How to Use Strategic Analysis Tools To Get An Edge

01/08/2009 - Never has this industry faced a time where market conditions are more challenging. Every publisher, Certified Marketing Representatives (CMR), and yes, even advertisers are looking for ways to best prospect new opportunities, understand what competitors are doing, or be better positioned with their current advertising. To this point, most analysis has come from a patchwork of data sources and internally developed systems. But a new research tool may change all that, and very quickly.

In this article we look at the new Yellow Pages Analytics ™ tool from Yellow Pages Data Delivery – (YPDD), a brainstorm lead by industry veteran Stephanie Crammond. This new research tool provides the ability to learn, prospect, and apply the results from existing print products towards a comprehensive new marketing effort. Users can analyze ad revenues, research business classifications, and understand ad saturation by comparing advertisers found in one book but not in another, advertising patterns of advertisers, and how existing advertisers are using brands or other business information in their advertising. From the analysis results, sales leads can be downloaded into spreadsheets or in graphical form to initiate marketing acquisition plans. Hence, this will be an invaluable tool for Yellow Page printpublishers and CMR.

The Yellow Pages Analytics - YPDD system is a web-based marketing program containing 65+ million records from over 5,400 of the most prominent phone books in the US. The directory data is then merged with Acxiom Corporations business information data to provide a robust, complete advertiser view. This database allows an analysis and understanding of advertisers by geographic terms (by zip code, city, state or MSA), total spending by classifications, and what components (brands, features, products, etc) are used in ad copy. Because YPDD contains data from those 5,400 books, publishers no long need to have competitive directory’s keyed. Data at the UDAC or item level has at least one year of historical data in the system.