News and Analysis
BrightLocal Survey Finds Businesses Still Offering Incentives for Reviews
Nearly half of consumers have been offered incentives in exchange for leaving a business review, despite widespread efforts throughout the online review industry to cut down on the practice. According to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey, the practice of offering discounts or cash in exchange for reviews is on the rise.
What the Rise of Generative AI Means for Marketers
While these are still early days for OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, marketers have begun to pounce. From creative production and versioning to content generation and customer service, marketers are finding innovative ways to use AI chatbots to generate more reliable results for their clients.
Google’s AI Chops and Local Search
ChatGPT celebrants have lauded it as a Google killer or questioned why Google wasn’t first to the generative AI phenomenon. But there’s a problem with that narrative: Google has been all over AI for years.
Commentary
How the E-Commerce Wave Is Helping SMBs Increase Revenue
For many of the small businesses that have stayed afloat so far, e-commerce has become the new focus. A quarter of brick-and-mortar retail businesses surveyed in June said they’ve already added an e-commerce channel to their operations this year. Retail SMBs either want a piece of the growing pie that is e-commerce sales in 2020, or they’ve realized they won’t survive without an online sales component.
Whatever the motivation, the uptick in e-commerce sales has set the stage for SMBs to start boosting their revenue. And to complement the current market conditions, the rise of no-code tools is making online retail success more accessible than ever to SMBs. These solutions are proving to be the surfboard that helps small businesses successfully ride that e-commerce wave.
Why You Should Be Using Video Marketing To Connect with Local Audiences
One report from Cisco found that by 2022, internet videos will make up over 82% of all consumer online traffic. Even though the Covid-19 pandemic has slowed down video production and demand somewhat, it still remains a perfectly viable marketing channel.
People are simply more likely to watch a video than read a blog. By looking at key pillars of online video production as well as what’s worked for other companies, you, too, can develop a stellar strategy.
Leveraging Cannabis Consumer Data is the Key to Mainstream Acceptance
Thanks to the industry’s meteoric growth and coronavirus-era essential status in many states, cannabis consumers have emerged as one of the most coveted marketing segments, driving even more engagement in data collection and presentation. A rising tide lifts all boats – and data is a powerful tide that can help raise the industry to mainstream acceptance.
Data may be the ticket to legalization, too, if leveraged in a way that considers how this lucrative information can be used by mainstream companies. As cannabis data begins to resemble data from other industries, it is our responsibility as industry leaders to collectively leverage this data and allow legal cannabis to flourish and emerge as a truly established industry.
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GrubHub or GrabHub? Thoughts on the Latest Predatory Industry to Target SMBs
“Growth hacking” along these lines is enough to gag a maggot, but there is the more “benign” approach of Google that says, “Let’s add an order button to every restaurant for the ‘benefit of the customer’” that is equally reprehensible. The business is effectively paying a searcher “head tax” to the food delivery companies on brand searches where the consumer just wanted to get the restaurant phone number, and the searcher was offered a big order button that is so much more convenient to click.
In Google’s case, it would be a simple matter to provide the local restaurant the option to turn off the Order CTA in the dashboard. Instead, if a business complains to Google, they foist them on the delivery service for resolution. (Or not.)
Alexa, Draw a Line Between Convenience and Control
It’s that factor, consumer data and Amazon’s vast store of it, that stands out most in Jason Del Rey’s reporting on Recode’s new podcast series, Land of the Giants. Specifically striking is the episode on Alexa, in which Amazon employees openly speculate about a future in which smart microwaves will hook up with Amazon’s growing healthcare ambitions to tell you when it’s time to stop making popcorn and smart countertops will join the intelligent kitchen conversation. As Del Rey notes, Amazon execs talk about this future openly, dropping tidbits about customer obsession along the way and appearing truly unperturbed by the thought that such interventions into our domestic lives may go too far or generate unintended consequences. Optimism for the quality of Amazon products and a fervent belief in the company’s benefit to consumers—without due consideration for products’ risk and would-be limits—seem to pervade the corporate culture.
