Understanding the Proxies That Can Undermine Location Data

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For marketers, the ability to deploy technology that identifies and bypasses online users who may be masking their locations and digital traits yields improvement in the form of targeted campaigns and fewer wasted impressions.

How Local Healthcare Providers Can Imitate Advances in Retail to Boost Efficiency

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Providers need to do, ironically, what the best retailers do: make the experience better. To that end, data management is key. Here are some steps providers can take to address patients’ need for access and control.

Local Media Consortium Partners With IAS to Fight Web Ad Fraud

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To fight the pervasive web fraud crisis, the Local Media Consortium, which represents more than 75 local news media companies with 1,700+ digital publications, is partnering with the global data firm Integral Ad Science (IAS), which each day measures and analyzes the quality of 500 billion media metrics.

A Vision for One of Tech’s Most Valuable Startups: The Airbnb Card

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Airbnb has already created a trusted network. It now merely needs to extend that trust to get local hosts and merchants working together to create great experiences for their mutual customers.

National Brands Must Take Advantage of Tech and Reap Benefits of Going Local

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The marketplace is now offering media inventory that can be localized even in channels like national magazine titles. Advances in data management platforms, programmatic exchanges, and ad operations workflows allow national brands to go local at scale in order to reach customized audience segments.

How Augmented Reality Will Change Local SEO

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Ultimately, local SEO is all about engagement, and AR helps brands engage customers. Incorporating AR also shows that your brand is not just up on trends but actually ahead of the curve.

Toward a Better Definition of AI in Internet Communications

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Under broad scrutiny, AI stands for “that thing we do with computer data manipulation that is somehow more complicated than layering algorithms on to data structures. But neither do we agree that the current state of AI represents actual computer or machine learning.

How Marketers Must Prepare for the Voice-Connected Consumer

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As digital media surpasses traditional, marketers must prepare for the changes that will result from connected devices becoming a common source of customer experience. Local search will be of paramount importance as consumers turn to their voice devices, and eventually their connected cars and appliances

State of Hyperlocal: Location Data Is Key R&D Priority Now and Longer-Term — AI and Voice on Horizon

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Location data and analytics are a key R&D priority both now and in the longer term for companies supplying technologies and services to the connected local economy, according to Street Fight’s latest reader survey. Those companies deem AI and voice technology as two areas that require investment now, with an eye on a later payoff.

Follow-Up Thoughts on the SMB Marketing/Operations Universe

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“Regardless of the right package, the key for both agencies and small businesses is to choose best-of-breed components in each galaxy that integrate with each other so that you can add relevant and profitable services over time,” David Mihm says to Mike Blumenthal in their bi-weekly column.

SMB Ecosystems vs Universes: What’s the Difference and What Do They Tell Us?

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From analyzing the companies that specifically target the SMBs, this space is better depicted by a series of galaxies that swirl independently of each other and offer the SMB a myriad of choice. The upshot of all this work is that some stars are shrinking and others are growing. Bigger companies are actively acquiring and consolidation is increasing.

Cost-Per-Visit and Bad Location Data: Are You Really Getting What You Pay For?

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CPV is generating a welcome dialogue in the ad industry as it wrestles with questions such as how to value repeat customer visits and how much is a visit worth. Key to answering all these questions, though, is clearly understanding the accuracy of the underlying location data being used to score the visit.

The ABC’s of AR: Always Be Closing

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In these early days of augmented reality (AR), we’re learning a lot about consumer behavior and preferences — the same learning curve defined the early days of smartphone apps. One lesson so far is that consumer AR use cases will be fairly limited. It’s not a silver bullet and it’s not for everyone.

State of Hyperlocal: Attribution Is Top Industry Challenge and R&D Priority

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Companies selling local marketing and technology and services continue to believe that online-to-offline attribution is the toughest challenge facing the industry, and it’s now their top near-term R&D priority. That’s what we’re hearing from a preliminary analysis of our annual State of Hyperlocal survey of Street Fight readers.

Q&A: Does Google’s Latest Product Mean Death by a Thousand Cuts for Brands

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Google really left businesses hanging with the Q&A release, Mike BLumenthal tells David Mihm in their biweekly column: “We had enough engineering cycles that we could “step into the breach” of what is obviously a big brand problem. Whether it is long term or not depends on what Google can parse from the questions in terms of improving results. “

Selling to Multi-Location Brands: Sizing Up the Prospects

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Multi-location brands have been a little slower to embrace digital technologies in support of their local marketing and advertising than SMBs, but that’s changing pretty fast. The biggest of those companies still tend to be a little conservative, but they’re shifting digital spending towards local and adopting a broader variety of tactics.

Selling to Multi-Location Brands: Who Makes the Decisions

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Across tactics, over a third of those big companies we surveyed manage local digital marketing in a centralized fashion, but a similar number do so locally or regionally. Local sites and email are the tactics most often de-centralized; mobile and paid search the most often centralized.

Lots of Facebook News — But Little Progress in Local

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Instead of integrating multi-media news consumption with entertainment, community conversations, events calendars, advertising, and a buyers and sellers marketplace, Facebook is isolating them as components. While this is consistent with its separate apps approach, it likely won’t result in as much audience cross-fertilization as it should. Nor does it feel at all local advertiser-friendly.

Should Local Businesses Ask for Reviews?

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Reputation management services should focus on helping businesses understand what consumers are saying and engage with reviewers by responding. Unbiased review content is a true goldmine for the brand who works with a reputation company to glean deep insights about consumer sentiment offered by consumers themselves for free.

Two Big Facebook Moves in the First Two Weeks of 2018

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“It will be interesting to watch how much SMBs’ costs go up with Facebook to achieve the same level of engagement that they have been enjoying,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm in their biweekly column. “As Google expands their many local offerings, this might just play into their hands by forcing businesses back to Google My Business.”