Category Archives: local advertising

Thank you for being our customer

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It’s 8:02pm and my wife and I just put our kids to bed. Now I’m trying to figure out how to announce the new website that we’re launching at eNeighbors. It got me thinking about the beginning, when we started the company 11 years ago. And I couldn’t help but be filled with gratitude for everyone who helped make eNeighbors what it is today.

The list of people that have directly contributed to eNeighbors in one way or another is amazingly long, and for privacy reasons, I won’t list any names here, but you know who you are. And of course, without our customers, we would be nothing. So perhaps, most of all, I want to say thank you, to you – our customer.

It comes down to this – because you buy deals on eNeighbors, I can pay myself, and my employees. And we can continue to do the work that we love to do.

So, from the bottom of my heart, really, and truly, thank you.

In our Kansas City area neighborhoods – the only city where our eDeals program is offered – you have purchased over 50,000 deals from local businesses that offer service to the home – like lawn care, window washing, and carpet cleaning. And because you and many of your neighbors bought deals, we were able to negotiate bulk discounts with local service providers – saving everyone money, while helping local providers acquire new customers.

Your purchases represent over $4,000,000 in revenue for local service providers and an equal amount in savings just by buying together and scheduling together, one neighborhood at a time.

The success of eDeals in saving homeowners money and helping local providers grow their businesses, all while allowing us to grow our own business, has inspired us to build a new website dedicated to featuring money-saving deals from local service providers.

The new site will feature many of the deals from the service providers you’ve come to love. The user experience is greatly improved, however, especially on mobile devices.

Our “soft launch” is set for September 1st. An email with a link to the new site will be sent to all customers. More to come soon.

It’s time to get back to work…see you then.

eNeighbors for free?

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Neighborhoods now have the opportunity to offset the cost of their website by selling the sponsorship position on their public sign in page.

If you have a sponsor interested in advertising on your website, simply email us at ads@eneighbors.com with the following:

  1. Advertiser Contact Information
  2. Headline – maximum 25 characters
  3. Description Line 1 – maximum 35 characters
  4. Description Line 2 – maximum 35 characters
  5. Website URL: maximum 1024 characters

A sample ad is shown below:

Site Sponsor Example

For those neighborhoods that do not currently have a sponsor listed on your homepage, you may begin selling your space immediately. For those that currently have a sponsor listed, you will have to wait until the end of that sponsor’s current agreement before you can sell the position.

Below is an example of the sponsorship postion on the public sign in page:

Villas of St. Andrews

eNewsletter & Local Advertising

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It’s been a long time everyone… we’ve been hard at work with heads down these past couple months but wanted to let you all know about some new changes we’ve rolled out.

1. eNewsletter – NEW & IMPROVED!
If you are currently an eNeighbors user then you probably have already seen the new newsletter in your inbox this week. We have some great new features for you:

  • News and Events now have more date info
  • Events that require you to RSVP will now include the registration link
  • Groups now shows how many members are in the group
  • Classifieds now shows when they were posted as well as the photo
  • Added a Community Feedback link for easier access to communicate with your HOA board and property manager

2. Local Advertising
The other big deal that we’ve been working on is the new Sponsors section in the eNewsletter. We now offer the ability to advertise your business in eNeighbors neighborhoods.

For only $50 a month, you can place your ad in the newsletters that get emailed to our eNeighbors residents.

Here’s an example of the ad

For more details including discounted pricing options, a list of our neighborhoods, and the ad specs, please visit our Sponsors page.

If your neighborhood is not signed up with eNeighbors, find out how you can get your neighborhood online.

Short End of the Ad Stick

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My take on Eric Picard’s article on local advertising over on ClickZ:

1. Display advertising (i.e., print ads) in the local newspaper is still the best ad/marketing vehicle for a small business to reach its audience.

Article quote:

I’m fairly certain the numbers used by J.P. Morgan’s analysts include classified ad revenue. Classifieds have been decimated in local ad spend, but display ads in local newspapers are probably just as strong as they have ever been, despite shrinking circulation. This is mainly because there are no alternatives for local businesses, including local affiliates of national brands (e.g., local auto dealers, quick-service restaurant franchises, national retailer locations, etc.), to reach their local audiences. Much of this has to do with creative production and the lack of online inventory that can be targeted locally.

