News and Analysis
Yext Launches No-Code Page Builder to Power Localized Marketing
Yext this week made another power move by launching a no-code page builder. No-code websites may sound most relevant to SMBs, but they’ll also have huge implications for multi-location brands looking to stand up localized marketing websites across hundreds or thousands of locations without large marketing teams.
Retailers Move to Automate 70% of Rote Store Tasks by 2025
Generative AI is the talk of the retail town as marketers look to use it to connect with customers, but many retailers are gearing up to use AI for another purpose: automating routine in-store tasks.
FKA CGO: ‘Any Agency That Says These Are Easy Times Is Simply Lying’
Is the agency model inherently broken, or is the executive turnover taking place at large global firms pushing the digital media landscape in a more positive direction? If you ask Linsey Loy, the newly-appointed chief growth officer at Formerly Known As, or FKA, it’s most definitely the former.
Commentary
How to Turbocharge Social and Email via Cross Promotion
At a time when marketers have limited resources to create new content, social posts and user-generated content can be a welcome addition to email marketing campaigns and newsletters. Email and social media can also be used to cross-promote, creating two sticky channels that drive home important messages. What’s more, while everyone is at home and online more than usual, marketers can get creative with new forms of social engagement over email, too.
How To Get More Positive Google Business Reviews and Improve Your Google Rankings
In this article, we’ll take a look at how Google reviews can make or break your customer acquisition and retention efforts, and secondly, what you can do to encourage more customers to write the sort of reviews that keep the almighty Google algorithm happy.
Making Local Content Work for Retailers
Customers expect businesses to answer their questions and meet their demands in one easy-to-find, easy-to-navigate-to location. They want to know what a store carries, where the store is located, and if they can easily buy a product online instead. Increasingly, especially since the advent of Covid-19, they also want to know if they have access to services like curbside pickup or what safety provisions a business provides. This is why, now more than ever, marketers need to leverage local content strategies to our advantage.
Latest Posts
Heard on the Street, Episode 39: Building a Local Merchant Operating System
The word “platform” is thrown around a lot these days. It’s sometimes invoked for the sake of PR positioning, sometimes to make something sound more sophisticated than it is, but often the technology being described is really more of an application. A true platform is a central point in an ecosystem of apps that can be launched and managed from one place.
This is the definition that Sparkfly embodies. As I discussed with founder and CEO Catherine Tabor on the latest episode of Heard on the Street, the company integrates several local merchant functions through the single jumping-off point of its local merchant platform.
The Rise of First-Party Data: Why Quality Matters Over Quantity
For years, digital marketers have paid hand over fist in the digital gold rush for data. Instead of a tangible product, tech companies earn millions in revenue from the data they collect on previous, current, and future digital consumers. But digital marketers seeking to gobble up as much data as they can for their campaigns — while not stopping to consider the source of or methods used to collect it — are taking the wrong approach. The age-old mantra of “quality over quantity” has never been more relevant in online advertising, and marketers must quickly and fully embrace first-party data or risk their digital campaigns (and bottom lines) falling flat.
5 Ways to Improve the Customer Experience for Holiday Shoppers
The retail space starts to feel chaotic this time of year, with brands pulling out all the stops to win over holiday shoppers. Amidst all the talk of sales and discounts, retailers this year are looking at integrating new customer experience initiatives designed to bring in first-time shoppers and encourage long-time loyalists to spend even more than usual.
To learn even more about the customer experience strategies retailers are launching this year, we checked in with a few industry experts. Here are their thoughts on the best customer experience strategies retailers are trying out this holiday season.
Which Emerging Social Platforms Will Win Big This Holiday Season?
Retailers looking for an edge this holiday season are testing the waters with newer, emerging social platforms in a bid to generate awareness and market their products to huge audiences of tech-savvy teens and twenty-somethings.
On TikTok, a mobile app for creating and sharing short videos, retailers are poised to connect with a base of more than 500 million users.
GDPR Implementation Spurs New Industry Offering Compliance Services
A year and a half after GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) was passed into EU law, Kantar has found there is a vibrant industry in the United States dedicated to helping US companies comply with the new rules, as evidenced by paid search advertising activity throughout 2019.
Kantar analyzed US Google desktop and mobile text ad clicks on ads displaying for 10 GDPR-related keywords from January through September 2019, including gdpr, gdpr compliance, gdpr requirements, and what is gdpr. During the nine-month period, we found 283 advertisers in a wide range of industries sponsoring GDPR keywords, including IT companies, online security firms, software manufacturers, and business consultancies.
Are Google’s Many Broken Features Reflections of Google’s Style?
Mike to David: To some extent, the Google “method” of release quickly, break often, iterate, and finally reject or accept a change collides very directly when it interfaces with the much slower-moving real world.
David: This speaks to our ongoing antitrust discussion and whether business harm is a justifiable prong on which to spear Google. Volatility is one thing, but a broken utility is another. And realistically, because of Google’s market position, small businesses have nowhere to turn when that utility is flat-out failing on fundamental levels.
Street Fight Unveils Innovator Award Winners
Street Fight’s charter is to educate the world on the innovation and best practices in local media, advertising, and commerce. And a key corollary to that mission is to recognize and award the innovators driving these sectors.
With that backdrop, today we officially announce the winners of the Street Fight Innovator Awards. Spanning 12 categories that represent the top battlegrounds in local commerce, winners embody the best of innovation and achievement in these areas (full list below).
With GatherUp Acquisition, ASG Expands Into Reviews Space
Mike Blumenthal says the acquisition by ASG gives GatherUp greater access to organizational value, helping the company build better products and processes faster and more robustly. He expects there to be virtually no change in GatherUp’s day-to-day activities. All of the company’s teams—including sales, customer success, engineering, and management—will remain intact following the acquisition. Aaron Weiche will stay on as CEO. Although GatherUp was founded in San Jose, the company employs a distributed team that is now focused in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Finding New Audiences: How To Win with the Next Generation of Consumers
The youngest generation of consumers is not only ad-averse, but also prefers to consume content when and where they want. With 71% of Gen Z claiming to prefer streaming services over traditional TV, the formula for successful content platforms is simple — provide consumers the content they want to see on the devices they use outside of the house.
It’s equally important for platforms to cut through the noise and remove commercials and ads if they want to secure Gen Z support moving forward. While we all have specific tastes in what shows we watch, older generations of consumers were perfectly content sitting through commercials and ads. Gen Z is not of this mindset.
Is Uber Local Advertising’s Duopoly Killer?
While Amazon is challenging the duopoly, when zeroing in on local advertising and commerce — Street Fight’s hallmark — as opposed to driving eCommerce, another challenger may loom: Uber. In fact, we have a longstanding prediction that it will blitz local advertising by strategically building from the Trojan Horse that is “in-ride mode.”
This theory is based on the fact that Uber has your captive attention during rides, given in-app utilities like mapping and ETA. Furthermore, it knows where you’re going (think destination-based promotions). In the aggregate, it has lots of behavioral data for a richer mosaic of audience-targeting gold.
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem