Phone Leads for Local Businesses: The Unsexy Cousin of the Click (Part II)

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Beyond bringing in big leads — and SMBs paying handsomely for them — call monetization will be compelled by something else: Opportunity cost. We forecast call volume to SMBs to explode (65 billion by 2016) as a result of increasing mobile usage trends. That’s going to mean a whole lot of calls to answer…

Why Mobile Marketing Needs to Evolve Past Physical Location

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In order for location targeting to be effective, marketers must think beyond just physical location or proximity to their store. It means moving beyond the traditional mindset of ‘who’ you are trying to reach to include ‘where are they,’ ‘what are they doing,’ ‘what are their interests’ or even ‘what might their intentions be,’ based on past behavior…

New Location-Based Services Are Poised to Enter the Mainstream

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To a surprising degree, the panels and presenters at Street Fight’s Local Data Summit last week in Denver emphasized a similar theme: we’re about to see a plethora of new technology-enhanced real-life experiences centering on ingenious uses of data. The signal feature this time around is an orientation toward experiences situated in a physical context. The question the new technologies will answer is this: “What do I need my technology to do for me now, in this place, at this time, under these circumstances?”

Why In-Store Messaging Needs Offline Measurement

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Offline, in-store environments historically have had limited tools for measuring impact of any marketing effectiveness, reach, or exposure. But mobile location technologies with geofence capability measure shopper behavior and produce actionable data sets, opening new opportunities to quantify messaging impact. Measurement is not only possible, but actionable…

Location, Relevancy, and the Search for Personalization

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Marketers today have access to an unprecedented amount of data about consumers and their environment that go well beyond location, ranging from their demographics and shopping behavior to the time of day and weather. However, local marketers continue to fail to leverage this throve of new data to create and deliver relevant, quality and personalized ads to consumers. And it’s a big missed opportunity…

As Google Updates Places, Could Some Merchants Find Their Listings Deleted?

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Local SEO consultants and service providers offer businesses the peace of mind that comes with knowing someone is watching the forums and industry news in order to act on policy changes and new developments quickly. Given the complexity of local SEO and the fast pace of change, it’s unreasonable to place the onus for listing management solely on the small business owner…

Apple’s Next Trick: Making the Retail POS Disappear

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The idea is to enable shoppers to conduct roving transactions throughout retail stores by scanning items with their iPhones, paying on the spot via iTunes then going on their way. No checkout aisles, no gum-snapping shopgirl, no 15 items or less. It creates a world where the mobile device is the POS…

Consolidation Watch — Where to Look for Deals in Local Tech

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The first half of 2013 saw total investment activity, which includes both M&A and private financing, grow from a year earlier, as the number of deals stayed flat but total reported deal value jumped from $5.2 billion to $7.2 billion over the same period. Expect to see more deals — both large and small — in the local space as big firms search for a foothold in the industry and host of maturing startups look for the exit…

Is Guest Blogging Dead? Focus on These Link Building Strategies Instead

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While guest blogging used to be a respected link building practice – and still might be okay in some instances – it is now often considered a violation of Google’s quality guidelines. And in the future, Google could penalize websites that accept guest posts if Google believes the business is attempting to gain links without truly earning them. Instead of placing all of your eggs in the guest blogging basket, it is best to focus on authentic link building. Here’s how…

Let’s Simplify and Strengthen Business Listing Verification

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Verification is a great idea in theory and, once you navigate the tangled process, it even works well for most business owners in practice. However, there is very little consistency across publishers as to how the process should work or what the result should be, and there is plenty of evidence that the supposed lockdown of business data via owner verification doesn’t always operate as it should…

5 Sales Practices Every Company Should Know

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The following sales best practices, inspired by Aaron Ross’ Predictable Revenue, can help companies close more sales in less time. Ross’s framework helped Salesforce.com, one of the most successful startups in history, increase recurring revenues by $100 million…

Phone Leads for Local Businesses: The Unsexy Cousin of the Click

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We’re seeing tech and media worlds finally come around to what we’ve been saying for years: phone calls are what businesses want. That’s especially true in high-value categories like professional services, autos, travel and insurance. Clicks and impressions, despite a sexier image, aren’t as valued in lots of cases…

Is Newspapers’ Falling Knife Finally Starting to Rise?

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Wall Street thinks the long-term decline of newspaper revenues may be near bottom as print losses are close to being outweighed by consumer and digital revenue increases. With Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos buying into the industry as a long-term play, the broader financial markets are following suit. The newspaper industry is getting some of its most positive signs in years…

Google’s Local Social Conundrum

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Google’s attempt at ushering in the Facebook-ization of search, local and otherwise, depends on a major shift in perception and engagement. It may be difficult to bring about such a shift with a “build it and they will come” approach — given the current volume of content, the emphasis on social turns Google’s rich local result set into a desert.

Hyperlocal Execs’ 2014 Predictions (Part Two): Locu, Radius, Placed

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As we have for the past couple of years, Street Fight recently asked a number of hyperlocal luminaries to weigh in with their predictions for where local is headed in 2014. We ran the first installment of their responses yesterday — here are a bunch more…

Hyperlocal Execs’ 2014 Predictions (Part One): Moz, Foursquare, Booker

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As we have for the past couple of years, Street Fight recently asked a number of hyperlocal luminaries to weigh in with their predictions for where local is headed in 2014. We’ll be running their responses in two installments, today and tomorrow…

Street Fight Staff and Friends Predict 2014’s Top Stories

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As 2013 winds down, it’s clear that the landscape in hyperlocal business has shifted significantly. Looking ahead, we’ve asked Street Fight staffers and a few friends who regularly contribute to the site to submit their prognostications for what’s to come in the next 12 months…

Lessons Learned From the ‘Daily Deal’

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According to a study conducted by Street Fight, the two most important factors for merchants evaluating hyperlocal marketing campaigns are the ability to attract new customers and ensure the right people are being targeted. Since daily deals are falling short in accomplishing this, what hyperlocal marketing avenues should local merchants explore?

Could Patch Find New Life as a SaaS Platform for Local Publishers?

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At this point, the best path forward for Armstrong to realize his noble goal of delivering high-quality community news might just be to simply throw open the gates and recast Patch as a publishing platform for small and medium-sized publishers…

Mobile Local Media: The State of the Union

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The end of the year is upon us and that means top ten lists, year-in-reviews, and predictions galore. Sort of in that spirit but a slightly different format, I’ve been organizing the way I look at the mobile local world into a few buckets. So as this month’s column, here’s my state of the union in mobile local media…