2. Online audience targeting is still not good enough for small businesses to shift their ad dollars online.

Article quote:

Local newspaper ad spend on display ads is very unlikely to move online for the next few years. The reason is similar to why television didn’t drop for some time despite shrinking audiences. There just isn’t an alternative to reach the target audience that a small local business, even a local affiliate of a national brand, can take advantage of.

3. Still no infrastructure for small businesses to get “true” local service positioning.

Article quote:

Local search has mainly solidified around mapping, which is great at taking advantage of people searching for a product in a local area but not for driving awareness of a sale or trying to create demand. And without a sales force and creative production resources to serve the local markets, it’s highly unlikely that much of the local inventory available within the online space will ever get sold to local businesses. The infrastructure is really set up for supporting national advertisers with localized creative.


Greg Sterling also comments.

How’s Your Inbox, Lately?

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Some interesting data over on eMarketer today talking about e-mail advertising and the expected growth in spending from $1.2 billion in 2007 to $2 billion in 2012. Additionally, JupiterResearch indicates that about one fourth of all email is now opt-in.

What I find interesting is some of the feedback from users about why they decide to no longer opt in to emails from certain companies. One of the primary reasons was that the content was no longer relevant. Is there an echo in here?

This is great news for us here at eNeighbors since the primary traffic driver of our service is the automated e-mail newsletters of weekly content from your neighborhood site (it’s like Facebook’s news feed without all the crap).

The content in these newsletters can’t be more relevant since it’s an aggregated conversation from your neighbors about things that are happening literally on your street.

We recognize that while most people want to stay informed about their local happenings (especially in their own neighborhood) there are only so many hours in the day. We’ve seen that the weekly recap of info is a great way to keep up on what’s going on. And that’s why we are working on some new features and enhancements to the eNewsletters. Stay tuned.

Local Search: The Future of eCommerce

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How much do you buy online? Depending on your social situation (single, married, kids, etc.), the amount of actual online purchasing can vary greatly. But how often do you research a purchase online regardless of whether you are planning to purchase online or offline?

When it comes to local search, Greg Sterling has some great comments on SEL today. Greg’s comment in his opening statement are of particular interest to me as it relates to eNeighbors. Since our target audience is homeowners in a managed community, the home services are a perfect fit for us to be able to recommend and advertise to our users, but Greg’s comment about products (which I assume to mean pretty much anything) tell me that every transaction whether on or offline starts at the local level since that’s where we all live.

In other words, we all live in a local community no matter where we are. This local community which houses our friends and family is the largest influence on our buying habits. Our local habitat dictates our entertainment options, our habits, hobbies, etc. You get the idea.

I think the real insight here is this — to sell a product (any product) how much more effective would that sales process be if it were approached from a local level? Obviously, it would be exponetially more effective. It would be like a door-to-door salesman for the entire world. In the past, this approach has not been very cost-effective for obvious reasons, but with the recent adoption of the web’s social networking features, this type of sales approach is now possible.

So, once again I’m advocating the use of a bottom-up approach to local search. In this case, as it directly relates to local commerce. Ironically, the internet may be the vehicle to bring back the feeling of community and localness.

Yahoo! Local Redesign – Did you notice the ‘neighborhood’ info?

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Yahoo! recently redesigned their local search portal and made some significant improvements. (I find the user comments on the redesign entertaining. Users are always upset after a redesign – “I can’t find [insert the one thing you used] anymore.”

There are plenty of reviews (here and here) of the new site, so I won’t waste your time simply recapping what they’ve already said. Instead, I want to focus on the integration of “Neighborhood Groups”, which is easy to overlook. If you missed it, you can find this new feature near the bottom of the Yahoo! Local page after entering in your location info.

Neighborhood Groups

After a cursory review, the Neighborhood Groups feature looks to be somewhat of an afterthought (I’ll explain why shortly), but I think that it indicates the direction that they’re likely to take their product as local social networks blossom.

