News and Analysis

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 […]

Stirista Acquires Customer Portfolios

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 […]

Commentary

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

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).

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.