Commentary
Rebuilding Retail with Customer-First Experiences Online and In-Store
There’s so much discussion around returning to the old normal, but retail’s future depends on getting as far as way from normal as it can. Retailers need to seize the opportunity and reimagine the experiences they provide—and create the next normal.
What would this look like? As a guiding principle, retailers should be finding ways to put the customer first in the experiences we provide.
Triangulating Apple Maps: The Tech Angle
Apple surprised the local search world last month when it announced local business reviews in Maps. Similar to its other search-based efforts, Apple formerly relied on partners like Yelp for local listings and reviews. But now, as part of its broader data-driven Maps overhaul, it will phase in original content.
Much has been written about this within the local search publishing world and analyst corps, including my colleague Stephanie Miles’ article on how brands can prepare for Apple Maps reviews here on Street Fight. So in the interest of treading new ground, what less-discussed clues lie in Apple’s recent mapping moves that can triangulate its direction?
Latest Posts
The Art of Making a Retail Holiday
From Black Friday and Cyber Monday to back-to-school sales, retail holidays may be arbitrary, but they have become a core component of successful sales and marketing strategies. As a result of their success, these holidays are becoming expected, fixtures of the retail industry embedded in its collective psyche. Companies must innovate to keep them fresh. Brands need to monitor competitors to see what works and what doesn’t work and tweak their strategies appropriately.
Data on successful “holiday” campaigns reveal how to make the most of holidays, whether long-established or freshly innovated.
Facebook, Free Speech, and the Responsibility of Power
The many arguments adduced to spare Facebook the responsibility of monitoring its content, of removing content that leads to physical violence all the way down to false political advertising, fail because they are based on under-developed understandings of responsibility itself. To argue that Facebook should be spared almost all regulatory expectations because it is a technology like the telephone rather than a media site like the New York Times or that Facebook should not be entrusted with taking down false advertising or striking down violent speech because those are tasks best left to the government is a failure of imagination and a failure to imagine what (civic) responsibility entails. As the word suggests (respons-ibility), the responsibility of any company or person who provides the possibility of speech, who can take it away from any given user and makes billions in profits off it, is to answer for and consider the admittedly unpredictable and deeply complex ramifications of the speech spoken under the company’s or person’s auspices.
6 Marketing Automation Solutions for Cannabis Businesses
The cannabis vertical is filled with dispensaries, laboratories, growers, manufacturers, and on-demand delivery services. More broadly speaking, the industry is comprised of plant-touching businesses (growers, processors, dispensaries) and ancillary businesses (delivery apps, payment processors, technology solutions). What businesses in both of these categories rely on is marketing to attract and retain customers, which helps to explain why the number of marketing automation solutions for cannabis businesses is growing so quickly.
Here are six examples of marketing automation platforms aimed at the cannabis industry.
Consumerizing AI to Drive Stickiness and Usability
Organizations investing billions in enterprise software realized the obvious: that easier-to-use technology was not only more scalable internally, but that it delivered better ROI. Accessible platforms could be optimized faster and were “stickier” across teams. This gave way to the consumerization movement in IT and enterprise.
As we head into 2019, the enterprise’s consumerization is well established. Yet when it comes to AI, which will see over $235 billion in investment by 2025, this idea of consumer-like UI has largely fallen by the wayside.
That has to change.
3 Challenges Keeping Chief Growth Officers Up at Night
The role of the Chief Growth Officer is challenging enough without digital ad budgets getting upended. But that’s exactly what’s happening. Thanks to radical changes made by the three largest U.S. online ad platforms, the digital advertising ecosystem is undergoing a transformation, and it is forcing Chief Growth Officers to reconsider their marketing strategies. Here are three challenges keeping Chief Growth Officers up at night—and a straightforward solution for getting more sleep.
5 Proven Strategies for Ramping Up Your Mobile Coupon Marketing Program
The United States is one of the largest smartphone markets in the world, with some 96% of people owning a cellphone. Those consumers most likely to own a smartphone fall into the sweet spot of retail marketing demographics—those ages 18-29 (96%) and those ages 30-49 (92%), according to Pew Research. Retailers are realizing that mobile coupon marketing is the best way to get special offers in the hands of consumers.
Retailers that take advantage of the power of mobile marketing when combined with coupons have a new and effective means of driving foot traffic and purchases. Here we offer a look at five mobile coupon marketing strategies.
Heard on the Street, Episode 37: Redefining Location Intelligence
Beyond the advertising uses for location intelligence (ad targeting, attribution, etc.), it’s being applied to other areas of enterprise support. That includes everything from supply chain management to deciding where you should open your next store location.
“When you look at ad tech and sales and marketing, that’s where the money is now,” said Mike Davie, CEO of location Intelligence company Quadrant on the latest episode of Heard on the Street. “But we are seeing people get more sophisticated with use cases like infrastructure development [such as] where to put high-speed trains by analyzing migration between countries. They’re making billion-dollar infrastructure decisions based on ground-level information.
To Meet Consumer Demands, Automotive Marketing Goes Vertical
While customer feedback is coming in from every direction, the automotive industry has done a better job of funneling reviews into vertical-specific platforms than some other industries. Large auto retailers like AutoNation are making major data stack investments, while others are working to improve their online ratings and reviews by engaging more frequently on sites like Facebook and Yelp as well as on automotive-specific platforms like Cars.com and Edmunds.
Jump of 0.1 in Five-Star Review Averages Can Make the Difference on Conversion
When customers are looking for a quick fix and do not intimately know the shops around them, star-rating averages are crucial. A new report by location-based marketing firm Uberall indicates they are so influential in consumer decision-making processes that a mere 0.1-point jump in a store’s average rating can increase its conversion rate by 25%.
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