Yodle Building Feet on the Street Too

I had an interesting conversation this morning with Court Cunningham, CEO of Yodle (formerly NatPal), a local SEM firm. Yodle is in the hunt for SMB online advertising dollars and says its growing ranks of advertisers are spending roughly $1K per month — a figure that I’ve heard from others.

This translates to an average annual spend of roughly $12K, which compares with an approximate annual spend in print yellow pages of $4.5K or so.

One of the things that makes Yodle interesting and different is that, like ReachLocal, it’s opening local sales offices. It currently has five in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, DC, Atlanta, with one soon to open in Chicago. Cunningham sees many more opening next year.

The company is driving clicks but selling calls. It doesn’t guarantee clicks or calls but uses predictive modeling to set expectations (e.g., for that spend you can expect to receive X calls, based on Y clicks). Cunningham said that his sales team offers what amount to small, medium and large packages that are budget based and very simple to sell and buy.

Other than the yellow pages, ReachLocal, Yodle and Weblistic are the three trying to build local offices and sales forces.

Cunningham acknowledges that there’s a growing din among competing providers but there’s still a low level of awareness among local advertisers/SMBs about the availability of these services. Cunningham said that he thinks we’re “18 months” from a time when there will be three or four highly visible and perhaps dominant companies in the segment (beyond the YP publishers).

Beyond clicks/calls Yodle is exploring other products, such as audio and video.