News and Analysis
BrandMuscle Releases Markie, a Local Marketing Virtual Assistant
The classic SMB marketing problem is that SMBs simply do not have the staff or time required to coordinate sophisticated digital marketing campaigns. BrandMuscle is stepping in to solve the problem with Markie, a local marketing virtual assistant that analyzes opportunities and points operators toward ideal next steps.
Commentary
4 Lesser-Known Social Platforms Effective For Marketing
Ask someone to name a social media platform, and you’ll probably get the same answers: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on. But it’s easy to forget that there are other powerful social platforms out there carving out a niche for themselves.
For marketers, these present an untapped opportunity. Read on to discover four lesser-known social platforms that will be great for connecting with prospective customers in 2020.
Retail Q5: Secrets to Maximizing Holiday Social Advertising Campaign Impact
The heightened emphasis on shopping during the holidays is a boon for retailers and advertisers, as brands flood all of our social feeds and airwaves with hot deals—not to mention the ever present cadre of e-commerce offerings also trying to break through. Spending on digital ads is also expected to increase as more advertisers shift their efforts to social media over television and print.
Naturally, much of this social media spending will go to Facebook. It can seem difficult, especially for SMB retailers, to break through the noise. But there is hope if you know how to game the system to be able to maximize the impact of your Facebook ads. There is this concept of “Q5,” which refers to the ~15 day period during just before and after the holidays where the lead time on ground shipping makes shopping online difficult. You’ll hear differing definitions on the exact time frame, and there is a regional element, too, as not everyone lives within one- or two-day shipping distances.
It’s Neural Matching: Google Explains the November Ranking Shakeup
A tweet on Monday from Google search liaison Danny Sullivan provides an explanation for the rankings shakeup that has perplexed the local search community since the beginning of November. Google began using neural matching to generate local search results.
Local search has just undertaken a huge evolutionary step. No longer are local results being matched to user queries solely on the basis of identifiable ranking factors, such as proximity to searcher, keywords in business names, primary category of the listing, review count, and so on. That isn’t to say such factors are now unimportant, but they have been augmented by a broader and more general sense of relevance delivered by neural matching.
Latest Posts
After Nearly Two Years in the Hot Seat, Facebook Feels the Burn
In its Q2 earnings report, the social giant reported that growth has stalled in the United States and Canada, its most valuable markets. And its overall user growth for the quarter of just 22 million users is the smallest jump since 2011, indicating that a slowdown in revenue growth will likely prove a long-term challenge in the years ahead.
Top Lesson for News Sites in SF Innovation Tour: Identify Users and Win Them Over One by One
Revenue was, naturally, very much on the minds of the 12 publishers, broadcasters, and other news media executives who took part in the Local Media Association’s June 2018 San Francisco Innovation Mission. But Jed Williams, LMA’s chief innovation officer, said the event focused on audience engagement.
Report: E-Commerce Sites Must Fend Off Looming Challenge from Social Platforms
The opportunity is ripe for social platforms with the right transactional infrastructure and e-commerce sites with a proper slate of marketing functions to cross into the conventional territory of the other, a new report from video marketing firm Magisto indicates. If e-commerce sites do not go beyond transactions to offer their vendors marketing possibilities, they may lose the market on transactions altogether.
BPA Worldwide and Bombora Supply Publishers With Tools To Compete with the Duopoly
If publishers are to compete with Google and Facebook for advertising dollars, they need to offer hyper-valuable media inventory that provides cutting-edge insights on the audiences exposed to sold ads. Enter secure media exchange BPA Worldwide and provider of B2B intent data Bombora, which are announcing a partnership today to offer those resources to publishers.
Heard on the Street, Episode 8: ‘Engineered Casual’ with Broadly CEO Josh Melick
Word of mouth has been a leading form of local marketing for more than a century. But in a digital age, the name of the game is harnessing it by combining “IRL” chatter with the power of software and network effect. This is the bread and butter of Broadly, whose CEO and founder Josh Melick is our latest guest on our podcast Heard on the Street.
How JumpCrew Grew to a Team of 200 in Just About Two Years
The way that people are going about acquiring new customers has really kind of been the same for the last 15–20 years,” CEO Robert Henderson said. He hopes that JumpCrew’s services will change that. “We’re putting together those solutions in packages and processes that are really easy for businesses to understand,” he said.
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Streets Ahead: Google Chat, and Instagram Reels