This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube video titled "How Yelp Innovated Their Expansion Strategy Using A Community Manager Model" (created 2023-02-26). The excerpt is a short interview/discussion between two speakers (labelled SPEAKER A and SPEAKER B) in which SPEAKER A asks about supplier adoption and adoption curves and SPEAKER B describes Yelp's market-by-market go-to-market strategy. SPEAKER B explains tactics including recruiting Yelp Elite reviewers via a local street-marketing/community management team, hosting in-person events, leveraging those core reviewers to generate content that drives SEO, and recommends reviewing Yelp's S-1 for more detail. The clip focuses on marketplace growth, demand acquisition before scaling supply, and the role of community managers in Yelp's expansion.
One thing I did want to chat about briefly is the adoption kind of cycle, right? Or I guess you could call it maybe adoption curve. So some of the suppliers kind of a little bit, you know, later coming on. So could we maybe chat about that? And, you know, from your experience at Yelp, you know, maybe some learnings there?
I mean, sort of what we already talked about, you know, around the, you know, the restaurants and then the later verticals and things like that. You know, we took a market-by-market approach to launching Yelp, which is, I think what a lot of marketplaces do now, but at the time it wasn't actually the accepted strategy, the market-by-market approach. It was like, let's launch everywhere. And some of our competitors were giving out $5 Starbucks gift cards to get people to write reviews, right? We took the market-by-market approach. And a lot of that had to do with adoption in a market on the consumer side, on the demand side, before we started to scale up the supply side and convert more of the businesses there. And so happy to, happy to dig more into that. But that's one thing that we found and definitely encourage you guys to check out the Yelp S-1. There's a lot of great public information in there about the marketing strategy there for acquiring demand before going in on the supply side.
Yeah, I would actually love to go into that in a little bit more detail if we can.
Sure. If you, if you sort of think about it, you can think about it like a bullseye. And at the center of the bullseye is the Yelp elite reviewer, right, who writes reviews and writes 2 reviews a day, 1 review a day, every single day, and they love to do it. The job of the community manager was to go in and acquire the center of the bullseye, that Yelp Elite member who's going to go and write reviews every single day. So the way that we did that was through a street marketing team. So we would hire someone locally in the city of Seattle who knew a lot of people and their job was to go out and acquire Yelp elite reviewers, writing reviews. They were the center of the bullseye. And then over time, they would tell people about it. They would talk about Yelp. Oh, how'd you find this brunch place? Oh, I found it on Yelp. Oh, you should check it out. So there's a lot of word of mouth that would get created through that center of the bullseye. That center of the bullseye also was creating the 90% of the content, which was then getting indexed in the search results. which was then driving the SEO acquisition. So the community management team, the street marketing team, if you will, was a really innovative approach to acquiring the demand side for Yelp. I think we were one of the first websites ever to actually have parties where people met in person. You know, the common wisdom at the time was you don't meet people that you met on the internet, right? And we kind of, you know, flipped that on its head and had parties. So that was a really key part to the overall strategy, but also the marketing strategy, the community management strategy. The idea of a community manager was completely innovative. Yelp was one of the first companies to ever have them and was critical to the company's overall success. So I think that innovation on the go-to-market side is really important in marketplaces in addition to the product innovation.
