August 2nd 2010 – Yell is to give a strong boost to small businesses in the UK through enabling targeted advertising on Facebook as part of its netReach product. Small businesses advertising with Yell online, and which subscribe to netReach, will benefit from extended reach for their current Yell.com advertising across the Facebook platform. The move is part of Yell’s overall strategy of being the best provider of marketing solutions for SMEs in the UK.
netReach uses a network of around 70 partner sites to give wider exposure to advertiser information. Through the Facebook platform, small businesses will be able to target their advertising to relevant audiences by displaying their business and services when keywords match those in the profile of a Facebook user. Targeting can also be done by location, age and other demographics to ensure optimum results.
Facebook is the first social site to be included in the netReach network, which currently includes national and regional newspaper groups, property and travel sites. The integration offers the chance for SME advertisers to further expand their reach to a platform with a UK audience of 26 million users, over 50 per cent of whom access their account on any given day.
Phillip Snalune, new media business services director at Yell in the UK, said: “Social networking is a hugely important and rapidly growing part of internet usage. By integrating with Facebook, this provides a very exciting, new dimension to our support for small businesses, giving them access to target customers through a dynamic channel other than search.”
Stephen Haines, UK commercial director, Facebook, said: “Facebook offers excellent opportunities for businesses of all sizes to engage with prospective customers in a highly targeted manner and this integration with Yell will particularly help SMEs who might have smaller budgets or be new to Facebook as a marketing tool.”
All Yell.com’s netReach advertisers will be involved, including categories covering popular businesses and services such as beauty salons, driving schools, florists, hairdressers, pubs, restaurants and takeaways.
The ability to run highly-targeted campaigns through Facebook is a key benefit for SMEs. It has shown to be highly effective, for instance in presenting wedding related ads to Facebook users whose status was set to “engaged”, or driving school ads to people aged 17 or 18.
Yell is being supported in the advertising initiative by digital advertising agency TBG Digital, which is using the ONE Media Manager system to target advertising at the most relevant audience.
