News and Analysis
Retailers Tackle Excess Inventory with Demand Planning Tools
The scramble to move excess summer inventory ahead of the holiday shopping season is forcing retailers to take a second look at new technology designed to help companies determine how much to discount or raise pricing to maximize profitability. At o9 Solutions, an enterprise AI software platform provider, retail clients are increasingly seeking out demand planning tools to help with demand sensing and inventory visibility.
Commentary
Location Weekly: PayPal Facilitates Contactless Payments
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association hosts Vanjo Wandscher, Group CEO, ROQQIO Commerce Solutions.
The team also covers Westfield’s Mall of the Netherlands using LEDs and AR to drive social distancing, MapinHood ensuring social distancing on sidewalks, and PayPal facilitating QR code contactless payment.
The Impact of Covid-19 on Local Search for Healthcare
On March 20, the Google My Business team announced they would disable reviews and Q&A (since restored) in order to conserve human and machine bandwidth for critical updates. New listing creation and verification was also temporarily disabled. Google made these moves, in large part, in order to ensure that listings in critical categories, especially healthcare, would remain up to date.
The Google My Business product team also rushed to create new features in response to the crisis, such as a “temporarily closed” flag in the GMB dashboard and prominent attributes showcasing the availability of services like pickup and delivery. Healthcare was a primary focus in this phase of new feature development, which is still ongoing.
The Importance Of Marketing Localization During Times Of Disruption
In 2020, organization and transparency will be key for retail marketers. In the short term, retailers must identify and optimize existing technologies to stay afloat. In the longer term, the focus should be on evolving shopping behavior and enabling transformation through technology. Knowing that Q3 will be a critical quarter for retailers as Covid-19 lockdown policies begin to lift, retailers must plan their comebacks now, and that begins with a strong digital approach.
Latest Posts
The High Stakes of Identity
Identification is the key to relevant, timely, and cohesive cross-channel marketing that increases sales and builds brand loyalty. Do it right, and you’ll achieve the kind of truly personalized marketing of which our predecessors could only dream. Here are the major tenets of a successful, privacy-aware strategy for storing data on consumers in a multichannel landscape.
Publishers Need to Pivot to First-Party Data
Rather than developing entirely new inventory strategies, which is a heavy lift, publishers can look to what they already have—rich behavioral, subscriber, and social data, most of it seriously under-leveraged. When used properly, first-party data can help publishers drive revenue in two ways—directly and indirectly. It can help them to stop working harder and start working smarter.
6 Customer Data Platforms for Brands
Customer data platforms dominated the conversation at the MarTech Conference in California earlier this month, as marketers shared how they’ve been able to pull data from multiple sources, combine that data into single customer profiles, and then make that data available to other marketing systems.
With so much hype surrounding customer data platforms right now, we decided to dig into the market and learn about some of the hottest players in the space. Here’s what we found.
Voice-Readiness Study Indicates Vast Majority of Businesses Fail Basic Listings Test
It only takes listing correct and comprehensive information on Google, Yelp, and Bing for a brand or small business to earn 90% on location management solution Uberall’s voice search readiness test. Yet only 4% of the businesses in the company’s latest study, which examined the voice preparedness of 75,000 listings, had correct info on all three of those major directories.
Government Regulation Is Marketers’ Most Common Concern About Data-Driven Initiatives
Changing political headwinds and increased media attention on data collection and privacy are apparently rattling marketers, who named government regulation as an obstacle to data-driven campaigns more than any other single factor. That’s per a survey of U.S. marketers by Winterberry Group and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, eMarketer reported.
Location Is an Underused Data Layer for Brands Seeking Better ROI
In 2019, we are just scratching the surface of location data’s potential for improving the ROI of advertising and marketing. As we approach the next decade, location intelligence will be a major factor in determining which brands thrive and exist in the many years to come and which ones fall by the wayside by not taking their data seriously enough.
The DOOH Opportunity: How OOH is Becoming a Bigger Piece of the Media Mix Pie
Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising is having a fantastic run. It is the only traditional media channel to consistently grow over the last 10 years and is expected to continue growing in 2019, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.
However, OOH teams are often siloed away from broader digital marketing teams and are categorized differently in budget breakdowns and post-campaign analysis. As the field adapts and evolves, continued separation of digital and OOH teams is going to hinder, rather than help, your efforts and results.
SMB Marketers: Small Budget? Small Team? Search and Social Are Key
With the barrier to entry lower than ever, third-party platforms have made inroads to make it easier for marketers to leverage search and social more effectively. These platforms have made it attainable for marketers—regardless of their team size or level of experience—to launch and optimize sophisticated, targeted campaigns, providing an ideal foundation to build upon as their capabilities and budgets expand. With that, here are five reasons SMB marketers should consider digging deeper into search and social right now.
Another Day, Another Story About Exposed Facebook User Data
While we don’t yet know if any nefarious activity took place as a result of this latest news of Facebook user information’s exposure to third parties, the bottom line, as per the pithy genie line above, is that Facebook handled user data so recklessly for so long that there’s no guarantee the company can prevent exposure going forward. That means, potential regulations for which Mark Zuckerberg is now calling notwithstanding, the end of the Facebook privacy-breach saga is likely not in sight.
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