News and Analysis

Brick & Mortar vs Flesh & Blood: An Interview with Ryan Serhant

Brick & Mortar vs Flesh & Blood: An Interview with Ryan Serhant

Even if you’ve never seen “Million Dollar Listing,” you should know who Ryan Serhant is, especially if you’re involved with a multi-location brand. Serhant is the high-energy and visionary media personality successfully breaking almost every real estate marketing and sales rule. Serhant launched his brokerage company (called SERHANT, of course) in 2020. The company now […]

4 Ways Brand Marketers Should Harness ChatGPT — Or Risk Being Left Behind

4 Ways Brand Marketers Should Harness ChatGPT — Or Risk Being Left Behind

Generative AI has taken the world of marketing, advertising, and technology by storm. In industries where speed and accuracy are essential, brand marketers are finding creative ways to use tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard to interact with consumers in conversational dialogue and personalize messaging at scale.  According to a recent survey by Chief […]

How Retailers Can Improve Inventory Management in Real Time

How Retailers Can Improve Inventory Management in Real Time

Among other things, SymphonyAI is a SaaS company that enables retailers and convenience stores to see through the eyes of the customer regarding in-store products on shelves and improve inventory management. Using image capture from employee mobile devices, whether mobile phones, tablets, shelf cameras, ceiling cameras, or robots, both retailers and CPG companies use SymphonyAI’s […]

Commentary

How to Ensure Your Mobile App Is ADA-Compliant

Federal courts have dictated that all mobile applications in the U.S. need to be accessible to those with disabilities, thanks to the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). Given these rulings and the 56 million people with disabilities in the U.S., you need to make sure your app complies with the law.

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. 

Latest Posts

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.  

Risks to Consider When Using Public Wi-Fi

The next time you stop somewhere to grab a coffee, you should think twice before taking out your phone and looking for available networks. Public Wi-Fi may be a strong positive overall, but there are dangers inherent to using it, and you need to be aware of them. That’s why we’re going to cover them in this piece — so let’s run through them.

Location Weekly: Google Maps Update; NextNav’s $120M Round for Geolocation Services

The Location-Based Marketing Association covers Home Depot piloting kiosks from Slyce to locate products in store, Google updating Maps with tips, transit, and AR, Air Canada enabling customers to use PayPal, NextNav raising $120M for 3D geolocation services in U.S., Korea’s Lotte going hi-tech to steal customers from e-commerce, and India’s NavIC possibly one day replacing GPS.

Valentine’s Day Boosts Entertainment, Food, and Social Apps

The data shows that Valentine’s Day marks a major uptick in app usage across verticals. Compared to an average February day last year, on Valentine’s Day, entertainment app usage was up 24%, food and drink apps 20%, and social 16%. Consumers also spent an unusual amount of time on transport (7%) and gaming (6%) apps.