In Race to Go Local, Brands Push Ahead Cautiously
There’s been a quiet emigration in the local technology world away from the mom-and-pop market, with startups and existing players alike moving upstream to bigger brands with more. During a panel at Street Fight Summit in New York Thursday, executives from Groupon, YP, and the well-funded upstart Brand Networks sat down with AdAge’s Michael Learmonth to talk about the growing interest in local among brands, and the limitations that are holding them back…
Who’s The Future Of Local Search? The Consumer.
As more and more consumers look to buy, as well as find and discover local businesses, online, the industry has evolved. During a panel at Street Fight Summit in New York Thursday, panelists from Yelp, Bing, and Yext gathered to discuss the evolving role of commerce in the local search industries, and strategies for the industry to adapt…
What Brands Are Doing Wrong On Mobile
As consumers spend more time using mobile devices than browsing the web and even watching television, a mobile strategy isn’t an opportunity; it’s a matter of survival, says Urban Airship chief marketing officer Brent Hieggelke. During a keynote at Street Fight Summit in New York Thursday, Hieggelke argued that brands need to change the way they approach mobile, shifting from looking at the platform as yet another marketing channel to treating it as a central tool in creating a better consumer experience…
Street Fight Daily: Showrooming’s False Threat, Groupon ‘Designed’ For Mobile
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Showrooming Is Not A Threat To Retailers’ Revenue (eConsultancy)… Groupon CEO: Our Deals Are ‘Designed For Mobile’ (CNBC)… OpenTable Is Hoping For A Second Helping (PandoDaily)…
Why It’s So Hard to Create Marketplaces for Local Commerce
Recognizing the success of Uber, startups and incumbents alike rushed to replicate the company’s model in other verticals, developing new products to help business and consumers buy and sell local services like car repair, house cleaning, and haircuts. MyTime, the 9-month old project launched by RedBeacon founder Ethan Anderson, is one of these and is staying the course. When I spoke with Anderson last week, he outlined a few key strategic decisions and clever hacks, which have helped the company get some early traction for its marketplace..
Case Study: Cosi Drives In-Store Visits With Mobile Campaign
Traditional media buys can generate brand awareness, but when it comes to driving foot traffic, it’s all about mobile. “The most important thing for us is to drive traffic to either increase visits from current customers or to bring new customers in,” says Marc Lapides, director of marketing at Cosi, the fast-casual restaurant chain with more than 100 locations in 16 states and the District of Columbia. “We really wanted to find a way to use mobile technologies to drive people into the store.”
Street Fight Daily: eBay Acquires Shutl, Tracking Companies Set New Rules
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… eBay Acquires Shutl, Races Amazon To Your Front Door (ReadWrite)… Tracking Companies Agree to Notify Shoppers, But Retailers Demur (Wall Street Journal)… Why Longtime Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy Just Agreed to Work for Clinkle’s 22-Year-Old CEO (AllThingsD)…
What Legacy Local Media Can Learn From the Red Sox
In advance of 2013, the Red Sox again fired the team’s manager, changed the executive suite, and reinvented the workforce. The new goal: replace high-cost and complaining “superstars” with a talented new group who bought into the new model. The organization became more horizontal and the salary of the team dropped by 20%. Meanwhile, over the course of the year, productivity increased by 40%…
6 Tools Restaurants Can Use to Fill Tables at the Last Minute
With one in five dinner reservations resulting in a no-show, according to some estimates, restaurant owners are always searching for low-cost ways to fill empty tables at the last-minute. Increasingly, these frustrated restaurateurs are turning to hyperlocal vendors for a solution. Utilizing a combination of geotargeted messaging and real-time inventory control, restaurants are able to incentivize would-be diners to come in and fill tables that would otherwise have remained empty. Here are six tools that restaurants can use to fill tables at the last minute…
How Back-Office Innovation Is Transforming Local Marketing
Over the past few years, we’ve watched as a host of payment processing, point-of-sale and scheduling services have popped up, helping local businesses manage day-to-day operations in more efficient ways. Using the cloud, these ‘commerce’ software plays have begun to undercut a number of large legacy companies, shaking up industries which have remained static for decades. In a new report, Street Fight takes a look at the impact of supply-side technologies on the local marketing industry, detailing the opportunities and risks that these emergent services present to existing solutions providers…
How to Set a Pricing Structure for Your Hyperlocal Business
Most hyperlocal founders think the products they’ve developed are priceless. The small business owners they’re selling to, however, are likely to have a very different view. Deciding on a pricing structure is one of the most difficult challenges a hyperlocal business is likely to face in its earliest days. Here are six strategies for determining the right pricing structure as an early-stage startup from hyperlocal executives who’ve managed to crack the code…
Chart: The Local Marketing Landscape
The shift from print to digital is old news, but what’s shaking up the industry is the introduction of cloud-based business management systems — for everything from payments and point-of-sale to schedule — into the marketing mix. Marketers can write algorithms to connect supply and demand, automating the way businesses and consumers interact locally. Yelp meets Booker. Facebook meets OpenTable. These combinations will bring together consumer data from every stage of the purchase funnel, automate marketing plans and messaging, and reduce implementation and sales costs for both marketers and solutions providers…
How Audiences Must be Redefined for the Mobile Platform
Now, marketers are rushing to grapple with a new medium in the smartphone, struggling to understand what audience means in the mobile age. In considering audience on mobile, marketers need to understand the constantly changing context of a user and the implications it has on the needs and attitudes of the consumer. Marketers need to listen to all the signals a smartphone provides, the most important of which is undoubtedly location…
5 Leading Indicators of the Future of Local Search
The local search market is changing. On the buy-side, enterprise advertisers are starting to assert their control, demonstrating that they can leverage large footprints to compete in local with clean distributed data, and accurate claimed citations. Consumers, meanwhile, increasingly want to use their mobile devices for more activities than navigational search, expecting to be able to buy and not only find goods and services nearby. The advancements of local search are evolving so rapidly that a race to control consumer behavior may be brewing between the Davids and Goliaths…
LBMA Podcast: Retailigence Does Offline Pickup, Fooda Does Hyperlocal Food
In this week’s episode, Jack in the Box uses time as a marketing factor with Pandora; Netclearance lets you do indoor location with WiFi and BLE; Disney harvests energy from your finger. Run to the beat of the right song with our app of the week, TempoRun. And special guest Dave Roesch of the Atlantic City Convention and Visitors Authority teaches us how cities should be using location based marketing…
Why Attribution Is the ‘New Black’ in Local Marketing
Advertising performance measurement has never been a simple process, but cross-platform consumer media usage, mobile, and advanced targeting technologies have made the process of linking ad engagement to a consumer purchase action even more challenging. The next generation of proper attribution has become essential for the ad tech industry and marketers looking to make ROI-driven advertising decisions…