News and Analysis
Invoca Raises $83M to Help B2C Businesses Offer Better Contact Centers
The conversation intelligence company Invoca is helping businesses solve customer service problems by building personalized contact center services in addition to offering phone call analytics. As a result, Invoca just raised $83 million in Series F funding at a $1.1 billion valuation, four times the valuation of its last round in 2019.
5 Retail Media Networks to Watch in 2022
Demand for first-party data, coupled with the looming disappearance of third-party cookies, has created a moment of opportunity for innovative multi-location brands and retailers. Retail media networks offer a way for brands across the spectrum of verticals to monetize the reams of personally identifiable information they’ve collected from their own digital properties, like apps and websites, and expand their global footprints.
Brands Embrace Holistic Data to Improve CX
Flawless experiences, complete personalization, and timely communication across multiple channels. Consumer expectations have never been higher. With the line between success and failure now razor thin, more brands are asking how they can use data to provide customized experiences that cater to each buyer’s wants and needs.
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
This Fast-Growing E-Commerce Management Platform Has the Attention of Pepsi and P&G
Content Analytics, which fancies itself “the only end-to-end eCommerce management platform,” is growing at a rapid clip, and big brands are taking note. The company announced on Tuesday its eighth consecutive quarter of YOY growth exceeding 100%.
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.
Study: Accuracy is the Most Important Factor for Marketers Buying or Using Audience Data
In a poll of 300 advertisers that buy or use audience data, data management platform Lotame found that 84% say the accuracy of the data is the most important factor in determining whether they’ll buy it and if they’ll buy more of it.
Womply: Prime Day Coincides with Bump in Small Retailer Revenue
It would make sense to assume that Amazon’s e-commerce extravaganza results in a decline in foot traffic for brick-and-mortar retailers, especially small ones. Womply’s data science team has intel that says otherwise.
Earn an A+ with Back-to-School Email Marketing
Retailers, have you optimized your email marketing for back-to-school shopping? If not, it’s not too late—there’s still a huge opportunity to capture your share of this year’s lucrative season, with sales predicted to reach nearly $83 billion.
Street Fight Daily: Accuracy is King for Data Buyers, Google’s Earnings Make a $5 Billion Fine Look Silly
DATA, DOLLARS, DISASTER… Study: Accuracy is the Most Important Factor for Marketers Buying or Using Audience Data… Surprise? Google Beats Expectations, Driven by Mobile and Cloud Services… Black Monday: Tronc Axes Half the New York Daily News Staff…
Black Monday: Tronc Axes Half the New York Daily News Staff
It is capturing cynical headlines across the media landscape: Tronc, the widely trashed name for the media company formerly known as Tribune Publishing, has sacked half the staff of the New York Daily News.
Mobile Coupons Are About to Overtake Paper—Here’s How Retailers Can Capitalize on That
When participants in CodeBroker’s 2018 Mobile Coupon Consumer Research Report were asked just how quickly they would likely redeem a coupon they received via text message, 25% said they would use it within three days. That number grew to 60% when they were asked if they would use it within a week.
Ohio Car Dealership Sees Early Success with Location-Targeted Mobile Ads
Years of ingrained assumptions about the way cars are marketed and sold have made the automotive industry a challenge for hyperlocal vendors. But at Kia of Bedford, Director of Operations David Gruhin is finding unexpected success with location-based marketing tactics.
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