News and Analysis

Enhancing Customer Engagement: Vericast and MessageGears Collaborate

Vericast NXTDRIVE and MessageGears have strategically collaborated to redefine customer engagement, promising a seamless solution that delivers scalability, speed, and efficiency. Set to launch early next year, NXTDRIVE represents a customer data marketing platform (CDMP) designed to elevate brand communications through personalized messaging across various channels, including email, short message service (SMS), and push notifications. […]

Sheeva.ai and Visa To Enable In-Vehicle Payments

Visa has joined the in-vehicle payment revolution. The brand’s heritage is in plastic credit cards, but for quite some time, it’s been a sophisticated global digital-payments platform. Its Visa Acceptance Solutions division has entered a partnership with Sheeva.ai, which enables digital payments using network tokens activated from the dashboards inside vehicles. “Network tokens are the […]

Sneak Preview: Holiday Season 2023 Retail Sales

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us.  A lot of shopping and feasting still remains.  But Street Fight wants to glimpse what retail sales have seen so far and what you might expect in the shopping and eating days until the end of 2023. What’s especially interesting is that in-person shopping seemed to take […]

Commentary

Google Local Search Trends II: Verticalization

This is the second in a series of four articles covering the themes behind many of Google’s recent local search feature releases and interface updates. In the first installment, I discussed Google’s increasingly personalized or customized search results, marked by content pulled from GMB profiles, the business website, and Google users, and matched to specific queries so that each SERP is unique. In this second installment, I’ll be talking too about interfaces that differ according to what you’re searching for, but in this case the differences are verticalized.

How Not to Grow Your Brand’s Social Following

While establishing your brand across multiple social media platforms is an investment, in both time and resources, it’s typically at a lower cost than almost all other marketing tactics. The key to success, of course, is to use it correctly. Social media cannot and should not be an afterthought: To realize the full value of this game-changing tool, companies should make it a priority—and stay active.

Hey, Siri! 7 Copywriting Techniques To Optimize for Voice Search

There are almost 40 million voice-first devices in homes across the US. That’s a whole lot of families asking Siri, Cortana, and Google questions. We’ve broken down a list of seven copywriting techniques to optimize your content and/or copywriting for voice search.

Latest Posts

Survey: Interactive Video is the Future

Of course, we might approach a survey by an interactive video platform about the love for interactive video with some caution. But there are other signs that interactive video is the future of online customer engagement, increasingly taking over both online ads and shopping experiences.

Google Local Search Trends I: Personalization

Though it’s not always easy to find the common threads in Google’s complex evolution of the local search consumer experience, some themes do stand out, such as the drive toward increasingly personalized search results, which I’ll be covering in this initial entry in the series. Fortunately for marketers, personalization, along with the other themes I’ll cover, offers numerous opportunities to outpace the competition and convert more searchers into buyers. A better understanding of these emerging trends will help marketers prioritize their efforts.

Concrete Steps to Prepare for a Cookieless Future

The biggest change for digital marketers who’ve grown comfortable with cookies is realizing that the future may not be near as turnkey and automated as it is now. Executing campaigns without cookies will require more hands-on strategizing and monitoring of campaigns, and it will force marketers to be proactive when it comes to culling third-party data providers and ad-tech partners that rely too heavily on cookies for their data and analytics.

Leadferno Launches to Power the Front End of Five-Star Customer Experiences

When Aaron Weiche, CEO and co-founder of Leadferno, started his previous company GatherUp, the goal was to help businesses organize data on customer experiences and boost their reputations. Now, Weiche is onto his next venture, which aims to set up the communications infrastructure that will help businesses kick off those five-star customer experiences.

Local Newsletters Are Good for Covid Information — And Marketing

Publishers are taking advantage of localized media to disseminate Covid information. Those same geo-targeted messages can provide effective audiences for marketers, says Kerel Cooper, CMO at email marketing platform LiveIntent. He elaborated on that view in a Q&A with Street Fight.

Innovation Brief: Facebook, Zoom & Delivery Robots

On a semi-weekly basis, Street Fight’s Innovation Brief series aggregates and analyzes happenings from across the technology and media spheres. This week, we look at Facebook’s latest ad reforms, Zoom’s ‘Focus Mode,’ and delivery robots going to college.

Why Social Data is More Valuable than Ever

Sav Khetan, Head of Product Strategy at Tealium, checked in with Street Fight to discuss why the data on social platforms is more valuable than ever, how advertisers can navigate privacy changes, and how customer data platforms can help.

LBMA: Groupon and Booksy Partner on Salon Appointments

In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Groupon and Booksy partnering on salon appointments, the Nike Store in Seoul tying real-time data to DOOH, Kroger teaming with Kitchen United on ghost kitchens, and Bluedot pursuing gamification with real-world AR.

Is Snap Building a Local Discovery Engine?

Snap wants to compete with Google Maps as a local search and discovery engine. That’s a tall order, but Snap could have an edge in socially-fueled map results. As often, it’s all about the data.

Why Audio Out-Of-Home Is Attracting Brand Marketers

“Between Covid-19 altering consumer buying behaviors and accelerating the growth of e-commerce, specifically in retail media, consumers have higher expectations than ever when it comes to customer experience,” Vibenomics CSO Paul Brenner says. “Implementing AOOH into retail media plans allows retailers to deliver a personalized, one-to-few shopping experience consumers now expect.”