News and Analysis
Lauren Niehaus Shares 7 Things Retailers Can Learn from the Cannabis Industry
On 4/20, now considered the “national holiday” for cannabis retailers and consumers, I spoke with Lauren Niehaus, Executive Director of Government Relations at Trulieve.Trulieve has the largest retail footprint of cannabis dispensaries today, spanning 185 locations across 10 states — and growing. Growing is an aspect of what Trulieve currently does. Cultivation is part of […]
Report: Cookie Depreciation Concern Remains High Among Advertisers
Sixty-percent of publishers say they are concerned about cookie depreciation, but just 24% currently have a solution in place for their cookieless future. Those are just a few of the worrying findings from a new DoubleVerify survey of more than 800 industry professionals from a wide variety of backgrounds, including media buyers and senior decision-makers. […]
Experiential Marketing: Connections Over Impressions
Experiential marketing is the future of advertising, not just because it’s fun for participants and makes them feel more connected to the brand – though that’s true in a well-executed campaign. It’s the future because it’s more effective. As Business News Daily notes, when people participate in a brand experience or interaction, 40% say they […]
Commentary
Developing an FAQ with Google Q&A
The major downfall and benefit of Google Q&A is that anyone can ask a question, and anyone can answer. For businesses, brand representation comes into question, and they’re challenged with not only answering questions themselves, but also monitoring the responses left by others on the web.
Despite the challenges, when managed at scale, Q&A is an excellent forum to bring customers and businesses together and improve engagement with your brand.
Latest Posts
Adapting to Covid-19 Using Location Data
My personal experience getting sick during the pandemic also got me thinking about how easy it is to spread the virus just by moving around and how important it is to abide by government guidance to stay at home or at least limit your movements. As someone who works in the location data industry, I have an appreciation for the mass movement of people, and staying at home and limiting contact with other people is the right thing to do right now.
I also had the chance to think about how location data could be used to help hospitals, governments, and businesses combat the spread of the virus.
6 Live Streaming Platforms for Gyms and Fitness Studios
The fitness industry has changed overnight as Covid-19 forces gyms across the country to close their doors. While gym owners wait for the go-ahead to reopen their businesses to the public, many are moving their classes online as a way to generate revenue during the pandemic.
Local fitness studios seem to be having the most success utilizing online platforms designed specifically for their needs. Technology companies offering fitness management software and live streaming tools have stepped up to the plate with tailored offerings for fitness studios and gyms, and some are even finding ways to work together with Zoom, YouTube Live, and other popular video services.
Here are six options that are worth checking out.
Social Distancing and Gen-Z
Social distancing and self-quarantining have changed the world in a matter of weeks. How is Gen-Z responding? They are flocking to apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat to pass time and interact with family and friends. Facebook and WhatsApp have lost their reign over the competition during lockdown.
To get a better understanding of Gen-Zers’ habits, routine, and lives during the pandemic, Brainly, the world’s largest peer-to-peer learning community, surveyed over 1,700 of them.
Yelp Revamps its Business Control Center and Releases Other Pandemic-Adaptive Features
The announcement follows massive layoffs at the company as advertising plunged along with SMB revenue in the face of coronavirus-fueled lockdowns. But a recent Brandify survey showed Yelp remains a massive presence in the local digital marketing space: 64% of US consumers are somewhat or very likely to turn to Yelp when searching for restaurants, second only to the leader across verticals, Google.
Yelp’s new features will prove especially helpful for businesses in the months, if not years during which Covid-19 continues to affect everyday habits, but a number of the changes align with digital marketing best practices that will serve Yelp clients well beyond the next 12 months. Below is a rundown.
Brandify Study Shows Consumer Search Preferences for Healthcare, Restaurants, and Retail
Google in particular has made significant moves in recent months to verticalize the consumer search experience. For example, the team responsible for the relatively new Google Travel and Google Hotels sites has reported that they built a new consumer experience for hotels specifically because they noted important differences in the ways consumers searched in that category.
Brandify’s study illustrates that consumer preferences for additional verticals are similarly differentiated, both in the channels consumers prefer for each vertical and the sorts of information they seek out when searching. Already, the search experience for restaurants, retail stores, and healthcare providers varies by vertical, especially on Google, which has added prominent vertical-specific attributes as a result of Covid-19 such as dine-in, takeout, and pickup availability for restaurants.
The Affiliate Maturity Curve: Graduating from Banners to Lifetime Value
Let’s face it: Affiliate marketing gets a bad wrap. Once considered a channel fraught with black-hat players, fraud, weak strategy, and an overall lack of transparency, affiliate marketing suffered from a reputation for opacity that did not imbue confidence and trust in partners. Most importantly, there wasn’t a sufficient level of confidence that the channel could deliver desired results and outcomes.
The reality is that the last-click-only perception of affiliate marketing is a thing of yesteryear. Looking back, coupon and loyalty dominated the category because of this reliance on the last-click model embraced by brands. That model stymied the channel’s advancement and progression. However, affiliate is no longer relegated to rudimentary tactics like banner advertising on coupon sites.
The Cookie’s Collapse is No More Consequential than the Shift to Mobile
The cookie is on its last days, enjoying an extended farewell tour, thanks to Google’s decision to view third-party cookies as obsolete within Chrome by 2022. While many have painted the cookie’s waning days as the potential end of digital advertising, the truth is that this move is really no more consequential than the gradual shift from the desktop web to the mobile device.
Similar to the shift to mobile, the loss of the cookie will change the way that digital media is bought and sold and the way that many companies approach third-party data. It will likely put several companies out of business if they fail to adapt. But this change will merely be a paradigm shift — one that is long overdue — and not the nuclear fallout that many are expecting.
Street Fight’s May Theme: Local Commerce’s Recovery Playbook
In our own reporting and analysis (and through the words of our contributors) this month, we’ll define the playbook for local re-entry. As business ramps back up, what will best practices be for local staples such as search marketing and reputation management?
We’ve already covered how businesses are digitizing to adapt to the challenges of commerce in a time of social distancing, embracing curbside pickup, social advertising, pop-up distribution centers, online classes, and retail tech. With an even longer-term view, we’ll examine how this period of uncertainty will shape the future of local commerce.
Location Weekly: Nextdoor and Walmart Team Up to Help Neighbors Assist Neighbors
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association’s Asif Khan chats with Cami Zimmer, chief business officec of Glympse, and Ron Cariker speaks with Shannon Wilkerson, marketing director of Cajun Harley Davidson. The team also discusses Nextdoor and Walmart helping neighbors help neighbors and 7Eleven opening a pop-up store letting hospital workers pay with their badges.
Beyond Store Visits: Better Objectives for Current Times
A more adaptive framework that allows campaigns to still operate with the hyper-locality of a Store Visits Objective campaign, but without the specific objective requirements, is timely and ideal for maintaining strategic flexibility. This framework can actually be replicated with other objectives, such as Conversions, Lead Generation, Video Views, or even Website Traffic, especially with specialized tools.
Developing campaigns across other objectives that utilize local pages and localized copy still provides the same local performance benefits as an SVO campaign, as well as the attribution models to ensure you can still prove ROAS.
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