News and Analysis
5 E-Bike Startups for On-Demand Delivery Fleets
With the vast majority of last-mile deliveries arriving by bike, a new breed of e-bike startups has cropped up to serve the industry. Startups like GetHenry, Ubco ,and Joco are supplying e-bike fleets to on-demand delivery startups through a subscription model. Logistics companies are finally understanding the need for reliable bike fleets that can scale up or down based on real-time demand, and the need for e-bikes has never been greater.
Yelp Launches Request a Call to Connect Local Service Providers and Customers
Yelp announced this morning Request a Call, a feature that will allow customers to easily submit a request for a call to local service providers. The feature represents Yelp’s acknowledgement that there is still too much friction in the local services customer experience and that listings and review sites can help.
Commentary
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.
Carriers, It’s Time to Weld the Lid Shut on Customers’ Data
Personalization and privacy seem inherently at odds. After all, media companies such as Facebook act like vacuum hoses for data – collecting much more than they need. That’s problematic in a world where data breaches dominate headlines nearly every week. However, where Facebook and others go low, mobile carriers can go high. In fact, mobile carriers that aim to be media companies have a huge opportunity to respect privacy while providing great personalization in their original content.
So, how can carriers take this high road — that is, deliver personalized content experiences without storing consumers’ personal information? By focusing on the device itself – leveraging local storage and client-side execution (rather than requiring server interaction) to help carriers deliver a personalized experience that is incredibly safe. This allows carriers to implement the industry-changing trend of device-centric discovery (DCD), which makes it easy for subscribers to find news/sports/entertainment/games without having to wade through multiple apps and searches. With DCD, carriers can create personalized content experiences that don’t expose subscribers’ personal data to external privacy risks, and in the process, become mobile media leaders.
Latest Posts
Location Targeting is Nothing Without the Facts to Back it Up
Doing location targeting right is no simple matter, and common claims about it require further scrutiny. Accuracy of a location through parcel targeting, a rapid refresh audience strategy, and reaching the right people at scale through IP and cross-device targeting will make a major difference in location-based campaign outcomes.
Survey: Multi-Location Brands Continue to Shift Digital Budgets to Local
Many multi-location brands still find some traditional media more effective than most digital tactics and focus their digital efforts on the corporate e-commerce site or company branding. But an aggressive group of budget shifters are increasing spending across a variety of digital advertising and marketing vehicles, often with a local focus.
Cheetah Digital Acquires Stellar Loyalty
The acquisition combines a comprehensive suite of digital marketing tools from Cheetah Digital with the loyalty expertise and huge repository of data commanded by Stellar, according to the release, allowing the pair to provide brands with a more powerful, all-in-one B2C marketing platform.
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Scaling Seasonal SEO Across Locations With AI Insights