Taking the Pulse of the Location Data Ecosystem

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Companies selling location and proximity data and services themselves concede that it’s a pretty small market, but that location data is an increasingly critical signal for a variety of marketing, operations, and product features well beyond mobile advertising.

Where Will VR Fit Into Local Advertising?

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How will advertising play out in (admittedly nascent) VR, especially in local? We’ll likely see the same early and ongoing misfires, such as banner ads. Or, as in video experiences, we’ll likely see a fair share of legacy formats — like pre-roll ads — ham-handedly shoehorned into VR.

The New ‘Location, Location, Location’ in Retail

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“The new consumer (and search) paradigm favors small-scale, hyper-focused boutiques close to population centers as opposed to horizontal big box retailers on suburban commercial strips,” David Mihm says to Mike Blumenthal in their bi-weekly conversation.

The Shift in B2SMB: It’s All About Platforms

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Major changes are coming to SMB marketing as the market shifts away from media towards cloud-based services, artificial intelligence, marketing automation and location marketing. This cluster of tech movements represent real opportunities to help SMBs target and engage customers, and become more efficient.

Foursquare Data Shows Up Today in More Places Than You’d Think

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It’s remarkable to see how often Foursquare data is popping up today in the apps that garner the most consumer traffic and press attention. These votes of confidence would seem to solidify Foursquare’s position as the forefather of natively digital location data.

Report: Matching Up With Local Merchants’ Marketing Objectives

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Our analysis of local merchants shows that SMBs are spending more money on digital marketing — particularly social media and email — because they find those channels most effective. But there appears to be some missing links between new customer acquisition and their favorite tactics.

Is Your Local Dealership Prepared for a New Era of Car Buying?

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The automotive space is extremely competitive and with automotive sales down 13.2 percent, the competition could not be fiercer. In order to remain afloat in today’s challenging sales environment, auto marketers need to rethink how they get high-intent buyers to their stores.

The Fallacy of Google’s “Micro-Moment” Positioning

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“I see the customer journey as the customer journey wherever it leads,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm. “I see Google’s efforts to oversimplify it into discrete points in time as a gross form of reductionism that doesn’t help us understand that journey better. “

Quantifying the Physical World with a Product-Based Approach

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By having access to real-world consumer footprints and analytics in real time, businesses have the potential to make decisions on product marketing quicker and more reliably.

The Key to Multi-Channel Success: Understanding the Search and Social Mindset

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People behave differently depending on where they are in the digital space. Even the same individual will exhibit drastically different behavior depending on when and where they are online. Understanding the different mindsets of your audience on these channels will help you align them more effectively.

2017: A Year of Experimentation for Google Local Search

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For marketers and local businesses, it’s always a challenge to keep track of the search giant’s frequent shifts in policy in policy, procedure, and terminology. This year has been especially dizzying, though to those paying attention, many opportunities are presenting themselves to reach out to customers in new ways.

How Big Is the Promise of Local AR (And When Can We Expect It)?

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Real execution will require an extensive value chain. And that’s why location data will be increasingly valuable in an AR-driven world. Specifically, location data will be a key element in displaying the right business or product information graphically.

Why Premium Media Is the Gold Standard for Brand Marketers

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There are media companies and then there are the media companies that deserve brands’ business — the ones that represent a positive baseline. High-quality premium publishers and advertisers know what high-quality environments look like. Consumers know it, too.

Enterprise Local Marketers Treat AI Hype as Means to an End

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Our research suggests that big brands and retailers don’t have AI high on their list of local marketing priorities. But it appears that if brands are very email- and direct mail-focused, and that’s where they’re thinking of applying AI.

Can Yelp Extend Its Moment in the Sun?

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“[Yelp has] not been very innovative in approaching the many needs of the SMB markets,” Mike Blumenthal writes to David Mihm. “It would seem that there could be (or should have been?) a raft of functionality that they could provide from appointments to customer follow-up that would be a natural fit.”

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How Brands Can Use Location to Ace Back-To-School Ad Campaigns

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Brands could be throwing their back-to-school ad dollars to the wind if they are only taking a standard location approach. In fact, the study found that brands could wasting more than 80 percent of their back-to-school media on the wrong audience if location data isn’t used correctly .

What Will Amazon Do With Whole Foods?

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Whole Foods will represent a brand-new challenge to the company that has come to define online commerce. How can shopping in a physical store be disrupted and transformed by the same kind of thinking that created the world’s biggest virtual marketplace?

Why Location Visit Data Is Going to Be Huge for Brands

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If you are not already thinking about how visits data fits into your location strategy, or you’ve yet to bring the people in-house to support that strategy (think: data scientists), now is the time. this is going to be the biggest, most critical shift in the young history of location data markets.

New Street Fight Report: Selling to Local Merchants

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Street Fight’s latest report on local merchants is a companion piece to our annual survey of local small and medium-sized businesses, that focuses on vendor strategies for selling local marketing services and up-selling add-ons or suites of offerings.

Using Social Media for Enterprise Local Marketing: Comparing Twitter and Facebook Marketers

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Surveys suggest social media is pretty influential for shoppers, particularly young ones, although they gravitate to Instagram and Snapchat. Big brands are taking heed. Although packaged goods giant P&G said it was paring back its most highly-targeted Facebook ads, it recently confirmed that it was maintaining its overall Facebook spending.