Posts Tagged ‘clickable platform’

14
Dec 09
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Clickable Local Advertising Partnership With New York Media

By David S. Kidder
Today we are excited to announce our partnership with New York Media (NYM). NYM is the parent company behind New York Magazine, Menupages, and other Web properties. NYM has launched New York Connects by white-labeling the Clickable Platform to provide online presence and new customer leads for its local-business customers. Crain’s New York Business has a nice feature story on the deal, and there are more details in the news release.

Clickable Platform enables our partners and their direct sales organizations to rapidly deploy online advertising programs to thousands of businesses under their own brand. Platform is designed to acquire and grow customers, set and deliver on expectations transparently, and defeat local-business customer churn.  Clickable Platform delivers all the necessary components for local-advertising success, including lead generation, self-manage advertising tools, managed-assist services, reporting, full customer support, launch training, community, billing (eight currencies and 120 Countries) and full CRM integration.

NYM is a special partner because we are combining two proprietary assets: the New York Magazine franchise and our Clickable Platform local-marketing technology.  It’s important to note that brands, incumbency and trusted relationships with local businesses represent half of the equation in building a successful local-advertising business. Technology represents the other half, and that’s where we’ll continue to innovate and lead.  We’re enabling partners like NYM to succeed with a complete performance-marketing solution that allows them to scale their local-advertising business from the first dollar to the millionth – all on one, simple experience. It’s the only one-stop shop on which to grow a full continuum of local-business customers, and we’re excited about it. This is just one of many Clickable Platform local partnerships you’ll hear about in 2010.

Importantly, we have an aggressive product roadmap, including integrations with leading social, mobile and real-time networks. We’re also developing experiences on both desktop and mobile-device environments. And all of these investments and innovations are driven by a clear purpose: to help businesses survive and thrive by simplifying online advertising success. That purpose inspired our first line of code, and it continues to forge every aspect of our culture and the products we build with our customers. That dedication and focus is proprietary to Clickable.

Please let us know if you’d like to learn more about Clickable Platform. We look forward to sharing many more successes in 2010.

Many thanks,
David
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7
Jun 09
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Local Search Advertising Market Will Be Led By Companies That Invest In Scalable Technology And More Efficient Business Models (Report)

By David S. Kidder

When we started Clickable, we decided to only create products or features that deliver measurable ROI, either by driving profit or by saving time. With this disciplined approach, we effectively ‘built the business backwards’ – by strictly listening to the customer, and watching the data. As a result, we recently entered the local advertising market with Clickable Platform. Platform is the first white-label solution that allows online advertising resellers to rapidly scale online advertising and lead-generation programs profitably to a full continuum of local businesses.

As we developed Platform over the past year, we became intimate with market forces that are hindering the growth and long-term sustainability of the local search advertising industry. To better understand the challenges and shed light on the opportunities, we’re thrilled to release today a new research report authored by Borrell Associates, a research and consulting firm that tracks local ad spending. We commissioned this analysis of the economics of local online advertising to help strengthen the performance of search advertising for small and local businesses.

We’d love your feedback on this research, which you can download for free. We present many conclusions and insights, and we’re extremely interested in your frontline feedback to incorporate into the products we build for our own customers and partners.

Key findings from the Borrell Associates report:

  • Local Search Advertising Is A Massive Opportunity: Locally placed search advertising in the U.S. is projected to grow 30 percent over the next five years, from $4.1 billion in 2008 to $5.3 billion in 2013.
  • Winners Will Adopt Scalable Technology And Recalibrate Their Economics: This growth will be led primarily by advertising service providers that adopt scalable technology infrastructure and recalibrate their economics to allocate more customer investment to search media spend.
  • Customer Churn Is A Major Challenge: Many online advertising resellers and affiliates, who service local businesses, churn half their customers within a year’s time, and some lose as many as 90 percent. This often is due to missed expectations and a lack of return on investment for local-business customers.
  • Success Requires ROI, Easily Understood: Critical points for local advertising success include correctly pricing advertising products for local businesses, and devoting a greater percent of their investment to advertising on their behalf. Most important, advertising products and value must be easily understood by local businesses. That requires a shift from selling Web site clicks to selling measurable leads and phone calls.
  • Tools, Simple Reporting and ROI Central: Affiliates and resellers of search advertising who do not invest in sophisticated technologies will continue to see high levels of customer attrition. In response, new affiliates and resellers who optimize and scale SEM advertising performance through simple software tools and reporting – that clearly communicate and deliver value – will be poised to capture a larger share of the local advertising marketplace.
  • Managing Customer Expectations, Retention & Up-Selling Key To Growth: The most successful local search advertising service companies will not only manage expectations through simple reporting and greater ROI, but by migrating customers to higher average monthly media spends.

