Jay Bean - OrangeSoda
After Jay Bean launched and sold his former company ah-ha (now Enhance Interactive) to Marchex, he put his experience in local search, web marketing, and company building to work at OrangeSoda. OrangeSoda’s primary focus is on helping small and medium-sized companies have online marketing success. They do this through a web-based system that lets OrangeSoda and their clients easily create and manage campaign, track success, view reports, and optimize search results. Bean explains the secret behind the OrangeSoda name to Brad Baldwin as well as why it is focused on online marketing for small and medium business.
The following is a transcript of a vidcast originally published on RockyMountainVoices.com
Brad Baldwin: This is Brad Baldwin with Rocky Mountain voices and I'm here with Jay Dean, the CEO and founder of an interestingly named company, that is OrangeSoda. Welcome to that vidcast.
Jay Bean: Thank you.
Brad Baldwin: You've got to tell me first about OrangeSoda. I mean, where did the name OrangeSoda come from?
Jay Bean: Well, I can tell you a lie or I can tell you the truth. We're different type of company and we wanted a different type of name. So, we looked through the archive of Jay Bean-domain names and OrangeSoda was down almost always, so that's the name that we chose.
Brad Baldwin: So the old marketing trick of, “I need a domain name.”
Jay Bean: Yeah, technology companies will typically go after technology-type names, something that describes what they do. We're going after a different market here. It's more of a small business, local market and we wanted a name that sort of stood out from the crowd, something that we could brand that was easy to spell, easy to remember. OrangeSoda fit the bill.
Brad Baldwin: Your voice greeting says that “it’s online marketing with fizz.” Is that the tagline?
Jay Bean: That's the tagline we use. We do online marketing, our system and technology is all centered around online marketing. The "fizz" ties in the name.
Brad Baldwin: Ties it back to the brand. Talk about what it is that you offer in the space -- in the online marketing space.
Jay Bean: OrangeSoda was really developed as a technology company, focused around local advertisers. Helping local advertisers come online. Online advertising is very complicated. From the standpoint if you're setting up a Google campaign or a Yahoo campaign, MSN, Salt Lake Tribune, wherever you're going to this set up your online advertising. With these services, you have to learn the dynamics of those networks, learn how to upload your keywords, change your titles and descriptions, so on and so forth. We know that dentists, plumbers, and doctors are really good at what they do, whether it's fixing teeth or fixing toilets. We know that they don't have the time, the money, or the resources to learn how to market their products. So we've developed a technology that simplifies the entire process. OrangeSoda is an all-inclusive system where they can login, we help them set up their titles and descriptions, and all their different networks. Our backend system actually optimizes their campaign for their best performing keywords, titles, descriptions, creatives, whatever the descriptions may be across multiple networks. So they don't need to login to Google, Microsoft, or MSN now. They can log in to OrangeSoda and see the reporting across the board. They can see how many clicks they had, how many users came to their website, how many conversions they had from those views, so on and so forth. It's all-inclusive and it makes it easy for the user.
Brad Baldwin: So it sounds like a publishing tool -- you can gather stats and push it out-- and a reporting system.
Jay Bean: Reporting analytics. There are great tools and systems out there: like Omniture. If you're a larger advertiser and you have the resources to manage a campaign like that -- that's great. But we know there are smaller advertisers that have only $1000-3000 every month. They don't have the money and resources available to warrant paying for an expensive analytic tool. There are other good analytics tools as well: Google analytics, and some others, but you still have to do it yourself. With the OrangeSoda platform, an advertiser can come to us and say, "Okay, I have $100 or $1000 to spend." We tell them how we can allocate so much for pay-per-click campaigns, search engine optimization, etc. and it's all managed on our backend system. We kind of hold their hand on the front, by helping out with their titles and descriptions.
Brad Baldwin: So really, the gut of your advertising is reaching out to the smaller business?
Jay Bean: It can be smaller business or it can be a larger brand, but with a local presence. An example might be Jiffy Lube: we do their local campaigns and a few other markets. They might have bigger budgets nationally, but when you break it down to the local level the budgets are a lot smaller. We manage their thousands of keywords. It's kind of too small for an ad agency but it's perfect for what our technology does. We have other larger brands that we use as well, but our true focus is on a local basis. We have customers in every state using our technology and our services to manage their campaigns.
Brad Baldwin: So how do you get these customers? Is it all online? Are you kind of drinking your own Kool-Aid?
