With the arrival of the internet and mobile smartphones, consumers have adopted new ways to do local shopping. And if consumers have changed, so has Yellow Pages Group.  We now offer a full suite of digital experiences that truly reinvent shopping.  While we still publish the Yellow Pages print directories, we are now the #1 digital company in Canada.

Let’s look at what this means:

• We have one of the largest digital audience in the country:
- Our websites are visited by more than 9 milion Canadians every month.
- Our Mobile applications have been downloaded on 3 milion Canadians smartphones and now represent over 30% of our searches

• YPG also enjoys partnerships with many of the digital power brands, such as foursquare, Twitter, and Google.
• YPG was also the first company in its category to open up its API. More than 1,500 developers are already using our data to develop a wide variety of mobile apps.
• With our Yellow Pages^TM 360 Solution, we now offer a full suite of affordable digital solutions, specifically developed for Canadian small businesses, including Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, web sites and even mobile advertising.
• In fact, having sold close to 10,000 web sites to small and medium-sized businesses in Canada, YPG is now on its way to become the largest web site provider in the country.
• No other company in Canada has more online customers than we do. We now serve more than 230,000 merchants for their online marketing needs.

For National Brands, we have Mediative, our performance media company, recently recognized as Canada’s #1 SEO company. Mediative now serves some of the biggest brands in North America for their online marketing needs.

Mediative also manages Canada’s leading ad display network, managing the ad inventory of over 600 web sites.

With annualized online revenues of over $340 million dollars, YPG accounts for over 17% of the total Canadian online market. No other Canadian company even comes close to making as much online revenue as we do.

Yellow Pages Group has become a Canadian digital powerhouse, and as you can see we’re no longer the Yellow Pages your parents used to know.

I’m very proud of everyone who contributed to this incredible transformation. I want to extend my best wishes for the holidays and to congratulate everyone that contributed to this – you guys rock!

See you in 2012!

The attendees came from both new and old, small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), including Independent Jewellers, a 30-year-old company that has managed to dominate the local jewellery industry. As this local success story is looking for continued growth, it sent corporate salesperson Mark Tottle and store manager Cameron Thomas to the seminar to learn how they can help pave their resolution to gain a larger online presence.

“We are thinking of taking our own web site to an e-commerce platform and we’re getting more into social media,” Tottle told one of our staff. He indicated that he considered the seminar as a starting point.

Nicholas Leung, a young businessowner whose computer tech service Geeks On Site is just three years old, was more skeptical going in. “‘The book’ [Yellow Pages] has been good for me. I get a lot of non-referral traffic from print. From what I’m hearing, advertising online is iffy.”

He added, “I’m not sold on it. If your computer goes down, you’re not going to find me anyway!”

But Leung’s tune had changed when we caught up with him after speaker Sean Ballard, YPG Director of Performance Marketing Products, gave SMB attendees tips on digital marketing and emphasized the holistic approach to marketing that is required to maximize their online presence.

After hearing about the rapid growth of mobile ownership amongst Canadians, a number expected to surpass laptop ownership by 2015, Leung admitted, “I never noticed how fast the trend had grown.”

Even though he’s one to use his smartphone, not necessarily his computer, to quickly fish for information, he didn’t realize how common that was. “It really does make sense in general because it’s so simplified, right? Because everyone’s on the go all the time.”

The second speaker, Bill Barnes, VP of Business Development for Mediative, YPG’s new division helping advertisers get results for digital marketing, expanded on the power of SEM and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Advertiser Debbie Lewanzick’s company, Monarch Home Improvements, which sells and installs high-end countertops, has tried traditional advertising for years, from books to billboards, but has been sheepish about digital marketing — especially when it comes to social. The YPG seminar was very good timing for Lewanzick. Her company had just updated its website this week, the first time in at least a year. Barnes’s talk had her taking a mental audit of how to optimize and get the most out of her site, to help increase her customer base.

