The chasm between consumer adoption of the mobile Internet and SMBs’ ability to respond to that adoption seems to be growing. For more than 80% of US SMBs mobile marketing and advertising is not something they’ve prioritized.
Fortunately for them “aggregators” and intermediaries (e.g., YP publishers and various other channels) are helping them with mobile exposure and distribution — whether they know it or not. So SMBs are getting reasonable mobile distribution but is it being monetized or simply thrown in as a “value-add”?
This is an interesting question that was discussed several times at the EADP event this past week. There I spoke with Itai Sadan, CEO of DudaMobile, which creates turnkey mobile websites chiefly for SMBs. (His is one of several SMB-focused mobile website vendors in the market.) He told me that when channel partners that show the product to SMBs there’s a near 100% take rate.
Sites or landing pages not optimized for mobile users lose customers; nevermind the pinch-and-zoom capabilities of smartphone browsers. Everyone must have an mobile-optimized HTML site. That realization will trickle down to SMBs over time. But will the product be priced separately or will it be part of the “gold package” for example?
Publishers and sales channels can’t sell an ever-expanding list of SMB marketing products a la carte; it starts to get very unwieldy for everyone: websites, SEO/SEM, social media, reputation management, mobile and so on.
Below is a video showcasing YPG’s new “360 solution” (Yellobook has a similar product in the US); it’s pretty slick and coherent but there’s a lot of words and stuff to explain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EU2nMVoCus
So do channels and publishers simply “throw in mobile” or use it (as is now often true of reputation management) as an upsell tool? Or do they try and make money specifically off mobile sites as a kind of premium product? If you do a new website (or a redesign) with the publisher/channel a mobile site may get included.
My guess is that mobile, in most cases, will be bundled at higher price points and the bulk of any revenue will come through performance marketing distributed via mobile (e.g., clicks, calls, deals).
May 16th, 2011 at 5:43 am
So that’s how they say Yahoo in Canada…. (1:35)
May 16th, 2011 at 5:46 am
ya-HOO
May 16th, 2011 at 4:20 pm
These are the same people who told the SMB community that their paper directories were still useful when search was drastically eroding their audience. For most of my clients, they’ll never trust anyone from AT&T or the other YPG companies again.