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.

The Place of Newspapers in the Local Marketing Ecosystem

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“Digitally speaking, NextDoor is encroaching on a space that local papers really should own.” David Mihm tells Mike Blumenthal. “It’s basically a glorified forum that in my view would be every bit as successful, if not more so, if hosted by a truly local entity.”

Building a Local Stack: The Rise of ‘SMB OS’

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SMB OS includes the full range of business services that traditionally fall outside of – but are related to – advertising. It’s POS systems, supply chain, payroll, insurance, appointment scheduling, online ordering, CRM… even HR.

Facebook’s Self-Serve Ad Creative Can’t Be SMBs’ Only Choice

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By removing some of the barriers to ad spend for small businesses, Facebook is trying to become a one-stop shop for their ad dollars. SMBs are likely aware of the problem, but they shouldn’t be willing to rely on Facebook exclusively for their marketing and advertising needs.

Podcasting Won’t Replace Local Radio Soon

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As a local advertising medium, podcasting shows promise, but it has a very long way to go. The medium is fresh and growing, and ad inventory is far less cluttered than radio, although a little pricey at $18 to $25 CPM.

Google’s Product Bid for DIY Wallet Share

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“Google has been on a tear this past month in the DIY realm,” notes Mike Blumenthal in his bi-monthly conversation with David Mihm. “Three major product rollouts in a 30-day span; Websites, Posts and now SMS messaging. And Google only needs uptake on one of them to get a chance to sell Adwords Express.”

Three Lessons from the Dex Media/YP Merger

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For Dex Media and YP to become DexYP, they had to teach one another three lessons that every business in the local space should know: the primacy of distribution, the fallacy of stagnation, and the inevitability of market consolidation.

Accidental Ad-Blocking: The Brand-Safety Snag that Advertisers Can Fix

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When it comes to ads that brands want to publish on the web as well as in-app, there’s a brand-safety technology snag that many advertisers don’t know about — and it’s costing them in-app impressions. Think of it as accidental ad-blocking.