How to Create a Great Vertical Directory
It’s tough for a start-up to break into the top echelon of local search players and become a one-size-fits-all solution like Google or YP. The great opportunity that exists in the space lies in serving special interests or special use cases better than anyone has before. Foursquare and Yelp are highly visible examples of this, but other very successful, vertically oriented directories exist, flying mostly under our radar…
What Do Google’s Enhanced Campaigns Mean for SMBs?
To wildly mixed reactions, Google last week announced a major redesign to its pervasive AdWords SEM platform. Known as Enhanced Campaigns, the redesign will force advertisers to run a single, converged — though conditionally governed — campaign across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices…
After Boom and Bust, How Will the Discount Economy Evolve?
The discount industry experienced 2012 as a major turning point. In the past 12 months, the deal provider landscape shook out even more, with the consolidation of many deals sites and the decline of some industry giants. Given the changed landscape, here are a few predictions about where the local offer and voucher space is heading…
Big Data and Local Search: The Netflix Precedent
We’ve entered an era when product decisions can be made not by analysis of demographics or user testing but by extremely fine-tuned measurements of current user activities. For local search, the question becomes just how many of our passive online activities can be converted into data points to be examined for purposes of marketing and product development?
Why Mom-and-Pops Will No Longer Pay for ‘Social Media Management’
The social media hype bubble has burst, and most very small businesses have not realized their ROI in social media. They’re not willing to pay my company — or anyone else — hundreds of dollars a month to market their company on Facebook or Twitter. Instead they are diverting those dollars to pay per click options, SEO, optimizing their websites for conversion and mobile, or targeted local media advertising…
Survey ‘Paywalls’ May Not Be as Good as They Sound for Local Media
While surveys may be a good source of revenue, it’s not a long-term solution for local news sites:There is an inherent supply-and-demand issue — not very different from the one that arises with online display ads. As more and more publishers adopt Google Consumer Surveys, Google can begin dropping its publisher payout because it has enough supply…
Understanding the Local Consumer’s Online Path to Purchase
Consumers are using the web to become highly informed about everything they buy, and what they see (or don’t) about a business online affects whether they purchase from that company. It’s much more complex and time-consuming for small businesses to reach these digital consumers than ever before, so it’s up to solutions providers to help clients create and sustain a total web presence…
Selling Local Is Hard — Here’s What You Need to Do to Make It Work
For the past couple of months I’ve been testing a new targeted local online advertising product as part of my fellowship project at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.The test has been essentially to sell the product to regional businesses within a given market. And at the end of the two-month trial, after calling on more than 150 businesses multiple times, I have a much greater appreciation not only for local salespeople but for the brands in the marketplace that can sell local…
What We Mean When We Talk About ‘Hyperlocal’
When we launched Street Fight, we expanded the term “hyperlocal” from its traditional use pertaining only to passionate, driven, highly local publishers who were the first to act on the erosion of local media’s business. We have applied it to include anyone who is disrupting and taking market share from traditional media and offering local businesses new ways to reach consumers…
The Local Conundrum: Rich Content or Accurate Information?
Google may have thought that situating local within Google+ would somehow obviate the need to fix it, but the presence of engaging content does nothing to modify the basic requirement that information services provide useful information. Perversely, information services spend too much time pretending they are content services but offer none of the openness of those services where it’s really needed…
What Multilocation Brands Need to Do to Prepare for Facebook’s Graph Search
National brands have invested nearly all their Facebook resources in building and supporting brand pages for the purpose of publishing content and managing customer relationships at the corporate level. But these brands don’t do business at the corporate level.They do business at the local level through large, brick-and-mortar networks. When it comes to Graph Search, these physical locations and their corresponding local Facebook pages are what really matter…
National Advertisers: Time to Get Local
“Local” is often thought to be synonymous with SMBs. In many media like television, however, huge portions of the local ad spend is from national brands buying up geographically specific advertising inventory. The same thing is happening in mobile. The projected growth in local mobile ad spending will mostly come from national advertisers that localize campaigns…
Leveraging Converged Media in Local Digital Marketing
Converged media is a term many local marketers might have heard of but may not be familiar with in terms of digital media environments. Essentially, converged media is the area of overlap between any two of three media types: paid, owned, and earned. This overlap is rich with opportunity and should be a focal point in any local digital marketing program…
Why Location Is Key to Mobile Monetization
As location becomes an ever bigger opportunity in mobile, a few questions are worth digging into further. One of those is how precise that location data is. Another important topic is the way success is measured in a local campaign aimed at driving offline actions, whether a call or an in-store visit…
Social Isn’t Search: Why Apple Should Think Twice About Foursquare
Though the cachet of the Foursquare name might make this idea sound appealing, my sense is that it could only be executed successfully if handled very carefully by Apple. With the prominence already given to socially driven results from Yelp, Apple would risk becoming a search service dominated by social content…
Daily Deals: Still Lucrative for Local Publishers
Given the challenges facing pure-play daily deal companies (and the saturation of news stories chronicling their issues), a casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the deals space is experiencing a major downturn. Recent studies, however, suggest a more bullish outlook for deals in 2013…
Using Geotargeting to Follow the Consumer from Desktop to Aisle
The choice of a location-based solution should depend on what message marketers want to convey to whom and when, along with how much consumer contact and engagement they want. As consumers continue to demand the ability to shop on their own terms and the local shopping experience becomes even more entrenched in the buying psyche, retailers will need a three-pronged digital strategy with a strong geotargeting component to be competitive…
Mom-and-Pops That Don’t Invest in Social Will Miss Out
According to an article by Julie Brooks published last week on Street Fight, demand for social media management among small business owners has “dropped off a cliff.” But social media is about taking word-of-mouth online, and now that the prominent social media websites are making it easier than ever to capitalize on these moments, local businesses have everything to gain…