The idea is to get local people talking to each other about local business listings like restaurant reviews, vendor recommendations, etc. For example, one neighbor talking to another about the incredible (or not so incredible) restaurant that they ate at last night.

Why is this cool? Relevance and trust. My neighbor’s review about a restaurant is much more relevant to me than a review from someone I’ve never met. I know and trust my neighbor so when he says that the restaurant was great, I believe him. Or maybe I know that I have different tastes than my neighbor, which is also valuable to me, and I’ll be sure to avoid what he likes. Either way, the review is more valuable to me. And the same goes for my neighbors’ lawn care company, real estate agent, dog sitter, handy man, etc. 

But is this how it works? No, not today. Not yet.

If you visit http://local.yahoo.com/, under “Neighborhood Groups” the site asks, “Need a recommendation? Ask a neighbor in a local group”. So I clicked on “Search for groups near you”, you’ll get a list of groups, not neighborhoods, located in your area. When I did this, I typed in zip code 80027 as my location, and came up with the Louisville Runner’s Club, a group located in Louisville, Colorado.

Even though I didn’t get a list of neighborhoods, I was actually pretty excited at this point. I was expecting to find reviews from members of the Louisville Runner’s Club about the New Balance store nearby that has the cool machine that measures your foot for the perfect fit.

I didn’t find that review, which didn’t really surprise me, but what did surprise me is that I didn’t find any reviews from this group. Even more surprising was that there is no vehicle that allows me to do this.

So when Yahoo! asked me if I needed a recommendation and suggested that I ask a neighbor in a local group, what they’re really saying is, “hey, wouldn’t that be cool if you could do that?” Yes, it would. It would even be better if I could sort reviews by my friends, neighbors, and so on.

I’m pretty sure that Yahoo! has some of the data needed to accomplish this; they’re just not leveraging it yet. But it will be extremely valuable to businesses and consumers alike when this concept is further developed.

Local News and Content Innovations

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Yahoo Local redesigns their interface adding all sorts of cool content controls and useful features for discovering local news and events.

By partnering with MenuPages, CitySearch has added extensive menu content to their restaurant profile pages. Awesome! Now I can find out ahead of time if there is a kid’s menu.

Google is now allowing users to comment on stories (that they appear in) on Google News. Still wondering how Google will verify that people are who they say they are…

Does Local Search Equal A Trillion Dollars?

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How many times have you gone to Best Buy to buy a new camera/TV/computer/printer and were carrying a bunch of printouts of product reviews you got from researching online first?

More and more of us are now researching purchases “online” and then buying “offline” in our respective local communities. In fact, Yahoo just released a study that confirms this behavior, and even more specifically outlines how online advertising affects offline purchase behavior.

Greg Sterling, interestingly enough, calls this behavior “Local Search” by way of his definition:

“Local search is a process where users conduct research online but with the ultimate intention or result being an offline transaction. It’s about the Internet influencing real-world buying decisions.”

In my mind, this means that “local search” really means “local buying” due to the fact that these two actions are merely steps in the traditional commerce process. In other words, you aren’t going to search for a service or product outside of your geographical vicinity if you intend to buy it offline.

Here’s the other part of Greg’s post that got my attention:

The phrase, The Trillion Dollar Marketplace, comes from recent Jupiter and Forrester e-commerce/retail reports that predict the Internet will be influencing a trillion dollars of offline (local) spending by either 2010 or 2011.

Personally, I think this estimate is a bit overly optimistic (1999 flashback, anyone?), but the point is that we spend most of our buying dollars in the physical community in which we live. You can’t buy food out of state and have it shipped (I guess you could, but it wouldn’t be hot). Most of us still like to try our clothes on before purchasing, and there’s no denying the joy of instant gratification (or less hassle of returns) of picking up that shiny new gadget toy from your local electronics store today (rather than in 7-10 business days). And if I want any type of service or repair for my house or car, guess what, it’s going to be local.

More and more, it’s becoming important for online buying guides to provide very relevant and very accurate local retail guides. Innovations like alerts to local sales and special offers or service referrals from your in-town friends and family are going to become imperative for the bricks and mortar lot to compete for those dollars that are not spent in the online channel.