News and Analysis
CallTrackingMetrics CEO Welcomes Replacing Humans for the Boring Tasks
Todd Fisher is co-founder and CEO of CallTrackingMetrics, launched in 2009. If your business has a “high-touch” product or service that requires a phone call, it could probably benefit from using CallTrackingMetrics, which started out providing attribution for online ads but now does much more.
Can AR Elevate Multi-Location Marketing?
Augmented reality continues to be an early-adopter technology in terms of brand marketing. It has the unique ability to demonstrate products in their full 3D glory, which has proven effective in categories from furniture to footwear and cosmetics to cars. Many of these categories align with multi-location brands.
Commentary
Have Generational Shopping Habits Changed for Good?
During the pandemic, we took a fresh look into generational shopping habits, surveying 2,000 UK and 2,000 US consumers to find out if and how Covid-19 and the measures taken to fight it had permanently altered shopping behavior. These findings reveal that shopping behaviors are converging across generations.
Why Marketers Must Invest in Localized Media Strategies
We’re seeing uneven recoveries in both localized Covid-19 outbreaks and economies across the nation. This unpredictability, coupled with new essential needs, supply chain disruptions, and business realities (stores closing, competition rising), have rendered previously effective marketing tactics virtually irrelevant. A ground-up, local approach can help brands and marketers solve for all these new challenges by reducing waste and delivering on those essentials that consumers need during these atypical times.
The World Outside is Frightful—Drive Holiday Sales with Social Media Instead
The challenges of driving holiday sales in 2020 do not signify the end of retail, as many sensationalized headlines would have you believe. This e-commerce-focused season is, however, a siren call to local retailers who have yet to take social media marketing seriously.
In the absence of typical frantic holiday shopping foot traffic, social media is a necessary part of holiday marking to effectively reach consumers who opt to stay inside.
Latest Posts
Leveraging Voice: A Path for Brand Marketers
It’s important that companies can see who their customers are and what transactions are associated with each customer via voice assistants. This sort of knowledge is necessary for brands to make the channel a valuable part of an overarching loyalty strategy.
Given that voice is currently owned by just a few select companies, it’s important for brands to figure out how they will leverage voice differently from company to company or device to device. Will retail brands keep the same strategy with Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, or will they find unique ways to take advantage of these platforms across differences?
What Does Customer Experience Mean in a Voice-First World?
The trend of moving customer experience beyond the screen has been dubbed “conversational customer care.” It’s still unclear just how many channels are included under this umbrella or how the future of conversational customer care will look. Brands that are dealing with demanding customers can’t afford to sit back and wait for this to play out. Screen-free customer experiences could be the future. They could be just a single touchpoint in the broader context of customer experience strategy. Or, they could just be a passing fad.
But the chances that voice-first customer experiences are a fad seem to be shrinking.
This Election Season, Candidates Should Take Voter Data Privacy Concerns into Account
In the wake of Cambridge Analytica and privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, the advertising landscape has changed, as have consumers’ perceptions about data collection and privacy. Candidates still need ways to reach their target audience effectively, and they should do so while being mindful of compliance issues and Americans’ privacy concerns.
The 2019-2020 advertising cycle will generate an estimated $6 billion in political media spending, $1.6 billion of which will be spent on digital video, according to Politico’s spending projections. This is up from $0.74 billion on digital video in 2018, so we are talking exponential growth. Many candidates will wash their hands of marketing decisions, entrusting their staff and partners to decide how to best use their campaign dollars. But candidates should use their advertising strategies to make a political statement—to show voters they care about ethical data practices.
5 Ways to Reduce Errors in Voice Ordering
Restaurant chains like Wingstop, Domino’s, Panera, and Round Table have created their own skills to make it easier for people to place orders through voice assistants like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home. But before voice ordering can truly disrupt the restaurant industry, restaurants have to find ways to reduce the friction and eliminate the kinds of errors that lead to the wrong orders being delivered.
Here’s how some of the country’s top restaurant chains are overcoming the challenges associated with voice ordering and developing more frictionless customer experiences.
96% of Companies Say They’re Losing Subscribers for Fixable Reasons
Ninety-three percent of companies that rely on subscribers say retaining existing customers is as or more important than acquiring them, and 96% say they are losing subscribers for reasons they should be able to ameliorate. That makes pooling industry resources and determining means of improvement urgent, and that is the precise subject of a new report by Brightback, a customer retention software firm.
Brands Can’t Tell Stories If They’ve Lost the Plot
In 2020, a marketer’s goal should not be to create more content. It shouldn’t even be to create better content. Most brands, after all, are already doing a good job of generating content that provides value, service, comfort, and utility to people’s lives. What’s missing is a fundamental alignment between content and other marketing disciplines. Content, from a metrics standpoint, needs to speak the same language as paid media so that marketers can demonstrate the impact it has to their CMOs.
Survey: What Marketers Want from Location Data
Marketers surveyed showed an especially keen interest in understanding how they can integrate location data with other kinds of information. Asked how they deploy location data, 27% said it’s a “key component of a broader strategy to map the customer journey online and offline.” Twenty-six percent, the second-largest segment, said they were interested in learning how to marshal location data in conjunction with other data to achieve more advanced goals than their current practices allow.
How B2B Companies Can Survive in a Clickless Search Ecosystem
The dawn of the clickless world might raise alarms for B2Bs companies, and that’s fair. This trend will likely pose a challenge for companies that rely heavily on Google for new business leads — especially small businesses that generate a majority of leads from search traffic.
However, the clickless world also presents an opportunity for B2B brands to streamline their online presence. In this new ecosystem, B2B brands can generate awareness and encourage customers to contact their business even before a customer actually sees their website.
Location Weekly: Foursquare Partners with Vistar Media, Yelp Launches Store Visits
In this 452nd episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Foursquare partnering with Vistar Media, Al Arabia Outdoor using Streach to measure OOH in Saudi Arabia, Walmart shutting down its Jetblack text service, Panera reaching 9.3M with AR campaign, Unilever piloting drones for ice cream delivery, and Yelp launching a new Store Visits product.
Privacy Regulations Shift Location-Based Approaches from Push to Pull Marketing
With the regulations and changes that limit marketers’ ability to reliably track users, location marketing must evolve. Push marketing is likely to become less effective as brands continue to lose access to consumer data.
A tried and true alternative is pull marketing. Pull marketing is an approach that attracts in-market customers to your brand or product. Rather than pushing a brand on the audience, pull marketing draws in customers by using less intrusive methods that don’t rely on personal data. One of the most common forms of pull marketing is search advertising (paid and organic).
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