Local business digital marketing firm Scorpion has announced that it’s now a Yelp Advertising Partner. This signals the latest move in Scorpion’s expansion to new consumer touchpoints — in this case tens of millions of Yelp users. The idea is to boost its reach, thereby demonstrating more value to its SMB customers.
Specifically, the deal positions Scorpion’s SMB customers to have direct access to optimize their presence and promotion on Yelp. That includes the ability to edit their profiles, contact Yelp’s dedicated agency teams, and get early access to exclusive and piloted Yelp tools such as zip-code level ad targeting.
On that note, Yelp continues to build out its SMB presence tools. In Februrary for example, it launched a cluster of feature updates. As we wrote at the time, this includes more granular geo-targeting, AI-driven budget recommendations and deeper conversational commerce options for direct customer engagement.
Scorpion’s SMB customers will get access to these features as well as those that are exclusive to Yelp Advertising Partners, some of which are noted above. Moreover, this deal has “future-proofed” value in that Scorpion’s SMB customers can benefit from future Yelp updates, sometimes before the broader market.
Meanwhile, Yelp benefits from the deal in that it gets more SMBs on its network. This represents a gradual move for Yelp towards channel relationships to grow its SMB base. Yelp has always emphasized direct sales to SMB — which it continues to execute today — but channels continue to be cultivated for greater scale.
Scale and Intent
Beyond specifics of the ad tools, the Yelp deal should bring more value to Scorpion’s SMB customers given Yelp’s scale and user intent. The former is mentioned above in Yelp’s 8-digit user sum. As for intent, Yelp users have a high degree of commercial intent to transact locally, relative to many other local ad channels.
Part of this benefit will include the ability to target ads and promote business profiles within Yelp. Targeting parameters will involve geographic relevance, as well as contextual relevance. The latter is enabled by Yelp’s editorial segmentation in the user experience, such as vertical-specific discovery tools.
This all follows the Scorpion One platform’s integrations with social ad platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The Yelp deal also follows Scorpion’s integration with Google’s Local Services Ads booking feature, which lets Scorpion’s home services SMBs offer direct appointment booking on Google.
All of the above brings Scorpion new layers to its product suite, which in turn boosts its value proposition to SMBs. This is pursuant to the larger goal of boosting retention and lifetime value — SMB Saas fundamentals. Scorpion continues to grow rapidly, and direct integration with Yelp should allow it to continue doing so.
“The pandemic in 2020 accelerated how consumers use digital channels to discover, research, and purchase from local businesses,” Scorpion Chief Growth Officer Jamie Adams told Localogy Insider. “That trend is continuing at a rapid rate, and it’s forcing local businesses to get more focused about their digital marketing strategy. We believe we have a responsibility to help local businesses attract, get to know, and win more customers. We do that by giving them access to marketing technology that’s integrated with publishers like Yelp, alongside a team of digital marketing experts who can help guide their strategy and ensure they are accomplishing their marketing and business growth objectives.”
