Cupcakes

Case Study: Bakery Takes Digital Approach to Local Marketing

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Like many local merchants, Heather Zidell has seen the number of customers finding her business through Yelp climb over the years. She decided to take the leap into paid advertising on the platform as a way to ensure that her bakery was being listed ahead of competitors.

Case Study: Children’s Center Uses Scheduling Platform to Streamline Administrative, Marketing Tasks

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Almost half of small business owners say they’re being overrun by basic administrative tasks. When Roo’s World of Discovery owner Michelle Pollak Landwehr found herself in that same position, spending hours each week on basic administrative tasks like tracking member visits, scheduling classes, and managing recurring payments at her Washington-based children’s indoor play space, she began looking for digital solutions.

Case Study: NJ Gym Uses Loyalty Program to Increase Sales from Existing Members

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When consumers commit to joining a gym and paying a fixed rate each month, they’re indirectly confirming their loyalty to the business. But after years of working with clients at Gold’s Gym of Jersey City, sales manager Mauricio Calmet noticed that a secondary loyalty market exists, one that’s rarely tapped by businesses once they’ve signed customers up for yearlong contracts or memberships.

Case Study: Salon Leverages Free Wi-Fi to Evaluate Digital Promotions

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Collecting customer email addresses and generating Facebook “likes” are two tasks that are at the top of virtually every small business marketer’s to-do list. Edges Salon & Spa has a system in place to streamline this process and encourage customer loyalty at the same time. For the past seven months, it has been offering customers free Wi-Fi in exchange for the chance to learn about their behaviors and engage them on mobile.

Case Study: Restaurant Increases Visit Frequency with Mobile Ordering Option

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Cold-calling techniques have a notoriously low success rate for hyperlocal vendors trying to onboard new merchants, but it was an unsolicited drop-in that led to The American Grilled Cheese Kitchen’s successful three-year relationship with ChowNow, an online ordering system and marketing platform for restaurants.

Case Study: Restaurant Group Takes a Data-Driven Approach to Email Marketing

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Data is changing the way large restaurant groups cater to their highest-value customers. Richard Sandoval Restaurants, the upmarket restaurant group with more than 35 locations worldwide, is looking for more strategic ways to use data for customer retention and acquisition. It has started harnessing its email database to make more data-driven decisions using tools like customer analytics and marketing platform Venga.

Case Study: Westport Restaurant Views Social Marketing as Digital Word-of-Mouth

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Local merchants in every vertical are relying more on social media marketing for customer acquisition and retention, but restaurants in particular have become heavy users of social platforms. This year, 50 percent of casual dining and fine dining operators said they planned to devote even more resources to social media marketing. Hyperlocal vendors like Perch are providing business owners with a way to consolidate most social marketing tasks in one centralized app.

Case Study: Mattress Retailer Captures Millennials with Digital Strategies

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The vast majority of mattress sales still take place in brick-and-mortar stores. However, America’s Mattress of Onalaska owner Dave Weinberger says he’s found that millennial shoppers are increasingly doing their pre-shopping research online. In response, he’s begun shifting his advertising budget away from offline channels and toward digital tactics, like call tracking and recording, search marketing, and online promotions.

Case Study: Reliability in New Scheduling Platform Helps Chicago Salon Maintain Buzz

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Online scheduling platforms are supposed to save merchants time by automating client bookings, cancellations, reminders, and even payment collection. But when merchants stop trusting their own scheduling platforms, and start verifying individual bookings for accuracy, the benefits of online-only systems go out the window. For an exclusive Chicago salon, switching things up helped maintain buzz and business.

Case Study: Hotel Attracts Luxury Travelers with Guest-Facing Mobile Tech

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As London’s boutique Lanesborough Hotel began what would become a 19-month, multi-million dollar refurbishment in 2014, executives started looking for strategic ways to appeal to guests with luxury tastes. To go along with the newly renovated rooms, which reopened in July, the team decided to add a technology component that would be unlike anything travelers had ever experienced.

Case Study: Coffee Shop Leverages Dayparting to Perk Up Afternoon Lull

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Walk into any coffee shop in the late afternoon and you probably won’t have a problem finding an open table. That afternoon lull can be tough to overcome. At Sunshine Coffee Roasters in Northern California, owner Mike Doherty’s approach adds a shot of technology to established customer outreach tactics. He relies on his cloud-based POS system, ShopKeep, for the majority of his promotional work and business management.

Case Study: Virginia Plumber Records Calls for Improved Customer Service

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Social media, search engines, and local review sites can all generate attention for businesses in the home services industry, but when it comes to actually making sales and closing deals, nothing beats the effectiveness of a good old-fashioned telephone call. “Listening to how my associates communicate with clients is important,” says All Plumbing’s Kabir Shafi.

Street Fight Daily: Stripe’s New Mobile Commerce Tool, Can Google Keep Up With Changes in Search?

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Stripe Introduces New Tools to Simplify Mobile Shopping (New York Times)… Google Gears Up for Search Shift to Mobile and Vertical (Ad Age)… Etsy Opens To Manufacturing (TechCrunch)…

Case Study: Bay Area Café Opts for Full-Service Social Management

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Keeping on top of the endless stream of reviews posted on Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, and TripAdvisor each day can be time-consuming for a busy small business owner. Responding to negative reviews can be emotionally draining, as well, so Brian Wilson decided to take another route.

Case Study: Georgia Candy Shop Manages Off-Site Sales with Mobile Tools

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Having a product as small and portable as chocolate candy gives M Chocolat’s owners the freedom to sell outside their brick-and-mortar store. The sisters often use food festivals, local races, wine shops, and gourmet specialty stores to find new customers.

Case Study: Bubble Tea Shops Use Boosted Facebook Posts for Customer Acquisition

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Like many merchants, the team behind Boba Guys relies primarily on unpaid marketing campaigns for customer retention, using organic tactics like posting exclusives and inside news on social media. Ten percent of Boba Guys’ marketing is aimed at customer acquisition.

Case Study: Restaurant Group Integrates Data for Targeted Customer Marketing

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Fig & Olive’s guest management system has been set up to match reservations to POS data, which allows marketer Matthew Joseph to track the dining habits and visit frequency of guests. This information is then used to run automated marketing campaigns.

Case Study: SMB Marketing Firm Uses Chat App to Convert Clicks to Leads

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With the goal of retaining and converting more leads for his agency, Outlook Bench Group’s Nii Akwei went in search of a product he could use to connect with website visitors in real-time.

Case Study: Salvage Yard Appeals to Do-It-Yourself-ers with Mobile App

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In addition to social media channels like Facebook and YouTube — where Padilla shares how-to videos and articles that might be helpful to his customers — Victory also upgraded its website to offer instant online quotes and inventory lookup information…

Case Study: Using Pre-Order Apps to Streamline Lunch Operations

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Given its location in the mid-Market area of San Francisco, Alta CA has a unique clientele. The bustling neighborhood restaurant has customers who are willing to try out the latest apps and services, and as a result it’s become a sort-of testing ground for hyperlocal marketing solutions…