In sum, this digital marketing Seminar Series has been about guiding small and medium-sized businesses in the often intimidating world of digital marketing, and helping them take the first dive, so that they can later swim on their own and take the necessary steps to harness their online marketing potential.

In terms of digital knowledge, the attendance was quite split. But even the people who were blessed with a 2.0 site wanted to know how to improve their effectiveness with search engines.

“We’re looking to enhance our customers’ online experience,” said Angela Gaune of Gaune Studios, who was attending with her mother-in-law, Margaret Gaune, of Greenway Tax Services. “That’s one of the things we have to work on, the look and the feel of the website, and maybe get some insight into the user experience.”

Allison Banman, owner of the Rising Star Academy of Arts, said that her school was expanding and that therefore she needed to be more visible online.

“I’d like to find out more about SEO (search engine optimization). I hear about it, but I’m vague about it,” said Banman, who does regularly test her website for results in various search engines’ rankings. “Last I heard, we were ninth.”

The morning’s first presenter, Matthieu Houle, product director (mobile and platforms) at YPG Canada examined how phenomena like social media, cell phones and smartphones had infiltrated our lives and how the marketing world may look over the next few years.

“By 2015, more searches will be done on a mobile than on a desktop,” he said.

Bill Barnes, the VP of Business Development with Mediative, was the second presenter, and dealt with the topics of SEO and SEM, as well as how people use search engines, noting that the search itself is the connection between intent and content.

“You only have a split second to impress someone, so make sure (your site) matches their intent,” he said.

After the seminar, many attendees wanted to immediately have a chat with the Digital Marketing experts. One of the popular topics was mobile optimization; would their sites be accessible via smartphones?

“Everyone uses their mobile (device) right now,” said Leanne Wolfe, of the Transcona Country Club, who also said she was surprised at future trends pointing to an even greater depth of mobile device use. The Country Club has had a website for years, but Wolfe wanted to gather more information. (She was also lucky enough to win an iPad in the draw after the seminar.) “I took down lots of info. I have all these ideas right now.”

Robert Fillion, from Vacuum Depot, a business in the outskirts of Winnipeg also seemed to have taken Matthieu Houle and Bill Barnes’ tips at heart: “I have to check with my IT guy if our website is good for mobile optimization. And I have to check with my competitors’ sites to see what keywords they’re using.”

For those who also want to add more to their IT guy’s to-do list, or just to improve your own online presence, you can check out where YPG’s next stop for the Online Marketing Seminar Series will be at http://360.yellowpages.ca/en/events-seminars.

For a series designed to help smaller businesses maximize benefits from digital marketing and compete with larger firms, it was an appropriate setting. Attendees were all small and medium business (SMB) owners or managers in the greater Halifax region, who strive to grow and increase market share in a local economic context that has its challenges. This free online marketing seminar not only helped them better understand digital marketing, but it also gave them practical tools to start harnessing online marketing and grow their business immediately, despite a sluggish local economic environment characterized among other things by lower consumer spending.

“We’re trying to understand how to target better, from a web perspective, and I have an interest in finding out here what the search engine trends are,” Greg Tees, an advertiser who markets premium fiberglass windows, told our staff prior to the seminar.

George Hanna, a business counselor for Immigration Settlement and Integration Services (ISIS), was also looking to stay ahead of the digital curve. “The online market is booming in the last two years and you have to catch up sometimes,” he told our staff.

It was hardly surprising, then, to see a diverse mix of attendees at the Halifax seminar, where Tracy Smith, Vice President of Performance Marketing & Go-To-Market at Yellow Pages Group, delivered a detailed overview of important trends in search, mobile and social media marketing, as well as group buying. He was followed by Bill Barnes, VP of Business Development at Mediative, a Yellow Pages Group Company. Bill delved deep into the topic of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), explaining techniques that small and medium-sized businesses can use to their advantage.

