At Planet Discover, our commitment to supporting our media partners goes well beyond simply providing online advertising products and solutions. Our Market Development group was specifically created to provide ongoing support of your online revenue generation efforts. To that end, all of our clients have an opportunity to work with a Market Develop Manager to tailor an online sales strategy to help meet your online revenue objectives.
Planet Discover offers a variety of advertising solutions. A Market Development Manager will work with you to determine the appropriate mix of advertising solutions to achieve your sales goals. Your Market Development Manager will also work with you to create enhanced business directory packages and pricing strategies targeted at your advertisers. In addition to enhanced directory listings, they will help determine where text ads, graphic ads and coupons fit in the overall online advertising offering.
On-site Training and Support
One of the most valuable resources provided by Planet Discover Market Development is
on-site training for your sales staff. Site visits provide your staff with in-depth
training on advertising solutions you offer and real-world best practices for
selling these solutions.
Market Development Managers will help you prepare in advance to ensure a productive site visit. First, a detailed presentation is created outlining the features and benefits of the online solutions available to your advertisers. Sales materials such as rate cards and collateral pieces to promote local search and advertising solutions are also prepared.
The majority of a Market Development Manager's time during a site visit should be spent accompanying your staff on sales calls. These sales calls provide an environment for sales representatives to apply what they learned during the sales training.
Finally, the Planet Discover Market Development and Client Services teams share in on-going fulfillment training for advertising coordinators. This is an important final step in the sales process to ensure a satisfying and robust experience for advertisers and local search users.
Group Sales
Advertiser sessions, based on a seminar selling approach, have proven to be effective in
terms of launching the local online sales effort. Focused on small- to medium-sized businesses,
these sessions are designed to educate advertisers on the online solutions you offer, while
providing an effective refresher course for your sales staff as well.
The invitation process has proven to have an impact on the success of these sessions. For many, the natural reaction is to blanket their advertiser base with an email invitation. However, attendance at recent sessions has increased when invitations were personally delivered by sales team members. Invitation templates will be available in the near future on LaunchPad, the Planet Discover support site. Planet Discover also has resources available to help design custom invitations.
During a session, a Market Development Manager typically delivers a presentation outlining local search and online advertising opportunities, including a demo of your site. At the conclusion of the presentation, the local sales staff consults with advertisers to determine which online advertising solutions are appropriate for their business.
Since their introduction, these sessions have proven to be very effective in securing commitments from advertisers. To incent advertisers, many clients offer discounted pricing for annual contracts signed on the day of the session.
At Planet Discover, we want you and your online sales staff to succeed. To learn more about how our Market Development group can help you achieve your sales objectives, contact Brian Talty, Vice President of Sales at btalty@planetdiscover.com.
The Planet Discover Local Directory product provides many advantages for advertisers looking to create a simple, economical and easy-to-manage Web presence. With features such as business descriptions, photos, coupons and user-generated reviews, advertisers have the ability to reach local consumers at the moment they are ready to buy. Online coupons can also be integrated into enhanced business listings to help advertisers drive incremental traffic to their bricks and mortar location. Advertisers can leverage these features through the Planet Discover Local Directory product to differentiate their business in the local marketplace, especially during these challenging economic times.
The Power of a Website
For many small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), there are challenges to creating and maintaining a Web
presence that truly helps meet their marketing objectives. There are two primary options for these businesses
to consider for this critical aspect of their marketing program: outsourcing Website development services or
doing it themselves.
Electing the outsourcing option requires finding a source to design and build the site as well as paying potentially costly monthly hosting fees. In addition, updating and maintaining an outsourced Website requires time-consuming coordination when changes are required.
For advertisers choosing to create their own Website, there are other types of challenges. First and foremost is the prospect of learning how to write HTML code or learning how to use a Website design software application or template-based system. Businesses that create their own Website must also choose a hosting model - paying monthly hosting fees or investing in a dedicated Web server. Finally, many business owners may find it more time-consuming to perform regular maintenance and updates themselves.
Considering the factors for either option, it's easy to see the challenges for business owners with regard to maintaining an effective online presence while they are trying to focus on growing their business. Planet Discover Local Directory enhanced business directory listings provide local businesses with a simple alternative to maintaining a complete Website. Advertisers can position the "more information" page, or microsite page, associated with an enhanced listing as their Website or a targeted extension of their existing site. To that end, advertisers can use the microsite page to provide timely information, specials and coupons, all designed to drive store traffic.
Microsite pages offer features - such as descriptions, photos, coupons and consumer reviews - that many SMB advertisers would include in their own Website. The Web links included in enhanced listings also provide an additional option for advertisers to drive traffic to their existing Website. In addition, the Marketing Center provides advertisers with a self-service interface to maintain their online presence 24 hours a day, seven day a week.
User-Friendly URL
Planet Discover has just made it even easier for advertisers to promote their Local Directory microsite page.
A recent release of Search Publisher, the Planet Discover proprietary search platform, includes the ability
for advertisers to create a unique Website address for their microsite page. This unique Web address makes
it significantly easier for advertisers to include a link to their microsite page on business cards and
other time-based marketing materials.
To understand the value of the unique Web address, consider what a microsite address for a local listing on the Planet Discover demo site looks like before and after implementing this change:
Contact your Client Services Team or send an email to support@planetdiscover.com if you would like to learn more about user-friendly URLs.
Thanks to products offered by Planet Discover and others, online search and business directories are finding a niche at the local level. However, local consumers still turn to national search engines, like Google, when searching for local content.
The Planet Discover Local Directory product now includes features to help ensure your advertisers are prominently placed in the results of national search engines.
National search engines use "spiders" to crawl links and files on the Internet for data. This crawling takes place on a predetermined schedule. The data retrieved during crawling is stored and indexed, and referenced when a keyword search is performed to return relevant results.
During the crawling process, search engines look for external links that take them to more content to be indexed. In fact, Google's PageRank algorithm uses external links to determine a site's relative importance on the World Wide Web. This means that Google relies on prominent and persistent links from your site to the Planet Discover Local Directory to find enhanced listing data. The more links to the business directory that you place on your site, in addition to the search form, the more access the search engines have to the directory content.
A sitemap is one of the file types the national search engines look for when crawling a site. The Planet Discover Local Directory includes a sitemap file that contains data for each enhanced listing. This XML file is updated on a regularly scheduled interval and placed in a location where the search engines expect to find it.
As a result, keyword searches that match data in the sitemap file return relevant results on a national search engine. Correspondingly, the links in the search results direct users to the enhanced listing microsite page within the Planet Discover Local Directory.
Submitting the XML sitemap file directly to search engines is another way to ensure a presence in search results for enhanced directory listings. The January 2009 issue of Get Results described how some Planet Discover clients have established trusted partner relationships to submit XML sitemap files directly to search engines. This is a proactive service you can provide for your advertisers as the owner of the search domain.
It's important to note that the sitemap file only contains enhanced business directory listing data. This should be a key selling point with potential local advertisers. Advertisers may be more likely to commit to an enhanced listing if they understand their listing will have a greater likelihood of appearing in national search engine results in addition to the preferred placement in the Local Directory results.
Contact your Client Service team or send an email to support@planetdiscover.com if you would like to learn more about XML sitemaps.
Clients with questions or concerns should contact their Client Services representative or email support@support.planetdiscover.com.
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