What Designing an ‘OS for Restaurants’ Really Requires

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When you look at the restaurant tech stack, there are clearly solutions, software, applications that should play nicely with each other, but the larger players have purposefully walled off their gardens. The next multi-billion-dollar company in this space will identify the mission-critical pieces of technology in the stack, and own them.

Can Facebook Messenger Become an Effective Local Marketing Platform?

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The pieces are in place for Messenger to become a major new marketing platform. Indeed, the various (mostly mobile) use cases range from customer service to e-commerce. So far, none of my experiences has been great. But there’s huge potential over time.

Why Online Locations Matter Even More in the New Retail Landscape

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In order to compete in the the new information-rich environment, businesses have been presented with a new and complex challenge: to win the battle for consumer attention they have to appear wherever customers are looking.

Displacement and Measuring the Unknown in Multi-Device, Multi-Channel Marketing Attribution

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Now more than ever, conversions are the metric used to measure the value of every pit stop along the customer journey as it moved across multiple devices and channels. Displacement-based attribution strategies help marketers stay in step with consumers.

Survey: Many National-to-Local Marketers Use Home-Grown Management and Analytics Tools

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Relatively few of these sophisticated companies make use of a common tool for managing and coordinating campaigns. That’s the case even though a third of respondents said various local programs were centralized at headquarters.

The Rise of Text Messages as a Political Ad Medium

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The 2016 election will be remembered for many things, but for marketers it will be the emergence of text messages as a medium. Text messaging has become an essential tool in running a political campaign and every candidate now uses SMS/MMS to get the word out.

Survey: How National-to-Local Marketers Plan to Grow Their Digital Budgets

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Street Fight recently surveyed decision makers at over 200 national-to-local marketers and found nearly half of them spend a third or more of their digital marketing budget in support of their franchises, branch offices, and distributors.

The Context for Contextual Marketing Is Changing

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The idea behind contextual marketing makes a lot of sense. But in practice, contextual marketing is getting pretty hairy, especially for location-based marketing. That’s because context is getting more complicated

Google Finally Reveals How to Improve Your Local Ranking

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Google has significantly updated its help page on the topic of local ranking to include, for the first time, specific common-sense guidelines showing businesses how they can increase the likelihood that online searchers will find them in Google Maps on desktop and mobile.

Automating Local Commerce: Rise of the Chatbots

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Bots could displace apps just as apps displaced search. “Search started with consumers typing into a box,” Pingup’s Ron Braunfeld said recently. “[AI] is all about knowing where you are, time of day, what’s in your refrigerator; and giving you the right information without having to search.”

Why Retailers Like McDonald’s Should Take Note of Starbucks’ Loyalty Program Misstep

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There has been a lot of backlash from Starbucks customers after the company changed the mechanism of its My Starbucks Rewards program last month from frequency-based rewards to dollars spent. The switch is informative for other retail brands, and indicates that personalization is key.

All That Glitters Is Not Gold: Separating Real Value From ‘Shiny New Things’ in Local

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Perhaps there is an industry epidemic of insecurity around the value provided to local businesses given the large market opportunity. Or, perhaps some organizations still think there is business in obfuscating value long enough to make some profit regardless of the damage.

E-commerce Is a $341.7 Billion-dollar Industry — Can SMBs Get a Piece of the Pie?

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Small businesses can close the gap between online and offline commerce with some hard work and adherence to a smart strategy. Here are a few tips to get you started.

Brands, Meet the Data Amplifiers

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Data amplifiers distribute and publish your data to a broader audience than you could ever do on your own — what I call the “network effect.” Your brand becomes more visible because your business data becomes more open and accessible to the influencers who are in a position to help customers find your business.

Retailers Shift Focus to Offline Affiliate Marketing

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Location analytics represent the new battleground in retail, but imagine if you could apply the same analytics for online attribution to offline purchases. Offline affiliate marketing does just that, giving retailers the tools to analyze data from in-store purchases similar to what they can do for online purchases.

Yodle Weighs in on How Google’s SERP Change Has Affected Online Ads for SMBs

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With a few weeks of empirical data, we now have a much clearer sense of how or if this change has affected local AdWords campaigns. At Yodle, we have seen a negligible effect on the performance metrics of the search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns we run on behalf of our local small business clients.

How Badly Do Consumers Really Want Grocery Delivery?

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Instacart is bumping up against the realities of the economy. There are two countervailing trends that are working against the idea of grocery delivery: frugality, and shopping-as-entertainment.

The Changing Role of Local Search Ranking

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As mobile searches outpace desktop-based searches, proximity throws a wrench in the works of traditional rankings.

National-to-Local Marketers’ Top Pain Points Center on Integration

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Nearly half of those who responded said they spend 1/3 or more of their digital marketing dollars to support their branch offices, franchises, and distributors — and 40% of them expect that budget mix to increase.

When Will We Be Able to Say That Cashless Payments Have Finally ‘Arrived?’

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The ubiquity of smartphones, new payment technology platforms, and ease of use have clearly caught the eye of many technology innovators and consumers. But why is this the year that cashless payments will go mainstream?