What Local Publishers Can Learn From Starbucks
Publishers shouldn’t think about “what thing” they should do to make money, but rather “what experience am I delivering and how can I extend that experience thoughtfully?” If something adds value for readers, adds value for advertisers, and strengthens your other efforts then you should be doing it today…
How Online Review Sites Can Regain Consumers’ Trust
As long as there are economic incentives to create bogus reviews, unscrupulous people and businesses will continue to exploit the platforms that make it easy to deceive. For the local players seeking to help users in selecting a great business, use the offline world as a guide. Require an identity, build communities of real people sharing advice, and give legitimate customers a megaphone to honestly rate the service received…
Is Groupon’s Deal Marketplace Undermining Merchants?
It has been my understanding that the purpose of daily deals is purely customer acquisition — to bring in new customers, not to target your existing ones. With the new marketplace focus, however, it seems as though this is no longer the case. I recently did a search for some of Groupon’s top NYC marketplace offers and I found that the company seems to be cannibalizing the local businesses’ existing customers by using Google AdWords to bid on nearly every Marketplace deal’s local business name…
Do Small Businesses Really Need a Website?
The website is the richest online repository of compelling information about a business, but it probably isn’t its primary means of attracting customers. Rather, customers who find you via Google Maps or Facebook may need to refer to your website in the event a third party search doesn’t provide enough information to make a buying decision. The website serves as a last stage effort to win business that hasn’t already been secured via local search…
Focus Turns to Attribution in Mobile Local Ad Tech
The promise of mobile local advertising continues to invoke the “closed loop” idea. The device’s portability and location awareness means that it goes to the store with you – enabling all new ad performance tracking opportunities. Nothing terribly new there. But it seems like the tech and media worlds are finally acknowledging that 93% U.S. retail spending happens offline. And an increasing share of that — to the tune of about $1.5 trillion — is influenced online and on mobile. So connecting those dots is the name of the game…
Why Attribution Is the ‘New Black’ in Local Marketing
Advertising performance measurement has never been a simple process, but cross-platform consumer media usage, mobile, and advanced targeting technologies have made the process of linking ad engagement to a consumer purchase action even more challenging. The next generation of proper attribution has become essential for the ad tech industry and marketers looking to make ROI-driven advertising decisions…
What Legacy Local Media Can Learn From the Red Sox
In advance of 2013, the Red Sox again fired the team’s manager, changed the executive suite, and reinvented the workforce. The new goal: replace high-cost and complaining “superstars” with a talented new group who bought into the new model. The organization became more horizontal and the salary of the team dropped by 20%. Meanwhile, over the course of the year, productivity increased by 40%…
5 Leading Indicators of the Future of Local Search
The local search market is changing. On the buy-side, enterprise advertisers are starting to assert their control, demonstrating that they can leverage large footprints to compete in local with clean distributed data, and accurate claimed citations. Consumers, meanwhile, increasingly want to use their mobile devices for more activities than navigational search, expecting to be able to buy and not only find goods and services nearby. The advancements of local search are evolving so rapidly that a race to control consumer behavior may be brewing between the Davids and Goliaths…
The Government Shutdown and the Local Data Economy
For the most part, local search appears to demonstrate with flying colors the benefits of getting things done in the private sector. Not only is it a self-sustaining and profitable industry; it exhibits a drive to innovate that brings ever-improving services to our desktops and handheld devices at a dizzying pace. Imagine if local directories and apps were run by the same bureaucracy that manages the Postal Service, the IRS, and the Census Bureau. We’d probably still be using phone books. Yet at a fundamental level, governmental authorities still act as objective reference points when it comes to information of interest to the public…
Should Hyperlocal Publishers Accept Barter Deals?
Most of the better known hyperlocal sites we contacted told us they didn’t do trade or barter, and they didn’t want to talk about it on the record. In Dallas, hyperlocal pioneer Mike Orren said people don’t talk about it because they don’t want to attract the attention of auditors, or they don’t want competitors to know that they’ll do barter. He agreed, however, that trade is “absolutely viable” for independents…
Gauging Hummingbird’s Impact on Local SEO
Standardization of data structure on simple things like name-address-phone number (NAP) information, mapping, local business category, organization (micro-formats) are now starting to pick up steam and become increasingly important for local search and discovery. Now with Hummingbird, things are about to get even more interesting…
In Search of the Checkout Pixel for Local
Until recently, the “last mile” offline had been considered the most challenging step to solve for. But today, it’s increasingly where most of the action is happening. Consideration starts online, but picking up the sushi or the TV, or getting the bridal party fitted, occurs offline — and that involves not just more steps, but also more room for attribution. What was opaque previously is now fertile ground. The race is underway to plant flags at every step and, to make things interesting, with each flag planted consumer behavior is changing…
As Digital Media Gets ‘Horizontal,’ It Acts More Like Local Businesses
Local businesses are the most suited to life in the networked world, because they already deal with people directly, and often on a first-name basis. To the extent that local businesses have learned to do this, they can teach the rest of the business world how to behave in our increasingly collaborative environment…
Mobile Is Huge — But Two Key Elements Could Slow Its Growth
We in the media think we’re in the information business, when the reality is that we’re very much in the advertising business, and advertising is in disruption right now. In their effort to influence and produce results, marketers are simply unable to demonstrate even a modicum of restraint when it comes to the line between useful and nuisance.
Is Content King in Local Too?
In the pantheon of buzzwords overtaking pitch decks and CMO-speak, “content marketing” is the new darling. The term has legitimate grounding to be fair, but like “long tail” and “web 2.0” in days past, its overuse precedes it. Content marketing also isn’t anything new — it’s been done for years, albeit under the ethically challenged “advertorial” rubric among other flavors. Now it’s new, improved, and hitched to en vogue terms like “native.”
Calculating the ROI of Local Search Campaigns
How can we calculate just how much return a given business can expect on the investment of time, money, or both into a local search campaign? For many business owners, it’s that type of dollars and cents calculation that will drive them to decide whether or not to move forward with a campaign. Other metrics are important but ultimately secondary to the bottom line…
Marketing to the ‘Happy’ Majority of SMBs
The local search industry needs to offer more responsive solutions for the average small business owner. The industry can’t simply drive more leads — it has to drive more, better-qualified, and better-paying leads at profit margins that incentivize buy-in from a business consumer that demands all or nothing. Only by catering to the “disconnected and contented majority” can the industry push itself to the highest standard of usability and convenience…
Selling Search to Small Businesses
It’s no secret that national brands are investing heavily in local marketing and small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) are feeling the increased competitive pinch. After all, there are only so many people looking for a given product or service in one’s neighborhood. But while national brands will likely continue to dominate TV, print and radio advertising, digital marketing offers SMBs a rare opportunity to compete with national brands on equal footing…