Online Advertising

Introduction

This proposal aims to find out how Yodle as an online advertising company manages to beat completion and stay on top of the online marketing industry. It looks at the adjustments that the company is making so as to remain relevant to the clients and people that will be the consumers of their services. It seeks to find out the changes that take place and the strategies that the company employs to keep satisfying its clients.

Yodle is a company that deals in online marketing and is based in the United States whose main clients are mainly the small business. As at December 2013, the company had over a thousand members of staff and its income in the previous year had been $132.2 million.

The company was started in 2005 by Nathaniel Stephens as NatPal but then changed its name in the year 2007 when Court Cunningham took over the helm from the founder (Cunningham & Brown, 2010).

Yodle’s breakthrough only came when Nathaniel Stevens and Ben Rubenstein had graduated from the university and a dentist decided to employ their services and after this they expanded and dealt with lawyers and other small business that had local establishments. From here they expanded and grew the company byemploying and enlisting the services of Kartik Hosanagar and John Berkowitz as the year progressed.

The company is in the service of assisting the small businesses with desktop and mobile website listings on search engines, paid search advertising and search engine optimization in the most simple and affordable way (Jones, 2013) . The company has tens of thousands of clients that they deal with many of which are small businesses as this are their primary clients and the main source of their revenue.

Since the company acquired Lighthouse Practice Management Group, it also makes available the service of retention marketing and has been highlighted by the time magazine in the “small business tip of the day” in early 2013. The company is committed and aims to multiply the value of the products that they develop every one and a half years.

The company has been listed in the Forbes most promising companies list as the 28^th company out of the total list that contained a hundred companies. Its revenues have been posting growths of double figures sometimes reaching 188 percent in only a tree year period.

The company’s main offices are in New York City but it has several other offices across the country in Texas, Arizona, Georgia and other places. Though the company is fast growing and posting good revenues, it has not yet performed an Initial Public Offering though it is considering it as it looks at the market to determine which time would be best to perform it.

Yodle aims to make a connection between the businesses and the customers through a process that is not complex and save money where they fuse technology with comprehensive customer support to make it customer friendly. Their solutions encompass display advertising, the offering and the review of management and a performance platform that is simplified and its advantage over other companies that offer the same service comes from the performance record in the industry.

Research questions

How did the partnership with Google come to be forged and developed?

Google has always been committed to helping the small businesses to nurture their advertising business that is done online and this is in Yodle’s portfolio that aims to develop websites advertising and reputation management for these companies. Google developed an association with Yodle that has lasted for more than half a dozen years and through these long relationship, Google has been able to recognize the amount of commitment and sophistication that the company is dedicated to delivering to its clients. When Google had considered all this they invited Yodle to be part of their program when the set out to re-launch their partnership program.

What do you benefit from this relationship with Google?

Google is a giant in the internet circles and Yodle is advantaged as a result of partnering with Google in that it has developed a credibility that its customers who are the small business can identify with and also enabling the access to their products in a faster time so that their workers can respond faster to them and also they can be advertised faster.

Yodle was one of the pioneers of the local ad extension which is an advertisement design for mobile devices and this brought about a new kind of efficiency that made them build a model that was based on the mobile platform which includes mobile websites, mobile bidding and mobile advertisements that are custom made. Google then bestowed on Yodle the Mobile Champion Award which showed the magnitude of the partnership that they are having with Google and the benefits that they are reaping from it.

What are Yodle’s plans in further investing in the mobile area?

Yodle considers the mobile platform to be the growth driver and thus has plans of further incorporating mobile advertising in its daily business. It says that most of the leads that they created come from the mobile devices and this has not hindered the progress in the sector that does not include advertising since this has also grown.

The people that employ the services of Yodle get the opportunity to monitor how their businesses are doing online and also have a shot at making it better. This helps the small businesses get a better web presence since if left on their own maybe they wouldn’t have developed as far since there are technicalities that are involved.

Currently they are not yet developing the social media angle as all their efforts are still on the website side as this still has room to be developed and they want to get the maximum potential from this sector first. They are continuously trying to improve the content and better the way that the websites that are being developed look like to please the customers and those that will be viewing them (Cunningham, & Brown, 2013).

Is Yodle still committed to dealing with the small businesses?

Yodle likes to consider itself as the marketing department for small businesses which have less than ten employees. The company puts its efforts in working for the businesses that may not have a person that is entirely dedicated to marketing or those that have people that have no marketing expertise.

The larger companies have a whole department dedicated for this but Yodle focuses on establishments like dentist’s offices that don’t have a lot of staff and those that are there are busy with their own line of work.

Does Yodle plan to enter the social media circles?

Yodle is making plans to enter the social media framework in early 2014 where it has set sights to launch the retention marketing product and then later introduce social as a retention marketing commodity which has already shown signs that it will be very successful.

Since they usually deal with businesses that whose products are primarily services, they view this as the things that people normally talk about and give their reviews about every day and assume this to be the driving force towards going into the social media angle. They plan to contact Facebook and discuss with them the idea since Facebook itself is already a major player as far as social media is concerned.

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