Among Smith’s tips were frequent updates of website content and a careful approach to group buying programs, while Barnes stressed relevant keywords and an understanding of the psychology behind consumer searches.

The audience, which represented a variety of organizations, from small technical companies to not-for-profit groups, got an informative boost from both presentations.

“I found it helpful. Some of the social media (Smith) was talking about, I haven’t taken advantage of that, but I am aware of how that’s a growing trend,” Craig Day, of the printing company Atlantic Digital Reproductions, told our staff. “There were a few additions that he mentioned for search that we’ll be noting when we update our website.

For Annemieke Vink of Kachina Health Associates, the presentations were a chance to get an online marketing primer. “It is a new world of technology that my generation comes to behind, so this was a way to get a global perspective on how these changes have impacted marketing and business development,” she told our staff.

Tamuno Cookey, a realtor for Royal Lepage, was excited to implement some of the tips offered by Smith and Barnes. “I just went through the process of starting a website and I’m trying to figure out how to implement different social media aspects into that website. This really helped out.”

We look forward to helping out more small and medium-sized businesses when the Yellow Pages Group online marketing Seminar Series continues to other Canadian cities.. In addition to the presentations, participants at these free events can also chat with our expert speakers.

To see the full Seminar Series schedule, please go to http://360.yellowpages.ca/en/events-seminars. We look forward to meeting you!

We decided to bring back the seminars following the overwhelming success of our first series in spring, and the positive feedback we received from participating small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who were looking for expert advice and practical work tools to break into and better understand the Online Marketing industry. We found that 40 percent of participants (made up of mainly SMB owners and executives) didn’t yet have a company website. So our goal with these talks is to showcase the potential of online marketing and to help businesses maximize their visibility so that they can be top-of-mind for consumers ready to make a purchase.

The first of our expert speakers at this first fall seminar was Tracy Smith, Vice President of Performance Marketing & Go-To-Market at Yellow Pages Group. His presentation, “Driving Success with Digital Marketing,” highlighted the major trends small businesses should be keeping an eye out for such as mobile marketing, social media, group buying and search engine marketing.

Next up was Bill Barnes, VP of Business Development at Mediative, a Yellow Pages Group company that addresses the national market for global brands. His talk focused on ways to optimize the content of a website with SEO in order to rank higher in search engines like Yahoo!, Google and Bing. He offered the audience a comprehensive set of tips and tools on search engine marketing (SEM), where choosing the right keywords is essential to a cost-effective campaign.

Just like the first series, participants responded extremely positively to the seminar. Ottawa advertiser Joe Devlin, who offers property maintenance services to commercial and residential customers, told our staff that he came into the experience knowing very little about the online world and left understanding how important it is to business today, motivated to learn more. “Customers are going online much more to look for businesses,” he said. “I’m not really a computer person but I’m going to spend the rest of the day browsing the Internet for more information.”

Michel Lajoie, a Hull-based photographer and long-time Yellow PagesTM advertiser, was also inspired by the talks, which he said made him want to explore the world of marketing beyond print. “I need to build a website for people to see my work,” he said. “Around 90 percent of my clientele is composed of new clients, and more and more of them are searching online.”

Zamana Kinkela – a Hull-based advertiser whose company, Gestion Ciga, offers outsourcing services in management – told our team that because there are so many options when it comes to online marketing, it can be overwhelming. “This free seminar is a great idea because it helps us understand where to start,” Kinkela said. “What I learned is that I have to fully understand my business and recognize my needs, then look into the best options to answer those needs. I like the idea of the Yellow Pages 360° Solution; it’s an all-in-one package where everyone can pick what’s best for their company.”

To see the full schedule for our upcoming, not-to-be-missed seminars, go to 360.yellowpages.ca/en/events-seminars. Participants will also have the opportunity to meet with our expert speakers at the end of each event, to ask questions or give comments on the talks. We look forward to seeing you all there soon!