Why More Brands Are Asking for Local Search Data
Google search ad traffic has dropped across all devices, with mobile taking the biggest hit. Mobile traffic has been down an average of 24% since the pandemic began in February. Brands have been adjusting their digital strategies to account for the shift, including changing up their search ads with enhanced location targeting and more relevant keywords.
But achieving that high level of optimization requires a type of local search data that isn’t easily accessible through Google alone. That’s created a hole in the marketplace that the intelligence platform Adthena is looking to fill.
Discounts Drove Black Friday Foot Traffic
To see how clothing retailers fared, we took a look at foot traffic to the top 10 in the U.S. We did a straight comparison on foot traffic between Black Friday weekend last year and this year (11/28/19 – 12/2/19 and 11/26/20 – 11/30/20).
Across all 10 retailers, store visits dropped an average of 42%. Who fared best? Who took the biggest hit? We queried our proprietary geofencing marketing database. Here’s what we found.
Six Last-Minute Tips for Holiday Marketers
The holidays are here, and along with them, a holiday shopping season like no other. With the entire retail sector transformed by the Covid-19 pandemic, e-commerce has taken center stage, and digital marketers are working feverishly to find new ways to reach customers and bring former brick-and-mortar shoppers into the digital fold.
Yet we know that there’s still a lot of work to be done, and the holidays aren’t offering much downtime to digital teams. That’s why we hosted a discussion featuring experts sharing eleventh-hour tips and tricks that marketers can use to drive revenue this holiday season.
How to Use Instagram to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
On its face, Instagram is not all that link-friendly, especially compared to other sites like Facebook or Pinterest, which are practically driven by linked-to content. Even though you can’t make an Instagram post link to a URL, there are ways to maximize the linking features Instagram does have.
Adthena and Adsquare’s New Launches
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Adthena launching “Local View,” Adsquare launching “Audiences in Motion,” location-based game Breadcrumbs debuting in Singapore and Clark County, and Las Vegas releasing the “FixIt Clark County” app for citizens to report problems.
Improving Satisfaction with Digital Customer Service
Most brands track certain metrics, including customer satisfaction (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), and customer effort score (CES), to gauge how well they’re serving customers. Each calculation gives a numerical value you can use as a benchmark or leading indicator when making improvements to customer service operations or your brand’s customer journey.
These scores provide insight into which experiences and channels drive the most satisfaction, as well as which pain points are negatively impacting customers. Benchmarking scores against ever-changing industry standards and monitoring even subtle shifts over time allows brands to access valuable information about the quality of their customer care.
How DTC Brands Are Adapting to Covid-19
When Covid shut down the world, it wasn’t just traditional retailers that were hit. DTC brands were, too. Shifts in consumer shopping habits during the pandemic forced DTC brands to alter the ways they think and they still came up on top. As the world continues to navigate our new normal, we hope that others can learn from the strategies DTCs are implementing.
Re-engaging Consumers Amid and After Covid-19
Shortly after the pandemic caused retail stores around the country to rapidly adapt their business models to address shutdowns and changes in consumer habits, CodeBroker conducted research to explore how shopping behaviors were changing.
The resulting report, Consumer Shopping Habits During the Covid Pandemic, offers insights into what has changed, which changes are likely to persist even after the pandemic subsides, and what retailers can do to protect their bottom line.
Retail Embraces Omnichannel for the Holidays
Rather than focusing on one platform or tool, retail brands are embracing everything necessary to engage with customers across multiple touchpoints. That could have a major impact on the way shoppers interact with their favorite brands in the coming weeks, and depending on the results, it could lead to changes in the way retail marketing is handled in 2021.
3 Enterprise Tech Trends for 2021
Next year’s period of relative peace will give leaders the opportunity to make thoughtful investments in technology that put 2020’s positive developments — like increased cloud adoption and remote work flexibility — on more solid ground. Companies will also have bandwidth to prepare for the next crisis, eschewing reactive, flash-in-the-pan solutions in favor of longer-term strategies.
Location Intelligence Beats Fraud
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Incognia solving QR code fraud with location verification, the Ontario Regiment Museum using an AI virtual assistant, L’Oréal launching virtual make-up for your online work calls, and Covid-19 leading to greater public willingness to share location data.
Retailers Unpack Black Friday Spending Data
Criteo analyzed commerce data from 1,005 retailers in the U.S. and 216 million transactions in the fourth quarter of 2020. In the process, they found that sales in the first three weeks of November were up 7% year-over-year in the U.S., indicating that Black Friday sales may have been down 5% because those purchases happened earlier this year than previously.
3 Factors to Consider Before You Choose a Martech Solution
If you’re among the many marketing professionals who are thinking about adding to their solution stack to manage digital marketing channels, keep in mind that your investment should endure for the long haul. You’ll need to find a solution that helps you improve performance on digital channels while the pandemic persists and afterward as we make our way to a new version of normal. Here are three points to ponder.
As Cookies Crumble, Can Location Data Pick Up the Pieces?
One potential and promising alternative to third-party cookies is location data. Captured from mobile users as they move through the physical world, location data can be used for a range of purposes and personalization.
Real-world visitation patterns offer clues to user identity, brand affinities, and purchase intent. Putting aside that Covid-19 has radically upended movement patterns for the time being, regular airport or hotel visitation can identify business travelers, routine presence in a gym suggests health-consciousness, and weekly fast-food visits implies the opposite. Someone visiting car dealerships is probably an “auto-intender,” and so on.
Adtech Firms Test New Concept with Autonomous Bot Delivery Campaign
While food delivery platforms like Postmates, DoorDash, and GrubHub have all launched no-contact options, they generally rely on human drivers leaving food on the ground outside people’s front doors. With the health risks and potential for mix-ups, it’s less than ideal.
A better solution might be the one being rolled out by Wrapify. Just this morning, the company announched the launch of a first-of-its-kind campaign that could take autonomous bot delivery to the next level.
Street Fight’s December Theme: Leaving 2020
What will the “next normal” look like in the post-Covid era of local commerce? Will things go back to the old normal or be a hybrid reality that cherry-picks components and new perspectives from the past nine months? Will e-commerce dip back down to pre-Covid levels or keep surging?
We’ll be answering these questions and others throughout the month, along with 2021 predictions (’tis the season) for our theme, Leaving 2020.
Why Your Business Should Start Incorporating Social Proof
When it comes to marketing your business, social proofing is one of the most critical and yet overlooked strategies in the book. Consumers seeing what others buy influences them to make similar buying decisions. As an example, when your website has reviews or testimonials from well-known figures in the same industry, that’s social proof in action because the reviews will compel many visitors to buy from you.
In this article, we’ll dive more deeply into what social proofing is, how to incorporate it into your business, and some of the pitfalls of social proofing that you would be wise to avoid.
Developing an FAQ with Google Q&A
The major downfall and benefit of Google Q&A is that anyone can ask a question, and anyone can answer. For businesses, brand representation comes into question, and they’re challenged with not only answering questions themselves, but also monitoring the responses left by others on the web.
Despite the challenges, when managed at scale, Q&A is an excellent forum to bring customers and businesses together and improve engagement with your brand.