News and Analysis
Stirista Acquires Customer Portfolios, a Strategic Lifecycle Marketing Provider
While many martech firms are retracting in 2023, Stirista is looking at expansion. The data-driven marketing company is acquiring Customer Portfolios, a Boston-based strategic lifecycle marketing provider, in a bid to bolster its customer acquisition marketing solutions with an integrated first-party data platform. “We are thrilled to welcome the talented team at Customer Portfolios to […]
Which Pandemic-Driven Retail Trends Are Here to Stay?
Many of the changes to retail shopping that took place during the pandemic-era were transient. Demand for curbside pickup and contactless delivery, for example, peaked in 2020 and 2021. Other changes in retail trends have been more permanent. Across the country, retailers are continuing to see surging interest in mobile shopping and contactless payments. Fifty-percent […]
E-commerce Retailers Need To Address Shoppers’ Rising Security Concerns
Online retailers and brands face a challenging environment as inflation makes shoppers more price-sensitive and increasingly willing to switch brands. E-commerce growth has also slowed somewhat since the early-pandemic boom, and online shoppers’ concerns about payment fraud, scams, and data protection have grown. More than half of consumers in the State of Consumer Attitudes on […]
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How to Attract and Retain Current Customers With CRM Software as a Small Business
Understanding the journey from a lead to a customer is critical, and with most online shoppers needing some form of customer support before they complete a purchase, implementing CRM as a small business should be a goal early on. With that in mind, let’s discuss a few tips small businesses can use for CRM implementation.
Popular Global Payment Options for Better Conversions and Customer Loyalty
Technology has made it easier than ever for e-commerce businesses to sell to global markets, and shoppers are growing more accustomed to making purchases regardless of geographical borders. What customers still demand, however, is a shopping experience that is localized and relevant to their own cultural preferences, including method of payment.
How to Beat Amazon and Walmart at E-Commerce amid Covid-19
Make personalization a priority to stand out from e-commerce giants like Amazon. Offer true advice and perhaps extended warranties or return policies as a way to build trust. Value ads like tech support personally have gone a long way for our brand. Make sure you are encouraging and incentivizing customers to take the next step with your company.
Latest Posts
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).
Charting the Rise of Conversational AI
Conversational AI is a broad term used to describe technologies that automate conversations and personalize customer experiences. With the right systems in place, brands are able to understand, process, and actually respond to voice inputs in a natural way. While voice assistants, chatbots, and messaging services like WhatsApp, Kik, and Facebook Messenger can all be harnessed in a conversational AI strategy, virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri are the most popular tools adopted by brand marketers today.
Heard on the Street, Episode 45: Building a Local Video Marketplace, with Stringr
Video as a medium continues to gain prevalence given better bandwidth, mobile connectivity, and cultural factors. Creation and distribution tools also continue to democratize “pro-sumer” video like TikTok. But at the professional end of the scale, quality production is still expensive and hard to find.
This is the segment of the video market that Stringr addresses. The company has created a sort of networked marketplace to connect supply and demand for video creation. That includes everything from a library of locally relevant B-roll footage for news stories to specific on-demand assignments.
How the Rise of Unbranded Search Upends Restaurant, Retail, and Grocery Strategy
Fueled by the growth of mobile and set to rocket even further north in coming years thanks to voice, unbranded searches like “burgers near me” or “Thai food” are growing as fast as 113% year over year, according to a fresh study by multi-location marketing firm MomentFeed. Unbranded search grew about 30% from 2016 to ’17 and 56% the following year before doubling pace in 2018-19, suggesting the slope of this trend’s adoption could get even steeper in coming years.
How to Stop Getting Bogus Leads from Facebook Ads
Like a discordant refrain, these familiar phrases can feel like they’re playing on loop when following up with potential customers generated from Facebook Lead Ads. Bogus or misleading leads are a huge complaint among advertisers, but there are a few common and useful steps an advertiser can take when building Lead Generation Ad Campaigns to curb the occurrence of false leads.
Certain aspects are out of our control from the advertisers’ end, such as trusting Facebook users to enter correct and non-misleading information, but armed with this handy checklist, you can audit your lead gen ads, making improvements to stem the tide of bogus leads.
3 Tips for Attracting High-Quality Leads at Your Next Event
First impressions are key, and it’s imperative that as soon as the lead is ready to buy, your brand is the first on their mind.
Doing this requires you to understand your leads and deliver a message that appeals to their needs while portraying your brand in the best possible way. This is a big challenge because you want to promote your brand without going overkill and scaring leads away.
Here are three steps for attracting higher-quality leads at your next event.
Three Methods to Deploy Foreground Data Effectively
For those of us in the location data industry, we must adapt to the new world we live in and find solutions to solve the age-old problems our clients face. Foreground data (data that is captured only when a user has an app open) has the potential to be just as effective and insightful and can offer even greater insights into how people interact in the physical world.
Companies conducting location analysis can use three methods to help keep their solutions robust in this next era of location data; layer in foreground apps, reduce noise, and capitalize on inferences.
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem