The pandemic has pushed Yelp into the limelight as a vital source of information.It was a really straightforward sell to the sponsors.

They got a massive audience of individuals on the verge of making a decision, and they helped them to get to the desired store — whether it’s a restaurant or a retail store — or a plumber.

Tom Foran, Yelp’s SVP of National Sales, has being vocal about the company’s achievements since its inception in 2004. When in-store shopping, indoor dining, and in-person services were suddenly shut down, a firm focused entirely on generating foot traffic needed to adjust quickly. And, Yelp was right there!

The brand was obliged to add extra touchpoints so that customers could place an order ahead of time for pick-up in store or take-out if the business is a restaurant. These were the things the world didn’t really focus on before the pandemic hit because people were stuck with the clicks or bricks world. 

Communicate with the National Brands

The epidemic, like in so many other cases, added urgency to already underway transitions. Yelp four years before the pandemic had discovered a business strategy centred on small businesses in his area. The objective was to push the company’s national sales to new heights. 

The company has done a lot of listening to agencies and huge national companies, as well as regional companies, over the last four years, and refined the offering to allow those brands to better tell their stories through Yelp.

There’s a big difference between looking for local businesses and looking for businesses that are close to the user. Yes, people are interested in discovering hidden local treasures or mom’n’pop shops, but they are also shopping for neighbouring national brand outlets. But it’s more than that. 

The company discovered that what matters isn’t whether there’s a Starbucks nearby, but whether the pumpkin spice latte is available. The question is hand is “how do we let brands express their limited-time-offer story, or what’s hot and new in a business that we already know about?”

Showcase Ads

The solution was a new product called Showcase Ads, which allows a company like Starbucks, Target, or Macy’s to tell people not just that a branch is nearby, but also what’s fresh, relevant, and timely at that location. That was the first step towards this brand’s success.

Step two was to put in place a more comprehensive range of attribution services. There may not be that degree of understanding at the local SMB level, but when working with bigger agencies and brands, proof is required.

LiveRamp and Foursquare, for example, aided in demonstrating the new product’s efficacy. LiveRamp and Yelp have a partnership. They can trace real transaction volume to exposure to Yelp ads because of their links with a number of big shops. 

The spotlight on the pandemic

Yelp is actually more relevant than ever before, thanks to the pandemic. Over the last 15 months, the nice-to-have of a national brand sharing their hyper-local narrative has become a necessity. Users didn’t need to know if there was a store nearby any longer. “Is it a Starbucks, and if so, is it open, or is it merely a drive-thru?” 

Yelp were catapulted into the spotlight of importance all of a sudden. It raised their profile for some of these national businesses in an odd way. It also compelled them to change their product suite. It used to be enough for Yelp to offer something like a Foursquare report to prove that it brought in foot traffic. 

It allows them to tap into e-commerce or digital transaction budgets that they earlier didn’t focus on in the past because they did not have enough to do with attracting customers into physical locations.

The first step is to conduct an in-depth search.

Of course, one of the pandemic’s major effects has been to increase the importance of search by encouraging online product discovery and purchase. In terms of search, Yelp’s architecture is very unique because they don’t have an open keyword taxonomy; instead, it’s a category-based system. They can negatively target keywords, but it’s not the traditional search paradigm.

Users usually come to Yelp with a certain goal in mind. They are “down-funnel” in the sense that they know what they want to achieve. What works in search is a pretty precise method of hiring the proper categories and continuing to spend money into search. When it comes to effectiveness and the down-funnel consumer, it’s still the best. Because of that down-funnel user, they are able to secure budgets and continue to perform well.

Again, the pandemic has prompted reforms. They definitely modified the search offerings to address what is more prominent to the consumer now – it’s not just about finding a burger or a hotel room. The epidemic has prompted companies like Yelp to step up their game, which is why they developed something like the COVID-19 health and safety matters, where consumers can see, for example, if the staff is wearing masks, when you receive a search result. Are there any virtual options? Is there an outside service for a beauty shop or a salon?”

Yelp has evolved into a learning tool.

Business pages provide what is referred to as “a broader canvas” in addition to enriching search results with more information. During COVID-19, Yelp had a “great sense of duty” for providing correct and truthful information to all users. Yelp was assisting businesses with surfacing health and safety information by the summer of 2020. Before they produced anything beautiful, it was a pretty scrappy effort to let any business to explain what was going on merely in a text box. Then they expanded the health and safety umbrella to include items like curbside pickups, restaurant DIY meal kits, and outdoor services for beauty and fitness enterprises. 

It struck a chord with customers as well as businesses who had previously been satisfied or dissatisfied with their ratings but now recognised Yelp as a valuable resource. According to Yelp statistics, 2.7 million company pages have an updated COVID section, while 1.1 million highlight a business’s health and safety measures.

What the future looks like?

The Q1 2021 Economic Average report from Yelp shows a return to something resembling normalcy, with new company openings increasing and restaurant, food, professional, and auto services company openings all above Q1 2020 levels. Is Yelp still committed to its new model of driving both online and offline interaction in the future? “The short answer is – yes!

Yelp has been satisfied with doing what they did best, which is the natural online-to-offline store traffic lift. However, they were definitely selling themselves short because they have this audience that is both high intent and relatively indecisive. Yelp is enthusiastic about what this business at Yelp can become as they continue to engage in different portions of the purchasing funnel now that they have the Showcase product that have helped them evolve their attribution strategy to evaluate transactions caused by a campaign rather than just foot traffic.

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