Yahoo Marketing Dashboard
Yahoo Marketing Dashboard (also called LocalWorks) offers small business help with four core pieces of online marketing: reputation and tracking management, local visibility, website traffic reporting, and marketing campaign tools.
1. Reputation tracker
The reputation tracker will track and display mentions of your business from over 8,000 sources online, including Facebook and Twitter. This allows you too see where your PR and marketing efforts are effective, and where they need improvement.
2. Local visibility tool
The local visibility tool audits directory listings on the internet and allows you to manage how your business is presented. If you need to update or change your information, this tool will help you do it across the board, all at once.
3. Site analytics
With a small business you always want to have web analytics at-the-ready, and the new dashboard allows you to do this through either Yahoo’s own analytic services, or Google’s. This provides you with a set of reports so you know what keywords are working and which sites are referring customers.
4. Marketing campaigns
LocalWorks users also get the benefit of Yahoo’s new partnership with Constant Contact and Orange Soda. Constant Contact offers you email campaign marketing solutions, while Orange Soda offers social, SEO, and SEM integration for you new dashboard.
Small businesses don’t have extra time
Shannon Parker Hane, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Yahoo Small Business stated, “Despite the proliferation of online marketing, small businesses often don’t have the time, resources, or expertise to navigate all the options for promoting their businesses online.” And the dashboard combines all these resources in one place to help save time that otherwise would be spent collecting data from multiple sites and services.
It provides a complete view of their business and marketing data. And even with every other service on the market, this is still a very useful tool.
Costs involved
Currently Yahoo offers this service at three different price levels: basic, local enhanced, and LocalWorks. The basic service is free and helps customers get your contact information (address, phone, URL). Local enhanced service is $9.95/month and adds photos, web links, reporting, and company description. And LocalWorks service will give you everything in the enhanced package plus: reputation information, 40+ directory listings, and maximum exposure. Currently this plan is on sale until September 30, 2013, for $30/month (regularly $50).
