News and Analysis

4 Ways to Use ChatGPT for Local Marketing

4 Ways to Use ChatGPT for Local Marketing

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Digital agencies are embracing OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and so are local marketers. With its automation capabilities and natural language processing skills, ChatGPT has the potential to level the playing field for small and mid-size businesses as well as regional chains without agency support. 

Yelp Provides Peek into Local Commerce Misinformation and Other Bad Practices

Yelp Provides Peek into Local Commerce Misinformation and Other Bad Practices

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Everyone tuned into local commerce knows that fraudulent local reviews are a problem. But how big is the problem, and what can marketers and platforms do to diminish it?

Study: Consumers Skittish on Spending in 2023

Study: Consumers Skittish on Spending in 2023

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Strong labor markets and a growth in wages have helped consumers maintain spending on discretionary items until now, but a new study released by the National Retail Federation and Affinity Solutions paints a less optimistic picture of the year ahead.

Commentary

How to Maximize the Power of DOOH in the “New Normal”

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Now is the time for marketers who have spent the past six months on the sidelines, interpreting the signals buried in data and gathering learnings, to put their messages back out where consumers are active and engaged – increasingly, outside the home. As more digital screens become available, brands and businesses need to keep in mind the particularly timely benefits of digital out-of-home (DOOH) as a way to effectively and efficiently deploy their market spend in our “new normal.”

New Study Shows the Impact of Transparency on Consumer Trust

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It’s time to start proactively addressing consumer privacy concerns. The data shows that people are becoming more concerned about privacy, and all signs point to the continuation of this trend.  

Start with building trust through simple actions like better communication and user experiences. Bake consumer trust initiatives into your corporate strategy by investing in technology, creating formal KPIs, and educating your internal audiences and stakeholders about its importance.

How Local Businesses Can Survive Without a Website

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It is hard to imagine operating a business without a website. However, it can be done. In fact, it is already being done by the over 40% of American small businesses that still don’t own a website of any kind. It should be noted that the lack of a website by some businesses isn’t usually due to choice, but rather due to cost. 

Even so, local businesses that lack the wherewithal to launch and maintain a website need not despair because there are a host of other viable marketing and communication methods at their disposal to bring awareness to their goods and services.

Latest Posts

Using Location Intelligence as Marketing Pixels for the Real World

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Without pixels, marketing in the digital world would be a guessing game. However, with 90% of all commerce still taking place in the physical world, oftentimes marketers find themselves in the dark, not knowing how their customers are interacting with their brands offline. Enter location intelligence, or as we like to call it, pixels for the real world. 

Take a moment to reflect on the past few weeks. Did you stop at a coffee shop on the way to work? Did you work out on specific days of the week at a nearby gym? Are there restaurants you frequent when you are too lazy to cook at home? In a study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers found that people frequent up to 25 places at any given time period. Similar to marketing pixels placed on websites, the ability to understand physical, real-world behavior such as path-to-purchase, visitation patterns, day-of-week preferences, and daily activities fuels more strategic decision making. 

LBMA Vidcast: Amazon to Roll Out Hand Recognition Payment at Whole Foods

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On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Skoda announces in-car voice assistant Laura, Philadelphia bans stores that don’t accept cash, Kochava teams with CubeIQ, GOAT let’s you try on exclusive sneakers in AR, Olo powering restaurant orders from Google search and maps, Amazon to roll-out hand recognition payment at Whole Foods.

Impending Brand Safety Woes: Nasty and Misleading Political Ads Hit Facebook

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If brand safety in the 2020 election season does not immediately seem concerning, consider the following: You’re an advertiser hoping to run digital ads for your advertising tech solution. You pay a publisher with huge traffic big money to score impressions on its platform. But as soon as a Democratic voter navigates to the site and sees your ad, along with it pops up a big Trump ad making inflammatory claims about Biden. The web surfer navigates away from the site. Who wins?

Last-Minute Shoppers Help Small Retailers Compete with Amazon for Holiday Sales

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During the holiday shopping season, it’s Amazon’s world — or is it?

Outside the digital sphere, brick-and-mortar holiday sales at big-box shops like Walmart and Best Buy continue to be buoyed by bullish shoppers willing to hit the streets in search of timely deals during consumer-focused quasi-holidays like Black Friday. As a result, shoppers are spending more during the holidays than ever before. 

And then there’s the independent, local retailer. How is a small shop supposed to compete with the ease of mobile e-commerce or the allure of big-box doorbuster deals? Turns out, they have an ace in the hole: last-minute shoppers. 

Heard on the Street, Episode 36: Fighting Location Fraud, With Location Sciences

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Along with GDPR, CCPA, and a period of generally heightened concern about privacy and data collection, this iOS update could challenge the ability for marketers to get precise location data. But on the bright side, these macro factors compel better practices, shifting strategies and measurement tools. The time is right, Jason Smith says, for Location Sciences and lots of other companies in the location intelligence sector looking to point the way toward digital marketing’s future best practices.

Technology Planning: What Retailers Should Do Now to Prep for the Holiday Rush

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Retailers will need to think differently when it comes to technology planning. With the holiday season looming, now is the best moment to develop a long-term technology strategy geared toward capturing more holiday sales in addition to driving revenue growth all year long.

Understanding a few key areas can help get the planning process started. This includes: exceeding consumers’ holiday shopping expectations, making holiday shopping more convenient, and enabling a holistic holiday shopping journey. 

Direct-to-Consumer Brands Are Winning at Personalized Messaging. Here’s Why

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According to new research conducted by Braze, a company that specializes in growth marketing automation, direct-to-consumer brands beat non-direct-to-consumer brands with 58.6% higher messaging open rates across channels.

One reason for the higher open rates is because direct-to-consumer brands show greater willingness to use automation and iteration to personalize messages and speak to customers at a point in the journey when it makes sense for them.

Nextdoor Releases Local Deals to Connect Businesses with Nearby Customers

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Nextdoor, the social networking app that requires users to enter a verified address in order to connect neighbors, is announcing local deals, a feature that will allow businesses on the platform to promote sales, discounts, and other offers to nearby customers.

Nextdoor is active in more than 248,000 neighborhoods across 11 countries.

Google Considers Buying TikTok Rival

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TikTok could be seen as a competitor for YouTube, the video platform owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet. TikTok is typically seen as a greater threat to Facebook in the social category, and the social giant is testing a copycat app of its own to crush the insurgent. But more time on TikTok could also mean less time on YouTube in a tight attention economy, and TikTok’s fervent teen users apparently have Google concerned enough to spark a potential Firework deal.

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Facebook Marketing Partner Summit 2019: What’s All the Hype about Messaging?

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Facebook led the Summit with this very interesting statistic: “There are now more messaging users than social users globally.” While the semantics of “messaging” vs. “social app” draw a fine distinction, on raw user count alone, WhatsApp and Messenger account for 2.9 billion users, and Facebook alone sits at 2.4 billion.

With these numbers in mind, Facebook’s contention is that conversation should be a larger part of the consumer journey when it comes to advertising, even noting that consumers are increasingly expecting to be as well, creating a virtuous cycle of sorts.