t a carbon copy of the next, but they have similar formulas. In today’s deal, for example, it will be interesting to see how Citysearch’s content integrates with Marchex’s OpenList — a powerful review and content aggregator in its own right. We shall see.

AOL and Citysearch announced a deal today wherein Citysearch content will be distributed throughout the AOL network.

According to what AOL told us, this will play out in a few different ways.

• AOL will infuse Citysearch editorial reviews, user reviews, merchant videos and photos throughout its local network (AOL CityGuide, Local Search and MapQuest).
• Local businesses that provide paid listings on Citysearch will get exposure on AOL’s network of local sites totaling 57 million monthly unique visitors, according to comScore.
• AOL will increase monetization of its local properties by integrating local paid listings from Citysearch advertisers across its local network.
• Citysearch content integration will provide reach into new local markets and an increase in page views — generating new premium ad inventory for AOL’s Platform A customers.

Essentially, Citysearch gets extra distribution to the tune of 57 million monthly uniques (a plus for its advertisers). AOL gets additional content to boost its user experience and extra revenue (rev share) from Citysearch’s PFP ads. Sound familiar? This has all the makings of the distribution deal Citysearch signed with Local.com back in December (except more traffic).

Like that deal, we’re bullish on its possibilities for both parties. One of the highlights for me is that Citysearch will feed local reviews and video content into AOL Local and other properties. Local video and reviews are becoming a hot commodity and Citysearch has done a good job aggregating and producing them.

In the case of video, it was one of the first local search sites to offer local merchant video ads (using TurnHere). Not only has it caught on well among SMB advertisers, but it also seems like everyone else now wants the content. Same goes for reviews.

“Partnering with Citysearch enables us to better serve the more than 57 million consumers who come to the AOL network in search of local information with additional content and reach into new markets,” says AOL Director of Product Management Chris Spanos. “In addition, we are better serving the advertising community that is looking to reach local consumers, through both the integration of Citysearch’s paid listings as well as through the creation of new premium inventory for our Platform A customers.”

Microsoft Canada Co. and Yellow Pages Group Canada announced that Microsoft Virtual Earth mapping software is now available on YellowPages.ca. The software licensing deal allows YPG to provide a more robust map experience for users. It will also enable the publisher to push the mapping technology to its various online properties and eventually create additional advertiser opportunities.

Three areas of development, according to Jean-Pascal Lion, YPG’s vice president of marketing, include “creating more layers within the maps to allow for advertising opportunities, maps to plot advertiser locations and map-based search similar to Google Maps via one of its stable of owned domains, Maps.ca.”

While no dates have been established for the launch of these initiatives, it is clear there is a sense of urgency to get these functions up and running to not only take advantage of the revenue opportunities but also to help increase traffic to YPG’s affiliated sites.

The Virtual Earth mapping will also be added to the recently announced Profile Plus pages offering. The Profile Plus product offers advertisers the following components:

1. A dynamic 30- to 60-second video profile of the business
2. A photo gallery where advertisers can showcase up to 10 photos
3. Business details, including location and contact information, hours of operation, products and brands, methods of payment, map and directions, etc.

The addition of a more sophisticated and increasingly accurate mapping program certainly improves the depth of the Profile Plus page and can only enhance its usage and relevancy with consumers. One interesting benefit is the ability of YPG’s Trader property to take advantage of the Virtual Earth mapping technology. This is an interesting move, allowing product searches to now include photos, maps and driving directions, which makes locating products a much easier process for users.

While currently ranked as the eighth most visited site in Canada by comScore, YPG is definitely working feverishly to improve its traffic and the quality of the user experience on its site. Maps are more for the benefit of users than advertisers; however, this move into offering a more robust mapping service should help YellowPages.ca, Trader Canada and all YPG’s affiliated sites generate more traffic and ultimately benefit its advertiser base.

As promised, today I had the chance to talk with Local.com’s VP of bus dev and sales, Peter Hutto, who took time away from his vacation to provide some more color on yesterday’s partnership with Citysearch.

Hutto confirmed that the deal will involve boosting the content and site experience of Local.com while also bringing in incremental ad revenues from Citysearch advertisers. This will happen through a revenue share arrangement for traffic that flows through Local.com.

He also expanded on a few other points alluded to in yesterday’s post, such as having this deal be a foundation for more content formats to enter the Local.com fold, including video.

“Our strategy is to be content aggregator first,” says Hutto. “There are lots of different forms of content out there, and you’ll see us make a broad range of deals to bring in content, such as deals we’ve formed with Superpages and Citysearch. Part of this will be to aggregate video from other folks.”

This is very much in line with the principles of universal search, in which users are coming to expect varied content formats in when they search for things online. In local search this trend is definitely present, and has been seen most through interest in local merchant videos.

For Local.com, the deal itself and its possibilities (including video) are essentially a function of this content aggregation strategy to bring in lots of different content from different sources.

“In this deal, Citysearch really saw us as Switzerland when it comes to distributing their content,” says Hutto. “In the future, you won’t see Superpages distributing to [video] to Citysearch and you won’t see Citysearch distributing it to Superpages. But you could see both distributing to us. And anyone else who’s got it, we’ll take it.”