Another eventful month for vSplash. We are looking forward to participating in Search Starts Here at Boca Raton, Florida, from April 21 to 24, 2012.

At a Special Invitation-Only Research Session, vSplash will present updates on SMB DigitalScape to presidents/CEOs of leading local search marketing companies. Research is underway; there will be revelations just as breathtaking as they were at ILM East, last month.

SMB DigitalScape is a quarterly audit ‘tracking’ study of live SMB websites and delivers intelligence on scale based on empirical evidence. The empirical nature of the study and high-volume data is what makes the study unique. The reports demonstrate the market opportunity for delivering digital services and solutions to SMBs.

Stay tuned for the latest on SMB DigitalScape.

Having to manage various internet marketing efforts through multiple platforms or windows is just as unimaginable and requires precisely coordinated efforts by multiple role-holders… a person dedicated to social media marketing, one working on the SEO and probably another looking into website performance and so forth. Such precision in coordination is anything but easy and failure to coordinate will have the business sharing the fate of our fancy car. On the other hand, engaging manpower to manage different aspects of internet marketing in not feasible for SMB advertisers. If all resources are used up just as the space in our imaginary car is, the SMB balance sheet will have too much on the right and little left on the left.

While the car is thankfully imaginary, the internet marketing scene for SMBs unfortunately isn’t.

Integrated technology is no doubt the order of the day. BuzzBoard helps manage social media marketing, SEO, SEM, website performance, directory listings, brand mentions and online reputation – all from a single dashboard, much like driving the real car, more so a modern car with advanced features including GPS navigation. Volume aggregators can toss in BuzzBoard as an add-on to their SMB offerings to enable advertisers to have an integrated approach to their internet marketing efforts. The shortcut to growth lies in helping your advertisers grow.

Initial findings from the latest SMB DigitalScape analysis were presented by BIA/Kelsey at this week’s Interactive Local Media East (ILM East), March 26-28, in Boston.

Empirical data from SMB DigitalScape includes:

• Six out of 10 SMB websites in the U.S. are missing either a local or toll-free telephone number on the home page to contact the business.
• 74.7 percent of SMB websites lack an email link on their home page for consumers to contact the business.
• 65.7 percent of SMB websites lack a form-fill option to enable consumers to request information.
• 93.3 percent of SMB websites are not mobile compatible and will not render successfully on mobile devices or smartphones.

Professionals from the industry couldn’t agree more.

“We believe local media companies in the U.S. can benefit greatly by having access to SMB DigitalScape,” said Rick Ducey, managing director, BIA/Kelsey. “It offers them a powerful tool to measure, in aggregate, their customers’ digital presence and determine strategic and tactical selling opportunities.”

“The data coming out of the SMB DigitalScape engine certainly point to considerable market opportunity for SMB marketers and aggregators, as many SMB websites today are deficient across multiple dimensions,” said Steve Marshall, director of research, BIA/Kelsey. “As you go through the data, it becomes pretty clear that while the world is shifting to a social, local, mobile — or SoLoMo — orientation, most SMBs are just not there yet.”

Additional SMB DigitalScape findings suggest that many SMB websites are not as technically sound from a search engine optimization perspective as they should be in order to be found. Deficiencies include lack of meta-titles, privacy policies and keywords. A large untapped opportunity for SEO professionals.

There is hardly anything surprising about it considering how fast devices and OSs have been evolving in the last couple years in response to how demanding users are becoming. They want to browse the web on the go, lying down on a sofa, walking on the treadmill or cuddling up in the bed. Even the laptop doesn’t help in some of these postures.

So the devices are here now, but where are the applications? For the new age user, it is too much effort to use Yahoo or Facebook via regular web-browsers. Please, we want easy-to-use applications. Sales of Smartphones and tablets is rising by the day and with it the use of applications apart from users’ positive experience about them. From its launch in July 2008, Apple’s Apps store generated 1.7 billion in 2010.

If only we could also use applications to schedule an appointment with the doctor or the hairstylist; or effortlessly book a table at the restaurant while watching the football match. A lot of businesses are yet to awaken to this revolution, but that is mostly because they are not aware of technological developments for tapping business opportunities, while they do excel in the services they offer. The SMB DigitalScape research by vSplash last month showed that 36% SMB websites in the US are only single page, let alone have a mobile website or mobile applications. These findings do corroborate with Forrester predictions. Although SMBs are not tech savvy, their market is. Will it be long before they buckle under pressure? Will they want to pass off business opportunities because their competition was more accessible on the users’ hand-held devices? Sure, it is a fast growing market as we are transitioning off into the age of applications.

