News and Analysis
Study: Consumers Skittish on Spending in 2023
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.
Catalina Collaborates on In-Store Promotions with Kroger’s 84.51° Labs
The shopper intelligence firm Catalina and Kroger’s retail data and analytics unit, 84.51°, are collaborating on a solution that will deliver Kroger’s digital promotional offers to customers who shop exclusively in-store.
Agencies Are Embracing ChatGPT. Is That a Mistake?
In SEO expert Andrew Shotland’s view, most agencies aren’t saving as much time using AI to develop creative content as they might think. Tools like ChatGPT are fast, but they aren’t particularly accurate. That’s a major problem, especially for agencies trying to create hundreds or thousands of local pages for national brand clients.
Commentary
Tracing, Tracking, and Trust: Why Tech Is on the Sidelines in Contact Tracing
Mainly, multiple instances of data breaches committed by governments, corporations, platforms, and even data warehouses have eroded the trust citizens have when forking over sensitive and personal information. The resistance only increases as a result of Americans’ strong resistance to being told what to do, which manifested in widespread protests against mandatory quarantine restrictions in several states.
How can this resistance be overcome? Companies and government organizations asking for personal information must build trust from the very beginning. High rates of consent require clear information to users about exactly what data citizens will share and how this data will be used and protected.
Marketers, Don’t Stress About Zero-Click Search Just Yet
Did you know that over 50% of Google searches performed do not result in a click? Did you know that Google is continuing to expand the number of queries to which they are applying zero-click SERP features?
Did you know that it’s not something that you should be too worried about yet?
“Wait… But it’s taking away search opportunities from my website!”
That depends on how you are defining search opportunities, so let’s jump to it.
How Location Intelligence Benefits Businesses During Covid-19
The pandemic has changed the way businesses function, and while a lot of purchasing has moved online, many physical locations remain. Location intelligence is one factor that can help businesses perform better. Its uses include supply and inventory updates, supply-chain improvements, sales and marketing optimization, and monitoring for increased safety.
Latest Posts
August Focus: Local’s Next Battleground is Your Car
Why are connected cars 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. That is usually in proximity to one’s home (thus, local).
Could an increasingly digital and connected car influence those purchases when consumers are out and about? This is one extension of the local search that consumers used to do at home but now do on their mobile devices while on the move. The car could become a third point of connection and influence.
Low-Hanging Technical SEO Fruit for Local Ranking
Local SEO is powerful. If you run an ice cream shop out of Wichita, Kansas, then you’d probably want to show up on Google when a person there searches for ice cream. Search engines have become crucial for existing and potential customers to connect with businesses.
Some business owners unintentionally set up obstacles to appearing on local search by improper site structure. Here are some low-hanging fruits to help your business appear for local searches.
Heard on the Street, Episode 31: CDPs and Israeli Innovation
As data science continues to collide with digital marketing, customer behavior metrics are reaching new levels of actionable insight. But counteracting that advantage is the growing fragmentation of devices and platforms used in the path to purchase, making it harder to get a single view of the customer.
This is the world of customer data platforms (CDPs), and it is where Optimove hangs its hat. Founder & CEO Pini Yakuel explains to us on the latest episode of Heard on the Street how the company helps brands and multi-location retailers get the insights they need to better serve their customers.
Phone-as-a-Service?
It’s becoming clear that we’re headed toward a new vision for our devices: the Phone as a Service (PaaS). Yes, sounds crazy, but look at the parallels between your phone and how/why other “X”s have become services:
X-as-a-service (XaaS) is delivery of X directly via the internet, eliminating the need to use and manage multiple and independent solutions on locally hosted devices, right? So, PaaS is the delivery of personalized media via the phone, eliminating the need to use and manage multiple and independent, locally hosted apps. We’re already seeing that happen.
6 Companies Reimagining Last-Mile Delivery
There’s a renewed push in Silicon Valley to tackle last-mile delivery. The use of autonomous vehicles, drones, and artificial intelligence is what more and more vendors are pushing for. Last-mile delivery is the most expensive part of shipping, and increasing fees mean prices are only going higher. The company that can get goods from a transportation hub to the customer’s doorstep in the shortest amount of time will win the retail game, and technology firms are hoping that their innovative solutions will be the answer that retailers are looking for.
Here are six examples of companies that are working to innovate in the last-mile delivery space.
Consulting Firms and Agencies Are the Perfect Complement for Data-as-a-Service
External data is incredibly hard to use and make sense of. After all, it is just data. It is usually delivered via a big CSV dump or API call. Most data companies just hand off the data to their customers and say “good luck.” In fact, a decent amount of purchased data just sits on the shelf and is never used.
This is where the forward-thinking consulting firms and agencies come in. They have a massive opportunity to help organizations make use of external data.
Offline Retailers See Huge Boost From Prime Day’s Online Sales
Amazon wasn’t the only retailer to see high purchase intent during its two-day event. Competing retailers saw similar successes piggybacking on Amazon’s newest shopping holiday with their own discounts and limited-time deals. This year’s Prime Day event drove a 14% spike in U.S. traffic on its first day, compared to baseline traffic from the month of June.
According to data collected by Constructor.io, an AI-first SaaS provider for ecommerce sites, among the non-Amazon companies having sales during Prime Day, search volume increased an average of more than 500%.
Half of Organizations Send the Wrong Marketing Messages to Customers
The result of this data deluge? Organizations lack the insight into their customers they desperately need to deliver meaningful experiences, secure sales, and retain customers. New research estimates 48% of them struggle to gain these insights due to the data silos and more than half admit they don’t have a full picture of their marketing data and their customer journey.
Given the many challenges marketers are up against, it’s no wonder they struggle to define their customer journeys and optimize customer interactions. Below I offer some advice for those in this data struggle.
Multi-Location Marketers Want to Do More Social Advertising, But One Big Thing Stands in the Way
Unlike search, social is a push medium that marketers can use to reach new audiences. Social can leverage rich ad formats such as mouth-watering images of restaurant dishes, explainer videos for complex products, and eye-catching celebrity or influencer endorsements that are much more impactful and engaging at storytelling than search.
Today’s local enterprise advertisers know that they should be leveraging the one-two punch of search and social together. One day they will. But until social advertising can offer the same streamlined workflow that can make managing hundreds or thousands of locations as easy as search makes it, social will still lag behind in the local marketing media portfolio.
7 Cannabis Data Analytics Firms
One of the signs that an industry is becoming more legitimate is when its major players start investing in analytics. With a recent boom in the number of data analytics firms entering the cannabis space, it’s time to reevaluate the landscape for recreational marijuana as a business.
The marijuana industry is expanding at a rapid pace. Analysts estimate the industry could reach $75 billion in global sales by 2030. With so much on the line and marijuana companies facing enormous pressure to innovate, investors are pushing for the increased use of data analytics to make more strategic business decisions.
Here are seven cannabis data analytics firms working to change the face of the industry right now.
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