Businesses turn to Internet to target narrow markets
by Rebecca McClay | Staff Writer - The Gazette
Dani Gurrie, who launched Tots2Tweens on Friday, plans to expand the Web site to have a national presence, as she did with a similar site in Australia.
Among the new community Web sites that have sprung up in recent months are Suddenvalues.com and Tots2tweens.com, adding to the county’s growing cyber-portfolio. Sudden Values is a national company that launched its local site in mid-November. It features local small-business listings, weekly e-mail announcements about discounts and rotating ‘‘spotlight” articles for Frederick County consumers.
Businesses pay about $1,500 per year for their listing, logo and the e-mail discount alert service to customers. Twenty-five businesses, including Adventure Park in New Market, Skate Frederick and BB’s Bagels & Bread, have already signed on and about two businesses per week have been joining since November, said founder Chuck Boetler. If the company’s trends in 75 other markets hold true in Frederick County, about 96 percent of the businesses will renew their advertising next year.
‘‘It’s a very low advertising and marketing cost compared to some of the other advertising media,” Boetler said. ‘‘It’s a pretty low-overhead business.”
As for most Web site operations, advertising revenue allows consumers and visitors to access the site for free. More than 1,250 users were registered for e-mail blasts early last week and the customer base is growing by about 150 members per week, Boetler said.
Advertisers are not yet spurning more conventional advertising options such as newspapers, coupons and magazines as profitable markets, Boetler said, but many of his advertisers ‘‘allocate money to us that they may have wasted in other media.”
Mike Carlisle, owner of I Made This! pottery studio in Everedy Square in downtown Frederick, is among Boetler’s advertisers. He kept his regular advertising in Frederick Magazine at about $150 per month for part of a two-page layout with neighboring merchants, while he expanded online for the first time in December.
‘‘I’m open to new and different ways of advertising,” Carlisle said. ‘‘I would hope it will pay off. When you put money into advertising, you want to see some return.”
Tots2Tweens, which launched Friday after more than a year of planning, links Frederick and other Maryland parents through a forum and connects families to child-friendly activities with an events calendar.
The site also has a blog on parenthood written by founder Dani Gurrie, mother of two children ages 2 and 4, with plans to open it to other women at various stages of motherhood. More than 250 advertisers were active Tuesday, Gurrie said.
So far, advertisers include national companies such as Amazon.com, an Oregon beauty product company and an online safety course for teenagers, but Gurrie said most advertisers are local.
‘‘Our bread and butter is the mom-and-pop shops,” she said. ‘‘These guys don’t have big budgets and we can entice them over. A lot of them are dropping their advertising for something that’s more niche-focused. Some are not buying as often in print.”
The cost is $500 per year to be included in her search engine, but her opening 50 percent discount of $250 per year is well below the cost to advertise in community newspapers, Gurrie said. Shorter-term prices vary from about $41 per month for an ad to $1.50 per day for a calendar listing.
Next year, rates will be based on the site’s traffic and net ratings, she said. ‘‘Because we don’t have a lot of history, the rates are set low,” she said. A similar parenting site Gurrie started in Australia, where she lived for several years, boasts 3,000 advertisers and 300,000 members.
Gurrie’s plans for Tots2Tweens.com are to expand it nationwide, as she did with her Australian Kidspot Web site.
‘Folks are turning to the Internet’
The two new sites’ more established competitors in Frederick County are not worried, said Steve Flook of 270 Net Technologies, which runs Frederick.com. Founded in 1998 by Area Guides with the slogan ‘‘Your Link to Your Community,” the site has a business directory, local forum, help-wanted ad section and calendar of events.
Flook, a systems architect, redesigned the original Frederick.com site in 2001 from a static listing to an interactive format after partnering with Area Guides LLC, which was also doing community Web site work on 23 sites. It now has about 600 business sponsors.
‘‘Folks are turning to the Internet more and more rather than turning to the Yellow Pages,” Flook said. Frederick.com ‘‘is getting updated on a daily basis… There wasn’t as much confidence in Internet advertising, but that’s slowly changing. Internet marketing and advertising has matured.”
With 2,000 subscribers to its e-mail services, an average of 250,000 page views per month and 35,000 unique monthly visitors, Frederick.com’s revenue increased 20 percent in 2007 over 2006, Flook said without disclosing details. Current ad rates are $375 per year. Plans include expanding blog opportunities in the next several months.
‘‘Time is on our side with the Internet,” Flook said. ‘‘More and more people are using it.”
Ellie Whims, owner of Frederick marketing agency Aduro, whose clients include Gurrie, said it has taken time for advertisers to learn how to leverage the Web efficiently, but now businesses are become ‘‘adept and savvy.”
‘‘It’s related to their need to reach the local target markets,” Whims said. ‘‘Tots2Tweens is taking it a step further. They’re looking at a subset of that market. In terms of trends, I think we’ll see more subsets. Web sites that are very specific are going to allow advertisers to optimize the money they spend to reach people.”
