6 Real-World CRM Tools for Merchants
Retailers with brick-and-mortar stores are struggling to compete with e-commerce giants like Amazon, but the fight will never be fair as long as online-only outposts have access to superior tools for managing their customer relationships and offering personalized product recommendations. Here are six real-world CRM tools that retailers are using to level the playing field…
Street Fight Daily: Amazon Guns for Square, Uber and Lyft’s Street Fight
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon Takes Shopping Offline With a New Mobile Credit Card Reader (Wired)… Accusations Fly Between Uber and Lyft (New York Times)… Yahoo Acquires ‘Pandora For Places’ App Zofari (TheNextWeb)…
ReachLocal CEO: Company Got ‘Distracted By Shiny Things’
After a turbulent twelve months, which saw two founders depart and its stock price plummet, ReachLocal appears to be working on a comeback. Sharon Rowlands, the turn-around expert who took the helm as chief executive four months ago, remains as critical as anyone, but she believes that the company is on track to get things moving in the right direction in 2015…
Services Join Products in Goodzer’s Local Marketing Platform
Goodzer has been making it easy for consumers to find products in local stores since launching in 2011. Soon the company will be doing the same with services. Last month Goodzer announced that it is adding “enhanced local services content” to its database of more than 2.5 billion products. The addition expands the company’s number of locations from 500,000 to 2.5 million…
Street Fight Daily: Square Adds Booking Service, Lyft Drives Uber Competition
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Square Continues to Diversify With Launch of Booking Service (Fortune)… Lyft Drives Uber Competition With False-Order Allegations (Bloomberg)… Online Meal Delivery Firm Foodpanda Raises $60 Million (Recode)…
6 Marketing Strategies for National Retailers Managing Local Outlets
National retailers have access to expertise, money, and boatloads of data-driven marketing tools, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve got it all figured out when it comes to local marketing. One-quarter of national brands say they’re unable to track ROI at the local level, and 33.8% aren’t even investing in local marketing. Here are six strategies that national brands should consider…
Street Fight Daily: BuzzFeed Raises $50M, Senator Warns of Wearables
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… 50 Million New Reasons BuzzFeed Wants to Take Its Content Far Beyond Lists (New York Times)… Senator Warns Fitbit Is A ‘Privacy Nightmare’ And Could Be ‘Tracking’ Your Movements (Business Insider)… Apple iPhone Privacy Changes Lead to Layoffs at Retail Tracking Startup Nomi (Recode)…
How Innovation in Payments Can Drive Local Marketing
The changes in payments that Seth Priebatsch foresaw three years ago are certainly underway, but it remains more of a revolution than an evolution. Street Fight caught up with the LevelUp CEO recently to talk about why he thinks transaction data is the foundation of the next big wave of innovation in the marketing industry…
Street Fight Daily: Twitter Eyes SMBs, 7-Eleven Creates Venture Arm
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Twitter Learns From Facebook by Revamping Its Advertising Fees for Small Business (Wall Street Journal)… Oh Thank Heaven, Even 7-Eleven Has a Venture Capital Arm (Recode)… What Foursquare’s Looming Data Mean to Advertisers (AdAge)….
How Seattle’s South King Media Grew From Hobby Into Profitable Mini-Net
Southend was long dominated by “legacy” Robinson Newspapers, which last year was forced to consolidate its Southend print weeklies into one subscription product because of what it called “market forces,” but kept its individual community websites. Meanwhile, Scoot Schafer’s independent “pure-play” South King Media is profitable and growing. Street Fight caught up with Schaefer recently to talk about the different elements involved in successful hyperlocal publishing projects…
Case Study: Boxing Gym Uses Mobile Flyers to Attract Crowds
Paul Wade, the owner of Third Street Boxing Gym in San Francisco, is a self-professed technophobe. But noticed an increase in the number of people coming into his gym with smartphones in their hands, and he had a nagging feeling that there could be better ways to promote his live boxing events than the printed posters and flyers he’d been creating with the help of a graphic designer for the past 10 years…
Street Fight Daily: Foursquare’s New App, Facebook Ads Costlier for SMBs
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Can Foursquare Crack Local Search? (New York Times)… Facebook Ads Become ‘Costlier’ Choice for Small Businesses (Wall Street Journal)… Yelp Lied About Review Policies to Inflate Stock Price, Lawsuit Claims (GigaOm)…
Hyperlocal Companies Among 500 Startups’ Latest Batch
Silicon Valley seed fund 500 Startups has announced a new round of startups it will be helping navigate through the tough road to sustainable profitability — and they include a number of brand new companies in local commerce, marketing, and tech. Here are a few interesting hyperlocally focused companies from the latest batch…
5 Pet Sitting Marketplaces in the ‘Sharing Economy’
Americans spent more than $55 billion on their pets in 2013, and a number of hyperlocal startups are looking to capture that puppy fever by creating local marketplaces where pet owners are matched up with people who are willing to take care of their pups while they’re out of town. Here are five hyperlocal pet sitting marketplaces getting in on the action…
Street Fight Daily: Shoppers Flee Stores, Gannett Splits Digital Business
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Shoppers Are Fleeing Physical Stores (Wall Street Journal)… Gannett To Split Print and Broadcast/Digital Divisions (New York Times)… Facebook’s New Video Ads Aren’t Ready for Small Businesses — Yet (Recode)…
As Losses Widen, Groupon Struggles to Redefine Itself
Groupon said Tuesday that losses widened in the second quarter as marketing and sales costs jumped but gross profit remained flat. The culprit, a far less profitable ecommerce business than anticipated, accounted for every dollar of the company’s top-line growth as it struggles to find new footing for its sluggish local deals business…
How the Former CEO of Digg Plans to Win in Local
Earlier this year, Matt Williams, the former CEO of Digg and an Amazon vet, hooked up with a few other former Amazonians to found Pro.com, a local services marketplace that raised $3.5 million from investors that include their former boss Jeff Bezos. Street Fight caught up with him recently to talk about what local can learn from the early days of ecommerce…
It’s Official: The Newspaper Industry Has Given Up on Newspapers
In the past couple of weeks, three of the major legacy media companies announced they were splitting their companies into separate-but-unequal broadcast and print ventures. The decisions by Gannett, E.W. Scripps and Tribune to divide their once “synergistic business models” into separate and very distinct businesses indicate that we are now at the beginning of the end-of-the-end for this industry…