Bringing SMEs Online: ReachLocal's Michael Kline

Michael Kline is founder, vice president of products, and chief operating officer for ReachLocal.com, a company that provides a platform for local businesses to market their products and services online.  Kline recently shared his thoughts with TKG on the progress in bringing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) online, and on his company’s role in that effort.

TKG:  How would you describe ReachLocal to someone who has never heard of you?  What’s the “elevator pitch”?

MK:  ReachLocal has developed an end-to-end advertising solution that makes it easy and effective for local businesses – and those that represent them – to reach customers online.  ReachLocal’s solution has been designed to facilitate the migration of the $100 billion currently spent offline today by businesses targeting local or regional audiences.

The ReachLocal advertising platform allows self-service advertisers or businesses who represent advertisers to develop an online campaign very easily.  ReachLocal provisions the campaign for the advertiser (or agent), manages the campaign relative to the advertiser’s target campaign budget objectives, and provides the advertiser with full reporting.

TKG:  Where do ReachLocal pay-per-click (PPC) ads appear online?

MK:  We have developed a proprietary and patent-pending campaign allocation algorithm that takes the advertisers’’ budgets, the types of products or services they wish to promote, and the geographies they wish to target, and selects the publishers that optimally address those objectives.  The platform is publisher agnostic in the sense that it selects the best publishers for a specific advertisers and will constantly be adding publishers to its network.  Currently, ReachLocal is working with the leading search engine PPC providers (Google, Overture), Internet Yellow Pages companies (SuperPages.com), paid inclusion providers (Yahoo!), and geotargeted banner networks (Advertising.com).

TKG:  What about businesses that don’t currently have a Web site?

MK:  ReachLocal provides advertisers with a campaign-specific offer page that their campaigns link to.  The offer page consists of basic contact information, a list of all the products or services they have indicated they wish to promote, a link to the map of their location, and a section devoted to promoting timely offers (e.g., 50 percent off).  Advertiser can have multiple campaign-specific destination pages running at the same time and can modify them at any point during their campaign, thereby allowing the advertisers to have a page that has up-to-the minute and relevant content.  Advertisers do not need to know any HTML, but for more advanced users, there is an HTML editor that allows custom content to be uploaded.

TKG:  Where are you seeing the most growth?  What categories or types of businesses are adopting PPC through ReachLocal?

MK:  We developed the platform so that any advertiser can promote any product or service.  We have seen the best response from traditional Yellow Pages and classified advertisers – car dealers, dentists, home and home improvement companies, attorneys, auto repair, etc.  We have developed a category structure that lists more than 50,000 business specialties that will allow most businesses to come in and very quickly identify and promote themselves.

TKG:  How are you promoting ReachLocal to local businesses?  How are you getting the word out?

MK:  To date, our focus has been on proving that the product offering works and that our advertisers get great results.  We have only just recently opened up access to our online platform to a select group of advertisers and agencies and will be providing greater access to the platform in the coming months.  As we do so, we will be engaging targeted groups of advertiser and agency communities.

TKG:  Are you finding that ReachLocal or your sales channel(s) have to do much education, or do location businesses understand what you are offering?

MK:  Some of our initial customers were familiar with search engine marketing and the language of pay-for-performance because they were managing their own campaigns.  However, they were interested in off-loading what was a very time-consuming effort – and saw us as a way to ease that process for them while also getting better results.  In terms of businesses not currently engaged in PPC advertising, there is a slight period of education, but they key for us has been showing them the reporting data we make available to our advertisers on a daily basis – call tracking, e-mail tracking and the like.

TKG:  Any significant metrics you’d like to share?

MK:  We have seen greater than 80 percent month-over-month retention rate – almost 100 percent in some of the more traditional categories mentioned above.  LMJ