Today there are literally hundreds of ways to market your business. And those options are growing every year (maybe even every month) and becoming more complex.
Decades ago, the phone book paved the way for new types of advertising, such as print, TV and radio, as well as direct mail and billboards. Then online marketing became important, and now you can advertise on Google, Facebook, Instagram and a host of other online mediums.
As the Thryv team is always working to provide better tools for our customers, we recently conducted research with 500 small businesses about their marketing efforts.
We learned that one of their biggest challenges was that they were spending money on marketing and advertising, and weren’t sure which of their marketing activities were working, and which ones weren’t.
So our product team got to work, to develop a way to help our customers understand their marketing spending and the results it achieves.
We’re pleased to announce our solution to that problem, with the U.S. introduction of the Thryv Marketing Center, with planned international launches in early 2023.
The Small Business Marketing Solution
In order to understand what marketing efforts are working or not working, you need to understand what marketing and advertising efforts led to your customer acquisition. For that reason, Thryv Marketing Center connects automatically with Thryv’s already robust CRM.
All of the data collected in your CRM now informs and makes your marketing and advertising decisions smarter.
Because our customers want to save time, we automated the marketing analysis process using Artificial Intelligence (AI). All you need to do is run your business, and Thryv Marketing Center can track all the activities, in real time.
Easier & More Transparent Online Advertising
We also wanted to support our customers with the growing options of online advertising. So Thryv Marketing Center fully integrated with Google and Bing for search engine marketing. Facebook and Instagram cover social media marketing. And Yelp, ConnectedTV, and Yahoo Display Network round out the offerings.
These integrations enable Marketing Center users to launch a single campaign across any of the above platforms simultaneously with all the tracking, analytics and spend managed from a central location.
In that same research group of 500 small businesses, over 80% of them had tried to run their own online advertising campaigns at some point because they didn’t trust other people to run them for them anymore. Why?
They shared with us that many of the companies who were managing their online advertising spending were taking 40-60% of their total advertising budget in fees. Not only were those costs substantial, but the small businesses weren’t getting great results or transparency.
Advertise Your Way
Not every business wants to run paid advertising all the time. Some have seasonal needs, others may experience supply chain or recently even workforce challenges. So, Marketing Center includes always-on upgraded profiles on Yelp, YP.com and integrated Google Business Profile Optimization.
Marketing Center also includes a robust set of marketing tools that can be used anytime to maximize the efficiency of existing tactics. Whether it’s a heat map of your website to improve conversions or generating trackable phone numbers to understand if lawn signs or postcards are working.
These platforms help differentiate Marketing Center businesses and provide a leg-up even when paid campaigns aren’t running.
The Thryv team ultimately created Marketing Center to help customers with overall marketing tracking as well as total management of online advertising spending.
We worked hard to provide a solution that offered a streamlined experience easy enough to manage the process on your own. But we also wanted to offer a support option, a “do it with me” scenario, where our seasoned marketing experts provide assistance with onboarding and every part of the process, through our 24/7/365 support.
We’ll help you set up your first campaign and give recommendations based on best practices, but the decisions would be yours. And our marketing experts would always be available to help you with changes to your campaigns, understanding the analytics, and more.
How Thryv Marketing Center Works
Let’s start with an example of how the Marketing Center can determine the effectiveness of an online ad:
Your prospect, Pat, is sitting in bed at 11 p.m. looking through Facebook and laughing at cat videos. As they scroll through their feed, they see an ad for a local solar installation company. Pat has been thinking about purchasing solar panels, so Pat clicks on the ad, which is for your local solar panel company.
When they click on the ad, it brings them to a landing page describing solar panels, along with testimonials and a way to schedule an appointment.
At this point, Pat schedules an appointment, and you learn that the lead came from your Facebook ad. Right?
Not necessarily, and maybe even not likely. Here’s why.
Here’s What Prospect Pat’s Path Actually Looks Like
It’s 2023. Pat is a little hesitant to share their personal information. They don’t want to get hounded through email or phone calls.
So what does Pat do? What many of us (and your prospects) do.
Pat goes to Google and looks up your business name, to see if your business looks legit. They read some reviews and feel more comfortable. Then Pat finds your Google Business Profile.
