News and Analysis
Travel Brands Play Catch-Up as Consumers Seek Mobile Capabilities
As consumers grow more comfortable using mobile tools for communication and commerce, the disconnect between what travel brands are offering and what travelers are seeking is growing wider.
Halloween Season Amplifies Consumers’ Impulse to Buy
The cost of Halloween sweets will rise 34% compared to last year, according to data from PayPal, but that isn’t stopping retailers and brands from doing what they can to influence which products consumers purchase.
Pro Soccer Club Uses Fan Experience Data to Improve Engagement
The Oakland Roots Soccer Club is working with UserTesting to collect real-time insights from fans and develop more engaging digital experiences.
Commentary
No Time to Think Small: Innovate on SMB Reputation Management
A small business’ reputation is the company’s most valuable intangible asset. During this current climate, we are seeing successful brands adapting quickly to their customers’ change in lifestyle and priorities. They’re catering for their isolation with services that make their lives not only easier but also more entertaining. By remaining engaged and keeping conversations fluid, small businesses will be able to weather the storm as well as keep and attract new customers.
A trustworthy and actionable understanding of local communities is now more important than ever.
Here are a few ways small businesses can build and sustain a healthy reputation.
The Upside of Being Down: How to Market Your Small Business During Coronavirus
Studies show that eliminating advertising during tough times can lead to a decrease in sales. Business owners may view marketing as a discretionary cost and forgo it because they are bringing in less. But consumer and advertising spend are significant drivers of revenue, even in the midst of a downturn.
Coming out of the Great Recession of the late 2000s, marketers learned a valuable lesson: Going dark can have long-term consequences. Instead, business owners should adjust their marketing approach to reach audiences in thoughtful new ways. Here are some tips.
Location Weekly: Unacast, Krowdthink, Inpixon Tackle Coronavirus
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Unacast releasing a “Social Distancing Dashboard” to share how Americans are complying, Inpixon offering LBS tech to help hospitals with COVID-19, McDonald’s separating its Golden Arches in Brazil, and Yelp offering $25M in free ads to bars and restaurants. The show also features Geoff Revill, the co-founder and CEO of LBMA member company Krowdthink, who discusses the use of Community Krowd to assist the UK Home Office in the coronavirus crisis.
Latest Posts
The Location Angle on Another Bombshell Privacy Exposé from the New York Times
What exactly did Facebook do wrong, and what do its supposed wrongs portend for the future of data-driven, and especially location data-driven, marketing? Here are some major takeaways pertaining to future legislation, likely consumer reactions, and the distinction between data selling and sharing.
Google Testing Restaurant Booking, Foreshadowing Ever Tighter Grip on Local Commerce
The news is an important signal that local-commerce options like Reserve with Google will get sleeker and more dominant in the years to come. And it calls to mind a crucial local-search debate: Will Google SERPs and the many options for engagement with local brick-and-mortars on them effectively supplant the local business website as the crucial interface for interacting with customers?
Local Advertising’s Next Sleeping Giant: Uber
Mike Boland: Given the attribution possibilities, its scale, recent delivery partnership with Starbucks, and existing Uber Eats infrastructure, Uber’s move into advertising looks pretty inevitable. Of course, it would have to gain internal competency as an ad company, so look for acquisitions or talent hires (or both) in 2019. And look for more rhetoric about the latest company to challenge the duopoly, this time in a very local way.
Cannabis Retailer Uses Tech to Boost Employee Morale
Old-school companies hosted picnics and holiday parties to keep their employees happy, but tech-focused startups in the cannabis industry are taking a decidedly more sophisticated approach.
6 Lead-Generation Platforms for Local Businesses
More than a quarter of consumers say they use the internet to find local businesses every day, and yet a whopping 29% of small businesses still don’t have websites. Here are six examples of lead-generation platforms that small businesses are using right now.
GMB App Adds Support for Service-Area Businesses
As of late last week, Google is offering an update to the Google My Business app that adds support for service-area businesses. Earlier in November, a Local Search Forum blog post indicated that Google would be adding features to help such businesses with local customers.
Starbucks Partners with Uber to Launch On-Demand Delivery at 2,000 Locations
Starbucks announced on Friday that it’s partnering with Uber to launch on-demand delivery at 2,000 locations. The partnership is a sign of the “near me” local search era for retail, one in which proximity and convenience have become paramount, outweighing even loyalty.
Will Consumer Privacy Be the Defining Issue of 2019?
Though their terms are not identical, in essence both GDPR and CCPA are designed to give consumers the power to stop companies from collecting personal data, to review all personal data a company may have collected, and to request deletion of any stored data. Both regulations strike a major blow in favor of the concept that ownership of personal data ultimately resides with the individual and not with companies who may profit from it.
Efficacy of Google Posts Drops Following Relegation to Bottom of Knowledge Panel
Following a seemingly arbitrary choice on Google’s part to move Posts to the bottom of the Knowledge Panel, their efficacy in boosting businesses’ local search presence seems to be dropping.
LBMA Podcast: Burger King Swipes McDonald’s Customers, Target Experiments with AR
On this week’s LBMA podcast: AdMov, Xamoom celebrates “Silent Night,” Burger King swipes McDonald’s customers, Dunkin’ fools Portland, MA, Stella Artois’ beer-serving robot, Target selling Christmas trees with AR.
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