Today’s SMB continues to evolve, given several macro factors. How do today’s SMB profile and how does it differ from ten years ago? No one can answer that local commerce question better than Yelp and its reams of first-party data. We talked to Yelp directly to find out.

Key Takeaways

Here are a few key messages or insights that we gleaned from this session.

• Today’s SMBs are stress tested from several market challenges (Covid, great resignation, etc.), which have raised the bar for their digital marketing savvy.
• Despite some economic doom and gloom, there’s good news such as year-over-year growth in new business openings.
• Not only that but, attrition in categories like retail and restaurants has been offset by growth in home services.
• This home-services inflection is driven by macroeconomic factors such as homeowners that are renovating rather than moving, due to their attachment to low mortgage rates.
• There’s also meaningful growth in female-led businesses, even in categories that defy stereotypes, such as landscaping and home services.
• Key trends can also be seen in Yelp’s product development, such as its request-a-quote function – which has become popular on both consumer and SMB ends.
• Going forward we’ll see Yelp integrate more AI to help consumers find the right local services by asking what they’re looking for in natural language queries.

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Yelp sits in a unique position to gauge local consumer behavior and business activity. We’ll break down its first-party insights and trend data to understand what’s really happening out there today.

Speakers:

Jim Chappelle, Yelp