News and Analysis
Study: Multi-Location Businesses Underestimate Power of Local Digital Strategy
Marketing technology has changed the way consumers find, choose, and return to businesses. While the majority of multi-location businesses have successfully implemented broad strategies to be discovered by consumers, research shows many are failing to fully leverage the latest tools for local discovery, engagement, and conversion.
Commentary
How Advertisers Can Turn the Facebook Boycott into a Transformative Moment
It would be helpful if about 20 of the large brands boycotting Facebook put their money where their mouth is and invested in the establishment of a data and publisher sharing network.
The next step would be identifying the media publisher outlets as partners. The co-op would need to negotiate a performance-based publisher relationship, which would effectively increase content monetization for publishers’ content channels.
How Email Marketing Will Evolve in the Next 5 Years
With a tool that enables us to reach millions of potential customers with the click of a button, it’s tempting to send out mass promotional emails that reach the maximum number of people possible, but besides having been done to death, that means missing out on huge opportunities. Over the years, email marketing has steadily been moving away from the newsletter and promotional blast to behaviorally driven, event-triggered, one-to-one messaging. In one word: personalization.
Location Weekly, Featuring Co-Founders of Geofencing Platform Bluedot
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Fit:Match teaming with Brookfield for virtual fitting rooms in malls; Walmart, Cadillac, Fairview, and others transforming parking lots into virtual cinemas; and Uber buying Postmates for $2.65B. The team also hosts Emil Davityan and Filip Eldic, co-founders of Bluedot.
Latest Posts
July Focus: Retail Transformation in the Amazon Age
Street Fight is rolling into July with the monthly theme Disrupting Retail: a look at how retail continues to transform, driven by competition from Amazon and key trends like “retail-as-a-service.”
But why is this important to Street Fight (and to you)? As we continue to evolve the definition of “local,” one key component of its market opportunity is offline brick-and-mortar shopping. After all, about 90% of all U.S. retail spending, to the tune of about $3.7 trillion, is completed offline in physical stores. And that’s usually in proximity to one’s home (thus, local).
Startups Adapt to Shifting Privacy Standards
Two steps forward, one step back. That’s what it can feel like to be a technology provider in the location marketing space right now, struggling to strike a balance between the demands of brand marketers and growing concerns over consumer privacy and data regulation.
That push and pull is challenging vendors in the location marketing space. At the same time their firms should be seeing exponential growth, data regulations—including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s forthcoming Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)—are establishing new rules for innovation.
But some companies are embracing the regulation as a challenge to innovate in its own right.
In the Wake of Spam Reports, Google Focuses on Brand and Small Business Engagement
Google’s calculated risk in creating a low bar for verification works out fine in a world where most business owners simply want to gain legitimate access to their own listings, and most businesses do operate within those ethical boundaries. But as we’ve seen elsewhere at this stage in the evolution of social networks, fraud and deceptive manipulation have become a kind of ghost in the machine, dominating darker sectors of the local marketplace and creating an atmosphere of distrust that may eventually prove more broadly contagious.
All of this is only possible when lots of activity is consolidated on a few platforms. Just as fake accounts attempting to engineer the 2016 election thrived in the vast and complex Facebook ecosystem, so too has Google’s dominance in local attracted its own horde of opportunists, drawn like moths to its flame. Indeed, fraud in local listings is just the latest in a long history of attempts, from link farms to keyword spam, to manipulate loopholes in Google’s regulations and algorithms.
Vendors Rush to Bring Privacy Verification Solutions to Market
The demand for data privacy is at an all-time high, just as consumer trust in the technology space is at an all-time low. Advertisers are grappling with wasted ad spend and uncertainty over ad verification. The market is in disarray, and technology vendors are hoping they have a solution to the problem.
Just this month, the offline consumer intelligence and measurement company Cuebiq launched a new verification solution for third-party data. The solution gives advertisers verifiable proof of compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Consumers Welcome Some Automated Business Messaging, But Humans Must Tag Along to Help
More than half of consumers are frustrated by customer-service situations in which they can only interact with automated agents, and nearly one in five even reporting feeling angry in those situations. That’s per a new survey of U.S. consumers conducted by The Harris Poll and commissioned by call tracking and analytics firm Invoca.
Texting Allows Marketers to Reach Customers Where They Spend the Most Time
Seventy-six percent of consumers are already receiving texts from businesses, and a majority of consumers across all age groups would prefer that more businesses take up texting as a mode of communication, a new report from business text messaging platform ZipWhip indicates.
A whopping 83% of Gen-Z respondents and 82% of millennials said they “wish more businesses” would use texting. Even for older generations, that number made up a more than slight majority, including 76% of Gen-Xers and 64% of Baby Boomers.
The Retailpocalypse Doesn’t Have to Be Scary for Local Businesses
Headlines about retail closures suggest it’s Amazon’s world and we’re all just living in it, but there’s more to the story. For local businesses, in particular, there’s ample reason to be optimistic that the retail apocalypse doesn’t have to spell end times. In fact, exactly the opposite could be true. Let’s walk through a few of the reasons for optimism.
Alexa, Podcasts, and the Role of Voice in Today’s Marketing
The increasing popularity of smart speakers, digital assistants, and podcasts means we need to begin thinking differently about voice and marketing. That includes tailoring online content to users and how they engage with it, making voice functionality a part of the sales funnel, and creating podcasts or partnering with influencers to reach audiences in a new way. With the right approach, a creative brand could get a considerable head start in this new but quickly developing marketing landscape.
5 Consent Management Platforms for Brands and Publishers
For brands and publishers that work with multiple ad tech partners, the process of obtaining user consent for data processing is overwhelming. To simplify the workflow, publishers have started using consent management platforms (CMPs). Not only have CMPs been designed to help brands and publishers obtain and manage user consent, but they also help with monetizing users, even when users haven’t opted-in to sharing data.
CMPs were largely developed in response to the GDPR — most are built on the IAB’s transparency and consent framework — which means the systems themselves are still relatively young. Nonetheless, the popularity of this type of platform has led to a spring of new players entering the space. Here are five examples of CMPs on the market right now.
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