How Automotive Marketing Is Evolving in the Digital Age

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Car dealerships are an appealing target for hyperlocal media and suppliers of digital marketing technology and services. They’re relatively big spenders compared with many local businesses, and they’re adopting digital marketing faster than most.

How Local Businesses Can Survive and Thrive in the Age of RankBrain

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A great site with proper titles, tags and meta descriptions alongside good and relevant ad copy, and an intelligent approach to drive the maximum number of relevant clicks, is the best defense for the local business against the self-awareness of the RankBrain machine.

As Local’s Complexity Grows, What Does It Take to Build a Sustainable Agency Business?

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“There are two paths for consultants or small agencies today,” writes David Mihm. “Either be a generalist who’s aware of all the major channels, and the kinds of businesses that are good fits for those channels, or develop an incredibly deep focus in a particular channel, and make a name for yourself as the go-to resource within that channel.”

How ‘Moment-based’ Targeting Will Impact Local Advertising

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We are now onto the second phase of moment-based targeting, focusing on the combination of multiple factors in a moment to determine when a consumer will be most receptive. To find these receptive moments, an advertiser can identify and tap into many signals that will provide info about the end recipient’s state of mind.

New Report Identifies Enterprise Customer Types & Needs

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In our latest analysis, we discovered that the integration needs of enterprise marketers reveal some clear correlations in terms of attitude, behavior and installed technologies. For example, the companies that found local store sites to be most effective were also doing well with local print, and planned to increase their social, mobile, and digital display advertising.

Why Local Businesses Should Treat Their Store Locator Like a Shopping Cart

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For businesses that operate multiple store fronts, store locators are critical revenue-generating assets. But too often, the locators are treated like a forgotten tool sitting on the shelf, collecting dust and rust. Instead, they need to make the discovery process and conversion to offline visits as easy and personal as Amazon does.

Survey: Demand for Multichannel Programmatic Is Promising

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Nearly one-third of the respondents in Street Fight’s survey who also said that local media and content was important for their marketing were thinking about such cross-channel programmatic. Interest appeared highest for marketers who found local TV effective, but also played strongly with radio and print fans.

The New Proximity: A Second Phase in Mobile Brings Here and Now to Life

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The first phase of mobile software relied on us to express a desire and thereby to enable a service. Our actions initiated services that capitalized on the phone’s ability to maximize proximity. Now we’re entering a second phase where, for many of us, connectivity and location awareness will be active for longer stretches of our days.

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Mihm & Blumenthal: How Google’s Monetization Shift Will Impact Local Search

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In this new feature, local marketing gurus David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal kick around some of the biggest ideas affecting the local search ecosystem and the broader industry. This edition looks at the latest changes from Google and how local marketers should react.

Could the ‘Smart Home’ Be the Next Big Opportunity in Local?

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We can now make a taxi, a pizza, or a plumber appear with nothing more than clicking a button or speaking a phrase. And convenience-hungry consumers not only want more, they’re expecting it. Smart home technology is now on deck to deliver on that expectation.

Survey: Many Opportunities to Connect Local Media With National-to-Local Marketers

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National brands and retailers remain wedded to traditional media and marketing for their local branches, franchises, and resellers. However, they are increasing their spending on digital channels, and over half of them feel it’s important to associate their campaigns with local media and content.

Pokémon Go and Local: Why Now?

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The lesson from the phenomenon isn’t for local tech companies to try and build the next Pokémon Go — but rather to build a similarly justifiable value exchange for sharing location. Advertisers and ad networks should likewise work with apps that have that higher likelihood of user opt-in.

Why Local Businesses Should Embrace Google’s New Rich Answers

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If you’re concerned about attracting customers through SEO content, you likely have mixed feelings about the recent enhancements made by Google to improve user experience. But here are three ways that Rich Answers can actually improve the quality of your web traffic.

Lessons for Mobile Marketers From Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends Report

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The report focuses on several trends that should be of interest to retail marketers and their mobile marketing strategies. For starters, there is less differentiation between products, brands, and retailers. These days, products evolve into brands, brands become retailers, and retailers become products.

5 Steps to Identifying the Channel Partners That Will Grow Your Business

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It’s no surprise they call the golden rule of channel sales the 90/10 rule where 90% of the sales are going to come from 10% of your partners. The best approach to this problem is to come up with frameworks you can use to focus on those most likely to end up in the winner bucket.

Super Retailers Face Super Location Data Problems

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Managing location data across hundreds and thousands of locations requires dedicated resources to scale the data and change it. Just as importantly, a business must treat location data as a competitive asset, organized and managed like inventory.

Is Google Shrinking the Local Pack?

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The reduction of local search real estate represents a huge challenge to marketers, who must work even harder to ensure their clients’ listings can compete in a shrinking field. It also suggests that a strategy combining organic and paid efforts is becoming ever more important.

As Gannett Acquires ReachLocal, Some Lessons From Its U.K. Exit

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As news filtered out earlier this week that media giant Gannett had bought ReachLocal for $156 million, it capped off several years of speculation in the local marketing industry about where the public company would end up. As a former ReachLocal employee (2010-2014) now living in Norway, I’ve watched the company as it has faced steep challenges […]

Are Community Networks the Final Frontier for Local Publishers?

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What if local publishers changed their strategy to focus exclusively on engaging and connecting their community at large? It still requires the great content that they create daily, but also a powerful and relevant search experience for users, more calls to action, and a more native and engaging mobile experience.

How Businesses Can Take Advantage of the Massive Opportunity in Local Data

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The difficulty of accessing local data has been changing with the rise of smartphones. We no longer have to guess and approximate where consumers go, because mobile phones can provide data that paints a much richer picture of where, when, and why users visit the world around them.