Beermat Club:
Ask Mike
Think about value-added services
Q. We have a team of people who are constantly ringing venues to collect new data and now we are live, venues are contacting us to give us information about their venues. What we don't know how to solve is how to find out about new venues in new sites in order to ring them and collect the data or how to find out about venues that have closed, as the last thing the proprietor would worry about is their website listing. Steve Wilber, co-founder of www.meethalfway.com.
A. You have a real challenge here. Your revenue seems to be generated by venues themselves paying for enhanced listings and other organisations buying advertising space on your site. You do not take a margin on any services, such as meals, that people buy from the venues themselves.
Your site is quite complex and labour intensive, both for you in attracting listings and for your listed venues in providing information. Your restaurant listing information pack is 20 pages long, for example.
And your dilemma as you rightly point out is making sure enough information is current, both in the number of venues listed and removing those that are no longer operating.
You need to somehow encourage your users to always check the information by calling the venue before setting out, and to report back to you if a venue has closed.
Also, the venues themselves will have no idea if additional trade has been generated from your site, so they cannot measure if they have received value for money from their enhanced listings.
You should think about what value-added services you can provide other than just providing maps, directions and listings. What will people spend their money on when they arrive at a listed venue?
I suggest you follow the Lastminute.com model and ask venues to provide special deals, where the user clicks a box to say they wish to take advantage of the "two-drinks-for-one" offer, for example, thus proving that they found about the venue from your site.
You can then measure your response rates and report back to venues on the number of click-throughs that they have secured via your site.
I would also specifically target meeting organisers and venue finders. These industry professionals will find new uses for your site and suggest enhanced services that might be revenue-generating.
You can provide a message board or weblog facility where meetings planners can swap information and provide feedback about venues.
I recommend you discuss this with the trade organisation, Meeting Professionals International. Their UK office can be found at www.mpiuk.org.
Mike Southon, co-author of The Beermat Entrepreneur and Sales on a Beermat
First published in the Financial Times: 7th October 2006