The market is almost an App Store monopoly for now with their low prices and strong user experience being the main barriers for other vendors. However, Gartner predicts that Apple will lose its market share from the current 82.7% to 50% by 2015. Gartner analysts say that vendors entering the market should focus on “delivering a rich user experience based on a strong tie between smartphones and tablets, a good set of apps, an intuitive user interface, and the ability to share content easily between devices.” Achieving all this while keeping the prices competitive with Apple, yet having decent margins is no small feat.

Looking back into a career spanning close to a decade and a half, the key elements that have helped vSplash out-execute other players in the space are:

• Fully integrated and automated tools for managing fulfillment, review, reporting and communication.
• Simplified processes with minimal time and steps in order life-cycle, and maximal comfort for stakeholders.
• Flexibility in managing inconsistent volumes with capacity for spike periods.
• Substantially low costs enabled by economies of scale and elimination of waste.
• Enhanced customer experience through fully manned customer call center facility for post-sales consultation and post-fulfillment support.
• Adaptability to changes in technology and market requirements.
• Agility in responsiveness to new market opportunities leveraged for mutual value-add in partner relations.
• A commitment to continuous improvement of people, processes and tools.

vSplash continues to serve major directory publishers, telecom and hosting companies primarily in North America and largely around the world, delivering improved quality, cycle time, overall customer experience and substantial cost savings.

As we strive to be the leader in price, quality and convenience, we are always discovering ways to cut overhead costs, to minimize steps in fulfillment and to optimize our processes across functional and organizational boundaries.

What makes life simpler for the consumer while converting clicks to qualified leads for SMBs??
BUSINESS SOLUTIONS……Business solutions such as applications which not only serve as a repository of details of, for instance, stores, but also have search options for users to find the store by city, street, area, or distance. Or find doctors by city, specialization, reviews and insurance. In addition to these, an appointment scheduling option would take the user experience to an altogether different level. The scheduling feature enables the user to actually avail the service by contacting a particular doctor – straight from their mobile phone in case they are on the move with no access to a computer. That is actually converting leads into sales. How effortless is that?

These applications are valid for other service categories as stores, restaurants, florists, plumbers, electricians, spa, attorneys and so forth. For example, customers can look for a restaurant by preference, location, and reviews. The joy of sending flowers to a loved one with a single click on the phone through automated business solutions is incredible.

Thus emerge opportunities for directory publishers and SMB aggregators in the largely unexploited realm of business solutions – web/mobile applications in finding stores/restaurants, appointment scheduling, shopping carts, payment gateways, staff management, reporting, business analytics and inventory management that can add value to SMBs.

Capitalizing on these opportunities, search giants Google, Yahoo and Bing have been racing to e-business solutions. If Facebook stores, Google Checkout and Yahoo e-commerce solutions are anything to go by this market will continue to grow rapidly in the next 3-6 months. While many SMB aggregators continue to focus on search, the market is driving to business solutions that convert clicks and calls to qualified leads.

Add-ons as these can drive in increased revenues to any SMB aggregator or directory publisher who already has a size-able advertiser base across several verticals. Along with website development/maintenance or directory listings, a subscription for add-ons on an annual basis can boost revenues. You can do that without increasing your organization fat, i.e., by partnering with white-label solution providers with economies of scale and wherewithal at disposal already. Say there are 50,000 advertisers that need an e-business add-on, a margin on 40% at $1000 per advertiser means $20,000,000 more in annual revenues.

All you need to do is get your sales force into action selling away the idea to your existing SMB clientele. Just take it, a large percent of SMB advertisers are not internet savvy, much less e-business aware. The first steps, therefore, should be spreading awareness of the benefits of e-business solutions and how these can help their business make strides.

Small samples such as 300 to 1500 SMBs that most research is usually based on may not be completely representative. Using BuzzBoard technology and proprietary algorithms developed over the years, vSplash researched over half-a-million live SMB websites from over ten countries around the world, more than half of the sample from the US alone.

Some of the key observations:

• Only 13 percent of SMBs have a local phone number on home page.
• Only 24 percent have an email address on the website.
• 36 percent of websites are only a single page in length.

