Are Ad Brokers the Answer For Small Advertisers on Nextdoor?
Nick Leffler — January 25, 2019 — January 25, 2019
How do you advertise on Nextdoor with a small budget? By small budget, I’m talking $ 500-$ 2,000 per month. Ad brokers are the only answer as of right now. Read this before you jump to that conclusion.
Advertising on Nextdoor is fairly limited as I’ve written about before in previous posts about advertising on Nextdoor.
The only two options up to this point (even after many years) is to either
- Have a huge budget that only a national brand can afford ($ 5,000+ per month).
- Be a real estate agent or broker (and even then it’s still limited).
If you aren’t either of those two then you can’t advertise directly with Nextdoor. That has opened the market a bit for some third party players, though.
Yes, there is a such thing as an ad broker for Nextdoor ads. The only problem? I’m not sure how trustworthy they are or how effective they are.
I know of two companies which have services to facilitate advertising for small businesses on Nextdoor. One is highly questionable in their tactics, the other more trustworthy but the effectiveness is still left up in the air.
What is a Nextdoor ad broker?
These are companies who buy up large blocks of ad space on Nextdoor, break it up into smaller chunks, then sell it to small businesses for lower monthly costs.
Budgets for Nextdoor ad brokers still start out at $ 500/month for the most basic ad package, though. That means they still aren’t that cheap for a small business budget.
One company that offers advertising on Nextdoor sells it as a full-service plan. They seem to be more trustworthy. They work with you to create ad copy, images, etc.
So, if you’ve ever worked with an agency to do Facebook ads then it’s probably somewhat similar. You pay a management fee to the company and then you pay for ads on top of that.
The legitimacy of at least one of the ad broker companies is up in the air though. I’ll explain because I’ve received some highly questionable information likely from them.
Are they legitimate?
I can’t speak for all Nextdoor ad brokers but I can speak for one as for their legitimacy. It isn’t good. I won’t name names here because I don’t want to promote the idea further.
An example
A few months ago I was left a comment on my advertising on Nextdoor blog post. This company left a link to their landing page that is geared towards selling advertising on Nextdoor. The commenter didn’t even leave a legitimate email address.
The email address of the spam comment was a @gmail.com account which is nearly always a sure sign of a scam.
Here’s the comment marked as spam from my website:
As you can see it looks highly suspicious. Why wouldn’t they talk to me directly to share what they do? I felt that I needed to do a bit more research on what this company is doing.
You won’t find links to the actual website because I don’t know how trustworthy it is. Any company that resorts to spam tactics is absolutely not trustworthy in my book.
Verifying legitimacy with Nextdoor
I emailed Nextdoor with information on the page and asked about the “recently partnered with Nextdoor” claim. What I got from Nextdoor was a less than a satisfactory answer and never clarified if there was in fact any partnership.
Finally I received this email:
That doesn’t make it look like there’s any sort of partnership. I got conflicting information on whether the partnership was legitimate and then I got this email which seems to say you’re on your own if you advertise with this company.
The lack of accountability and clarity on whether there is an official partnership or not makes me question that companies claim of a partnership.
Wouldn’t Nextdoor have something about the partnership on their website if it was true?
I couldn’t find anything.
When I search Google for the two companies, there’s no overlap. The questionable company has information about Nextdoor but Nextdoor has nothing about the questionable company.
Suspicious.
Here are the advertising plans from the company and their claim that they’ve partnered with Nextdoor.
What should you do?
There aren’t a lot of options for small businesses when it comes to advertising on Nextdoor right now. These “ad brokers” have added a bit of hope but the trust just isn’t there.
The one that I think might be trustworthy would still be priced above most small businesses budgets who are trying to get established. It’s well above the budget especially given the potential for the advertising to provide a positive return on investment (ROI).
So, it’s ultimately your decision on what to do but my recommendation would be to have patience and hold off on advertising on Nextdoor for now.
I know a lot of people are itching to advertise but using an ad broker for it isn’t the way to go.
Wait for the platform to offer native advertising that you can then work with an agency on.
The steps you should be taking on Nextdoor right now is to be sure you’ve put some time into creating a great Nextdoor business page. After that, ask for some recommendations and then keep an eye out in your feed for people looking for what you do.
You’re absolutely allowed to recommend yourself.
That’s going to be the most effective way to gain traction and take advantage of the Nextdoor platform right now.
While Nextdoor will be a great platform to advertise on, it’s not there yet. Your advertising dollars can still be effective with pay per click advertising and Facebook ads as long as you work with the right person and do it the right way.
There are definitely more ways to do it wrong than right.
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