News and Analysis
Consumers Widely Frustrated by Business Messaging
Consumers are seeking easier ways to connect with businesses. For businesses, offering a phone number is no longer enough to maximize conversion opportunities when connecting with local customers searching for their products and services. But few businesses are prepared to meet consumers’ demands for quick, convenient communication.
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
Why Your Location-Based Ad Campaign Isn’t Working (And How to Make It Better)
Many low-accuracy solutions produce horizontal location data only – location in multi-story buildings is not even a possibility. The result is that advertisers are designing campaigns with the equivalent of one hand tied behind their back, generating two-dimensional campaigns for a three-dimensional world.
What advertisers really need is the ability to reach consumers wherever they are, including the floor level in a multi-story mall, and entice them to enter the store. To achieve this, high-accuracy 3D location is needed. Fortunately, new capabilities are in place to help retailers design more effective campaigns, which will drive better results and raise consumers’ expectations to new heights (pun intended!).
The Ghost in the Machine: Google Gamifies Machine Learning
David Mihm to Mike Blumenthal: As for our Halloween topic, a spooky good SEO, Scott Hendison, tweeted a link over the weekend that I found fascinating: https://crowdsource.google.com. Even for those of us who are used to these kinds of initiatives coming from Google, it’s the most brazen public effort we’ve seen to train their machine learning algorithm via user contributions across a whole range of data types.
Mike: It is certainly brazen. There is NO attempt to bury this as an activity within some other program like their Captcha. It’s a gamification of their ML plain and simple, and if I know Google, the reward will be either insignificant or worse: a discount on some “premium product” (i.e., an ad).
From Personal To Individual: Why Engaging Unique Consumers Requires Unique Communication
People everywhere receive “personalized” emails daily from brands greeting them by their first names. For a long time, brands have assumed this conveys genuine care for each customer. It’s certainly not the case anymore. Technology has evolved, and consumer expectations have risen to such a level that marketers must do much more. It’s no longer about saying, “We know you,” but rather, “We understand you.” To do this requires a major shift from personalization to individualization.
It may sound relatively straightforward, but what this shift entails and how companies can incorporate individualization in their everyday communications presents a whole new set of challenges.
Latest Posts
How a Proposed California Privacy Regulation Could Impact User Data-Driven Business
If it passes and is signed into law in November, the California Consumer Privacy Act would establish groundbreaking new consumer privacy rights throughout the country. The California act mimics the heavy regulations of the GDPR and could become one of the broadest privacy laws in the nation.
Street Fight Daily: Amazon and Google Announce New Initiatives Focused on SMBs
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Introduces Startup Campaigns for Small Businesses… Amazon Plans Startup SMB Delivery Services for Its Own Packages… How a Proposed California Privacy Regulation Could Impact User Data-Driven Business…
Study: Challenges Persist with One-Partner Programmatic Strategy
84% of brands want to bring their programmatic ad spending in-house as a way to gain more control over what’s become an opaque process. The problem? A study by Visto shows that advertisers who use just one platform are losing out on opportunities to lower inventory costs and efficiently delivery on KPIs.
Heard on the Street, Episode 6: Engineering, Surfing, and Acting with Frost Prioleau
How do you bring brand-like programmatic advertising to local advertisers who spend less than $4 per day? It takes good software and partnerships to hit the sweet spots of automation and customization, according to Simpli.fi co-founder and CEO Frost Prioleau, our latest guest on Heard on the Street.
Street Fight Daily: AT&T Buys AppNexus, Programmatic Recovering Post-GDPR
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… AT&T Is Buying Ad Platform AppNexus, Reportedly for $1.6 Billion or More… A Month After GDPR Took Effect, Programmatic Ad Spend Is Starting to Recover… App Publishers Must Avoid the Audience Circulation Trap..
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Scaling Seasonal SEO Across Locations With AI Insights