Speaking at ILM West, Steve Marshall, Director of Research and Consulting, BIA/Kelsey, said, “A key takeaway here is that there is a lot of online activity, but a big gap remains between top-level activity and the robustness of follow-through at a granular level.”

Pinpointing your best digital revenue opportunities just got easier with BuzzBoard, from vSplash. We’ll be unveiling the new BuzzBoard peformance and presence intelligence platform at ILM West.

Stop by booth 103-104 to learn how you can:

• Help your SMB customers track, measure and report on performance of digital presence initiatives, analyze underlying causes for low-performing assets, identify opportunities for improvement, and manage all social media channels from a single dashboard.
• Analyze a prospect’s online status and generate opportunities for online presence and performance-based packages.
• Open new sales opportunities by identifying areas for improvement in an SMB’s marketing mix.
• Reduce churn and enhance advertiser retention.

We look forward to seeing all ILM West attendees!

In addition to agility, service providers must execute superbly in order to remain competitive and profitable, while also weathering economic challenges and enabling growth and cost savings to its partners.

Implementational readiness or executional excellence is thus what constitutes operational excellence in Internet marketing. There are companies that perished in the aftermath of the dot.com burst.   It’s fair to say that many of these companies were caught up in the exuberance of the times and failed to adequately prepare for inevitable changes in economic conditions.  By contrast, vSplash experienced firm establishment and steady growth during those turbulent times. As cost cutting became a priority, aggregators worldwide turned to us for our ability to execute and deliver at costs phenomenally less than in-house operations or other vendors.

vSplash is equipped for implementational readiness, by virtue of:

• Long-standing experience in Internet operations that witnessed the growth of the Internet marketing industry from directory listings through the present social, local and mobile trends, while overseeing the delivery of 100,000-plus websites and other Internet marketing products and services.
• Foresight derived from constant observation and research of market trends.
• A commitment to take measures to adapt to changing trends.

In Internet operations, vSplash takes its experience and preparation to the level of executional excellence with:

• Multi-disciplinary capacities ranging from pre-sales research through post-sales business analysis; fulfillment through post-fulfillment customer support.
• Continuous sourcing, training and development of intellectual assets.
• Continuous development and enhancement of custom-integrated project management tools.
• Flexibility in delivering high to low volumes without compromising on quality or upping costs.

Excecutional excellence is what has helped vSplash emerge as the partner of choice for large and small volume aggregators around the world, and it’s what enables vSplash to continue to expand into new markets.

Success in mass-marketed web services relies heavily on operational excellence – simply put, the ability to deliver what your customers need, when they need it. More specifically, it involves a holistic outcome of a carefully crafted combination of experienced leadership, expert human resources, leading-edge technology and state-of-the-art infrastructure.

For instance, a hosting provider with 50,000 monthly subscriptions has plenty of monetizing opportunity even if a fraction of them – say two percent – need or demand additional products and services. If it lacks the operational excellence to execute those 1,000 orders, the hosting company may back away from the opportunity. The cost and monthly overhead involved in setting up a plant and employing manpower alone could deter a hosting company. Add to that the challenge of acquiring the excellence itself, something that is cultivated over long experience in project management for mass order fulfillment, and the revenue opportunity from value added services becomes unattainable.

The challenges in mass-production are predominantly centered on quality, scalability, flexibility and cost. Generally speaking, aggregators do not have the ability to scale in the event that sales rise phenomenally. Or if scale goes up, quality comes down. Clearly, it is also difficult to maintain flexibility in keeping with fluctuating sales. A part of capacity is unutilized when sales are low resulting in wasted investment; on the other hand, inadequate capacity when sales are high result in longer cycle times, increased costs, reduced quality, unhappy customers and subsequently, decreased renewals.

The key to success lies in keeping quality high and cost low, which can only be achieved through operational excellence. Who can vouch for this better than vSplash, a proven white-label provider of fulfillment solutions for Internet marketing companies worldwide? vSplash derives its excellence from more than a decade of experience in mass-order fulfillment, in conjunction with economies of scale, customized order management tools, deployment and continuous training of global talent. With multiple partners, sales fluctuations are no challenge, as human resources are always engaged for one partner or another. Scales are not daunting as there is always an additional capacity from downtime with one or another partner.

Operational excellence is what enables us to deliver quality at a significantly lower cost than in-house operations. It also allows our customers to capitalize on the rich revenue opportunities that the marketplace currently presents.