That profile has little buttons at the top that say Pat can call or message the business. Pat decides to call the business. It’s really late, so they leave a message saying they are interested in learning more about your products and services.
In the morning, you call Pat back and get their contact information, and input it into your Thryv CRM. You schedule an appointment for a good time to go to Pat’s house and measure Pat’s roof.
Before you get off the phone, you ask, “Hey, by the way, where did you find me?” And what do you think Pat says? Yep: Google, not remembering his cat videos or late-night Facebook scrolling.
Pat says Google because it’s the last place they saw your information. And it’s the button they clicked to contact you. Google’s made an entire business out of this.
So if you’re a small business owner and you hear that enough times you think to yourself: “Google is the only thing that works. I should shut down my Facebook ads. I should shut down my Instagram ads. I’ll stop wasting money and just figure out how to do more on Google.”
But wait — you have Thryv Marketing Center now.
Devices Don’t Lie
When you send the appointment reminder out of the CRM, and Pat opens it on the same phone they were using while scrolling through Facebook and finding your ad, Marketing Center’s AI gets to work.
Marketing Center knows that Pat’s phone went to the landing page, from the Facebook ad. And so it tells you, the business owner, that this CRM contact didn’t come from Google. It came from your Facebook campaign.
The device doesn’t lie. The device found that business from the Facebook ad and with Marketing Center it connected the appointment reminder with the landing page for a match.
The bottom line: Marketing Center automatically shows where customers actually found you, and what’s working. At that point, Marketing Center inputs “Facebook Ad” in the “Source” field for Pat’s information in your CRM.
But online ad activity isn’t the only online tracking that Marketing Center provides. It can track any online activity. Here’s another example:
You meet Pat at a networking event. Pat gives you their card and agrees to get information from you about your solar panels. You enter Pat’s information into your CRM and Pat receives an email from you.
When Pat opens up the email, Marketing Center’s AI starts working. If Pat opens the email on a phone, Marketing Center might track an initial visit from Pat’s phone to your website six months ago.
What Pat didn’t tell you (because Pat doesn’t want to get hounded) is that they have already heard about your company and checked out your website, but hadn’t taken any other action until meeting you today.
Marketing Center confirms that the actual source for this lead was not the networking event, but your website.
What Else Thryv Marketing Center Can Do?
In addition to tracking all of your online marketing activities, here are some additional features and benefits of Marketing Center:
- One interface for all of your online ads. Instead of having to spend time and learn how to create separate Google Adwords, Bing, Yelp, Connected TV, Yahoo Display, Facebook Ads and Instagram ads accounts, Marketing Center does all of that in one place.
- Easy Automated Analytics. There’s no need to figure out tagging and tracking for each of your online advertising accounts.
- Automatic landing page builder. Best practice suggests you should have a landing page on your website to send your ad traffic to, where the messaging matches your ad campaign language. Marketing Center’s AI tool grabs information, branding and photos from your existing website and creates an initial landing page for you. You’re free to customize it or even start over, but Marketing Center makes it easy.
- Buy and track all of your advertising in one place. You can bid on and review the ad performance of Google Adwords, Bing, Yelp, Yahoo Display, ConnectedTV and Facebook and Instagram ads through Marketing Center.
Marketing Center — Beyond Online Advertising
Not all businesses want to use online ads as part of their marketing activities. Some businesses will also choose certain times of year to advertise more or less, depending on seasonality and other factors.
In addition to the overall tracking of where customers found your business, even those businesses with little or no online advertising spending can use these Marketing Center features:
- Advanced analytics about your Google Business Profile, so you know how it’s performing
- A paid profile on YP.com, so you can get found easier
- A paid business profile on Yelp
- Heat mapping to understand how people are interacting with your website to improve conversions
- Trackable phone numbers to place on postcards, lawn signs, vehicles and more to know what works
- Competitor watch, to monitor the online advertising activities of your competitors to ensure you don’t lose market share
What Does Marketing Center Cost?
Currently, Marketing Center is available as an add-on to the Thryv platform for $199 per month. Contact our support team for a demo of Thryv’s Marketing Center today!
