Online Advertising - Yodle - Research Proposal Example

Topic: 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 28th 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. Problem statement This proposal seeks to address how Yodle plans to implement changes on how it will be operating and the mergers if any that it may considering going forward. Since Yodle works with small business, it aims to understand how it will continue to work with them or whether it will change the principles of how it offers services to its clients. It also looks at the way that Yodle handles it customers from when they come to sign up for their services up to when they will eventually deliver this services and whether the customers will be satisfied with the product and the way that the product will be presented. Theoretical framework Since there have been cases of people complaining that they did not get a value for their money as far as doing business with Yodle was concerned, this situation has to be looked at critically so as to know how they handles these situations that are at hand. Many people lodged complaints about them taking more money than they had asked for and also not giving the services that they had said they would in the timeframe that they had specified. It is apparent that Yodle dealt with these allegations and eventually the customers were satisfied but in the end they had dented the reputation of this company since they did not come from a single source but from a variety of quarters. Yodle thus struggles to satisfy each and every customer even though the customer base is increasing and they have to deal with a lot more on their plates. Variables When looking at the problem at hand, it is important to remember that there are two parties in this. These parties are Yodle as a company and the small businesses that contract Yodle to do their online marketing. Both Yodle and the small businesses have different opinions regarding the amount of satisfaction that the clients get from the deal that they have between them. Even though this is the case, it is also vital to remember that Yodle is a successful company that handles most of its businesses seriously and the cases of customers having issues is a rare concern. Thus the variables that will be considered are whether the partnership with Google will affect the customers that are already employing their services and whether the complaints from a number of their customers will make the ones that already exist pull out of the contracts they have and the potential new ones refuse to do business with them. Hypothesis The following is the hypothesis put across and therefore when internal branding is heavily considered, Yodle’s brand presence will have an outstanding effect on the type of service that they will give their customers since they have a reputation to uphold. The null hypothesis will dictate that the rebranding of the company and the partnerships that it is involved with will not affect the customers that were using the company’s services already since they have an idea of what happens already. If this is considered to have zero implication, then the opposite theory will have to be rejected. It is considered that the employees of Yodle will work better when they know that the company is living up to its promises in the market and is delivering what the customer wants and in good time. New customers will also be attracted to the company if they see the success that will be prevailing. Justification of the problem This study had to be done so that the clients and the businesses that employ the services of Yodle could better understand how the company works and the advantages that are linked to working with this company. It aims to put them in a position that they will have the knowledge of what they are dealing with as they work with Yodle. It also helps to enlighten those that may want to work with this company of the benefits and even the disadvantages that come with their association with this online advertising company (Liles, 2009). There have been a number of people that have been aggrieved by Yodle in the way that they deal with their business and this study is used to gauge and look at how the company does its business so that the people that had issues with it and the future clients can get an insight of what is going on. After going through the proposal they will them have a better position that will allow them to make an informed decision of whether they will work with Yodle or not. Significance of the study The people that operate the small businesses and also individuals that may need the services of Yodle will greatly benefit from the findings that arise from this study since they will be in a better position to make decisions concerning their dealing with this company. The clients will be better informed and have decision making power that is important since when they work with Yodle, it directly affects the business as the advertising that the company carries out for them is aimed at increasing the customer base that they have. This makes it important and vital that Yodle takes the business that they conduct for their customers to be done with seriousness and a lot of diligence to make sure that they are happy. They will also learn the advantages of employing such a company to advertise for them online and also the position of the company in terms of the market and also the companies that offer the same kind of service in the market (Hua, Mei & Hanjalic, 2011). Summary Yodle as a company has been very profitable and is fast growing to be the best online advertisement option. It aims at getting to the top of the ladder of the online marketing agencies and this is their motivation for providing even better services to their main clients that are the small local businesses. Even though Yodle posts all this successes it still has issues that are raised by the customers that dent its reputation when the chapter of new customers is concerned. Customers have been complaining of situations that they do not get what they have been paying for and yet they are billed more than they initially signed up for. The company takes time to deal with all this concerns but then it never really manages to take care of all of them since sometimes they are numerous. The company aims to meet the needs of all its clients diligently and completely so that the issues that have been arising it the recent past do not come up again and are put to rest. To do this they constantly listen to the feedback of their clients and the reviews that they give and then act on them so that they can improve on the issues that maybe raised and reducing business for them. References Cunningham, C., & Brown, S. (2010). Local online advertising for dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Cunningham, C., & Brown, S. (2013). Local online advertising for dummies. Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley & Sons. Hua, X. -S., Mei, T., & Hanjalic, A. (2011). Online multimedia advertising: Techniques and technologies. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. Jones, K. B. (2013). Search engine optimization: Your visual blueprint for effective Internet marketing. Indianapolis: Wiley. Liles, S. W. (2009). Online advertising: What kind of impact do embedded ads have on an Internet users perception of an advertisement when it is incongruous with the story content?Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest Read More