Communities: The Next Generation of Customer Engagement is Here to Stay
Today, it’s clear that the way businesses are communicating with customers is coming to another inflection point. Not only can end users opt out of messages from brands they don’t want to hear from, but they have become numb to the “spam” they receive on a daily basis. Now, new age technologies have opened up a plethora of avenues for organizations to push messages out to end users, and it begs the question, what can be done to find even more information about your audience?
A new mode of engagement is needed to help supplement customer communication in the next generation, but how will this manifest? My money would be on community.
LBMA Vidcast: PreciseTarget, Pinterest, Amazon Kills Dash Button
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: PreciseTarget, Pinterest, Pokemon Go in NYC, Amazon killing Dash button, Walgreens using Theatre, MediaMarkt rolls out Signify indoor navigation, RevealMobile adds Canadian data.
FedEx Stops Ground Deliveries for Amazon, Signaling Delivery War to Come
For FedEx as for the many other companies and industries Amazon has decimated over the past 20 years, the problem in confronting Amazon may turn out to be one of margins. While FedEx needs a profitable delivery business to survive, Amazon can afford to lose money on delivery and make it up with relatively free-flowing profits from Amazon Web Services and its booming ad business.
In fact, Amazon can afford, thanks to the faith and generosity of investors, to make no profits at all. No easy task, competing with that.
3 Things You Need to Know about Marketing on Reddit
Reddit refers to itself as the front page of the Internet. It’s a veritable goldmine for a marketer who knows how to leverage it. The trouble is, most don’t. They treat Reddit as no different from Facebook or Twitter. Here’s how to avoid making the same mistake.
Lens on Strategy: Connecting In-App Video Creative to Mobile Consumers
US mobile-video ad spend will reach $15.93 billion this year, and climb to $24.81 billion by 2022, according to eMarketer. There will be 187.7 million smartphone users in the US poised to experience that creative, a figure that will mushroom to 205 million by 2022, the same report predicts. The time for in-app video is undoubtedly now, but the question remains: what steps can publishers, advertisers, and marketers take to stay on the path of accelerated growth? The following strategies are part of the answer. Each will drive success when it comes to in-app video opportunities.
For Publishers, When It Comes To Display, Blame the Format, Not the Targeting
A controversial new study by Carnegie Mellon University found that digital publishers get roughly 4% more revenue for an ad impression that is cookie-enabled — or personalized — versus one that isn’t. That’s not much. And while the sample was limited — they only reviewed ads for one “large U.S. media company over the course of one week” — it highlights a question publishers have been grappling with for a long time.
Is cookie-based ad-targeting worth it? Given the mounting costs of investing in data stack technology; reputation issues (the “creepy factor”) and regulatory concerns like GDPR and CCPA that publishers routinely face as a result of behavioral ad-targeting, is the value really there? And is it justified? The Carnegie Mellon findings suggest that the benefit is minimal. However, as I see it, publishers are focusing on the wrong issue.
The Importance of Online Review Management for SMBs
Operators of small- and medium-sized businesses can get by ignoring many of the tech innovations that large companies adopt. Managing online reviews is not one of them.
Like it or not, the widespread usage of review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and even Google and Facebook have changed the landscape of how local businesses attract and retain customers. Left ignored or handled the wrong way, a business’s negative online reviews can be a deterrent to potential new customers. Managed the right way, however, those same review sites can be a valuable marketing and customer service tool that leads to improved revenue.
Marijuana Advertisers Chart Uncertain Territory with Laws in Flux
Could running ads for cannabis products put digital publishers in the crosshairs of federal regulators? It’s a question that more and more publishers are asking, even as marijuana legalization continues to spread across the U.S.
In a bid to help businesses in the cannabis industry understand what is, and isn’t, legal from an advertising perspective, Dash Two released its own guide to marijuana advertising laws. The company says it will keep its guide updated as the laws continue to evolve.
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