Jay Bean: We get customers in a few different ways. One is through partnering with companies who already have a large number of small business clients, and they're looking for new revenue streams. Everybody can't be an online marketing expert. We'll also go direct to customers through inside sales teams. Or we meet existing clients at trade shows or other places. We have relationships with interactive ad agencies: they’ll have customers who don't meet their minimum requirement and will then refer them to us.
Brad Baldwin: After the “dot.bomb”, the crash, it seems like everyone became a search engine optimization expert. Is that something that you guys have found -- that it's just a cottage industry and lots of individuals who say that they know what they do but they really don't?
Jay Bean: We actually really lived through that era. The last company that I started in 1999 was ah-ha.com. We actually lived through the whole downturn of the Internet. The Internet was going to go away. We lived and breathed this industry for the last 7-9 years. With search engine optimization and search engine marketing, there will be webmasters that say they can do it. If they're focused on designing websites, they list it on the things that they can do. Do they really do it well? Possibly. Most of them, no. It really takes time and expertise and knowledge.
Really we do one thing and we want to do it well. We’re focused on a marketplace that has minimal focus. An ad agency doesn't want to dip in and service $500-1000 clients, but we've developed the technologies and processes to manage these types of clients. It really comes back to our experience in the pay-per-click industry: we were the leading pay per click search engine. We have tens of thousands of clients that are small clients. Being located in Provo, Utah, our cost of labor is a little different than it is in Seattle, San Francisco, New York, or Chicago. So, we’re able to do more on the service side and helping customers get set up in the right way. We give them ongoing support that they need, really utilizing the technology that we've built. It's all proprietary in developing the systems to be able to manage tens of thousands of clients in an efficient manner.
Brad Baldwin: So it feels to me like this segment of online marketing is really becoming an important part of every business strategy, regardless of the size of the organization. If there's anything that's happened over the last seven years, it's that everyone has decided that, "I do need to play, I need to put some marketing budget in that area." Is that something that you're finding? Are we still educating the market?
Jay Bean: We're still doing a lot of educating in the marketing area. Local search/local online advertising has been talked about for years and tons of companies have tried to capture their piece of this marketplace. Google and Yahoo even want a piece of this marketplace; they have both stated in the last six or seven months that this will be a $10-12 billion market place in the next two or three years. Obviously, Google and Yahoo have the resources. They can go and educate this marketplace if they want to, but they really don't necessarily have the resources to support the smaller guys. Their systems are really made as hands-off -- you really do it yourself. We found that these advertisers in the last six or seven years, they really need a little bit more hands-on, especially when they are just getting started. They know how to set up a yellow page ad, they know how to call a rep and set an ad in the newspaper, but when it comes to online, it's a whole different ball game. That's why we've developed what we've developed in order to really service this marketplace and give them real value for the dollars that they’re spending. We have to take a fee, obviously we can't do this for free. Although, we would like to, it doesn't really work... groceries are good, I guess. Our technology enables them to get simplified reporting, and even in-depth data. They want to see what's going on, they are still managers. They can also track their off-line services with this: we offer telephone tracking so they can see how many calls they got off of their website or maybe they want a different telephone number for their billboard and they can check all of this even to the same online system.
Brad Baldwin: This industry keeps changing, that's the other thing that's hard for these mom-and-pop businesses. What worked for them on Google a couple years ago, you now need to reinvent yourself to keep up every other month.
Jay Bean: Exactly. What worked on Google six months ago doesn't necessarily work today, it's continually changing. Even pay per click ads, it performs one way today and will perform differently next month. These continue to change and a lot of that change is good. Some of the local search continues to increase and there are more local identifiers. Before, someone may search for "sunglasses" and now they might search for "sunglass store in Utah" or "dentist in Topeka, Kansas." Those local identifiers change the way that people advertise on paid search. What it does is gives the smaller advertiser, smaller business an opportunity to compete against companies who have multimillion dollar budgets. Obviously Target is a big company, they do search engine optimization. But even the local jeweler can compete with Target because they use local identifiers and can really benefit.
Brad Baldwin: Well, it sounds like you have your arms full at OrangeSoda. Cool name. I probably should take the camera and film some of the bikes so we can get some of that cool stuff out front. I appreciate the time sitting down today. OrangeSoda.com, that's where we should tell people to go. Good to meet you, Jay, and good luck.
Jay Bean: Thank you very much.
