This is your friendly neighborhood advertising platform.
At the very least, it’s a social network of pitch, neighborhood and business, by Nextdor, as its advertising business matures.
Nextdor on Thursday launched an integrated advertising platform called Nextdor Advertising (if you can believe it), which brings self-service technology and new formats and features to all its local and small businesses. Previously, these tools were only used by enterprise advertisers, such as Home Depot.
The platform brings together real-time, medical and dental services and vertically built NextDor division-specific products such as home and garden.
“We’ve heard from SMBs that they want an experience that’s consistent with what we offer to big advertisers,” said Kiran Prasad, chief product officer at Nextdor.
One change is that local businesses and service providers (plumbers, electricians, barbers, florists, etc.) can now reach neighbors (next door sounds for users) within 30 miles above the previous 10-mile range. Advertisers have more ad format options, including the ability to add a link to their own site or landing page.
Other social walled garden-type advertising platforms in NextDore lack the glossy targeting and optimization capabilities. Prasad said there is no visitor network to spread ads to users across the web, or CRM custom matches that make it look like that.
Nextdor’s pitch is like a foil for those platforms – a breath of fresh air for local businesses that must be on Google and Facebook, but no joy to be found.
Nextdor has 69 million accounts spread, including 36 million weekly active users, the company reported quarterly earnings for 2022 last week. So it’s not Google or Facebook, but it has a sharp edge for small businesses.
“The biggest thing we hear from small businesses is that they want to build an online presence,” Prasad said. They set up a Facebook and Instagram… but started with almost zero followers and struggled to grow even if they paid for the promotion of the account. They set up a website. Cricket
Business does not require NextDore followers to reach out to a critical mass, say, or pay for any traction. A pizza chain can create an account and start posting to local neighbor feeds.
Another advantage, according to Prasad, is that business features and users of other local platforms are often skewed against business owners. For example, NextDore does not have a “review” or star rating, as you would find with Google, Yelp or other local service platforms. It uses “suggestions”, he said, so positive posts appear on the account but the owner is not afraid of negative reviews to pan their business.
For NextDor, the challenge is to convert customers into free small business account users paying advertising platforms.
NextDore has 2.8 million business and local service provider accounts that already exist, Prasad said. However, the company did not disclose how many people jumped into the ad.