Again, the report is downloadable for free, and we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments section below. And if you’re interested in learning more about our Platform and partner program, you can contact us here.

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27
Apr 09
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Introducing Clickable Platform

By David S. Kidder

When we started Clickable, we made a business decision to only create products or features that deliver measurable ROI, either by saving you time or by making you more profitable. With this disciplined approach, we’ve been developing our next product quietly for nearly a year, and we are excited to share Clickable Platform with you today. Clickable Platform is the first white-label solution that allows online advertising resellers to rapidly scale online advertising and lead-generation programs profitably to a full continuum of local businesses—from a local advertiser’s first dollar to a large enterprise customer’s million-dollar campaign.   It’s already built, and, with the help of key partners, manages online advertising for over 2000 customers.

This is important because Clickable Platform was designed to solve the problem of creating, deploying and managing advertising for thousands of customers simultaneously, which usually results in complexity, inefficiency, and poor performance. This commonly results in devastating churn.  Clickable Platform solves the local performance marketing problem by integrating all three of our core products: Pro, Leads, and Assist. Collectively, they deliver value from day one, and mature customers from beginners to professional online advertisers. Clickable Platform is an incredible technical accomplishment that we are all proud of. It marks the expansion of Clickable’s focus for small and midsize businesses seeking simplicity and profitability, wherever in the market they participate: Local, Small, Medium or Enterprise. See our news release for specific product details.

Context is key: Since I last communicated with you in our 2009 outlook, the advertising market has continued to deteriorate, particularly analog formats and, in the online world, display. We still witness an active flight to performance-based marketing, with a disproportionate shift into search marketing.   Perhaps the most important thing we’ve learned is:  Advertising budgets do not directly correlate to the type of product or service an advertiser requires or desires. Both the enterprise and the local markets are filled with services that are misaligned with advertisers’ goals and expectations, and products that are filled with features and complexities that simply don’t drive return. The result is neutral to negative advertising performance, and churn.  This is the market problem Clickable Platform solves: it meets the advertiser’s goal along many points in the continuum of their needs – and it performs.

Beyond today’s announcement, Clickable continues to grow rapidly and meet our high expectations. We released Clickable Pro 2.0, our self-manage advertising dashboard, in February. In a few weeks we will release 2.1, and it will include several major reporting and recommendation-engine upgrades. We like to say that Clickable is relevant to all advertisers that want the simplest path to profitability. Evidence of this includes such customers as eNanny Source, Guidant Financial Group and many agencies of all sizes both domestic and international.  Clickable Assist is one of the fastest growing areas of our business, helping dozens of companies a month successfully launch or re-launch their online advertising efforts. Clickable Leads continues to power the lead generation efforts of several partners including Lexis Nexis and, more recently, a hotly contested win with Franchise Company Solutions.  We have many new partnerships we intend to announce in 2009 as well.

For the balance of 2009, we will focus on scaling and perfecting our three core products, building out our direct and partner sales channels, and scaling our customer support experience. In my experience with start-ups, it takes nearly three years to really know and understand your market and to determine what kind of company you are building. The third anniversary of Clickable’s first line of code is this coming September, and the esteem and confidence in our culture is building. We are already excited about 2010 and beyond.

I will close the same way I always do. It’s a reminder that we have not lost sight of our central cultural value: The 7:1 Rule. For those who have not heard it (no one at Clickable…), it’s the ratio of positive to negative that we aspire to meet everyday. Put simply:  we try to do extraordinarily more positive than we do negative. It’s a nearly unobtainable equation, and that’s the point. We are not perfect, nor are any products or companies in any market. We recognize this, and our customers and our team do as well. Our boldest, and perhaps most humble, claim is that no company has more energy, drive, resources and positive intentions in making you successful in online advertising than Clickable.  We hope this is always your experience with us.

Warm regards,

David

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