News and Analysis
Sales Tech Fuels Frictionless Customer Experiences
Sales tech took a leap forward during the pandemic. Sales teams needed new ways to communicate, both with their coworkers and with customers, who were accessing digital channels at unprecedented volume. Sales tech emerged to meet the market need, helping sales reps manage customer relationships, provide more personalized customer experiences, and coordinate with their colleagues.
Commentary
Embracing Hyperlocal Creative at Scale
The challenge of authentic content is doing it at scale, in a way that is brand safe, across all markets. While creating custom content could seem like a feasible task for international companies with endless resources at their fingertips, even legacy brands all too often struggle with personalized, custom, local content at scale. It’s equally as challenging for local businesses like franchises, small agencies, and Mom-and-Pop shops who are charged with many business tasks outside of content creation. One of the pivotal concerns in digital marketing as it applies to content and content creation is having an efficient process to scale content production.
So, how can franchises, local businesses, and brands scale their creative marketing content to better reach local markets?
How Long Will Google’s “Calculative PR” Playbook Work in Local Search?
Mihm: The engineering mindset that millions of spammy listings in a corpus of hundreds of millions of legitimate listings worldwide, or a (hundred million?) spam reviews in a corpus of billions of legitimate reviews worldwide, are simply “edge cases” that are beneath Google to prioritize reflects a profound lack of empathy for how their technology impacts fellow human beings — both consumers and especially small business owners and their employees.
Blumenthal: Absolutely agree. And a related problem is that they see customer service in the same context: as an engineering/cost-benefit problem to solve, not as a way to improve their product. As such they see the last 5, 10 or 15% errors in their big data solutions as just a cost of doing business that they have no responsibility to solve.
How Targeting Fuels Audience Activation and Satisfaction
Consumers benefit from targeting. When there are clear rules and guardrails in place for tracking and targeting, shoppers enjoy a more relevant online experience and a panoply of ad-funded digital services.
Traditional ads still have a place in the marketing mix, of course. But the future of marketing is digital. Online ad spend is expected to surpass traditional ad spend (likely for good) this year. How is it that targeting, while respecting privacy, makes the consumer internet better?
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Case Study: Crayola Overcomes Facebook Algorithm with Co-Created Content
Partnering with the in-product consumer sharing platform Vivoom, Crayola launched a holiday-focused campaign in the fourth-quarter of 2017. Consumers were encouraged to record videos of themselves, using a Crayola-branded filter, and then share those videos across social media as personalized holiday cards.
How Marketers Must Prepare for the Voice-Connected Consumer
As digital media surpasses traditional, marketers must prepare for the changes that will result from connected devices becoming a common source of customer experience. Local search will be of paramount importance as consumers turn to their voice devices, and eventually their connected cars and appliances
State of Hyperlocal: Location Data Is Key R&D Priority Now and Longer-Term — AI and Voice on Horizon
Location data and analytics are a key R&D priority both now and in the longer term for companies supplying technologies and services to the connected local economy, according to Street Fight’s latest reader survey. Those companies deem AI and voice technology as two areas that require investment now, with an eye on a later payoff.
Street Fight Daily: Direct Brands Own the Future, Facebook’s New Branded-Content Rules
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… IAB Study Shows Consumer Economy Growth Shifting to ‘Direct Brands’… Facebook’s New Branded-Content Guidelines Spark Turmoil for Some Pubs… Amazon Laying Off Corporate Employees in Rare Cutback…
Follow-Up Thoughts on the SMB Marketing/Operations Universe
“Regardless of the right package, the key for both agencies and small businesses is to choose best-of-breed components in each galaxy that integrate with each other so that you can add relevant and profitable services over time,” David Mihm says to Mike Blumenthal in their bi-weekly column.
Dr. Soon-Shiong and His New ‘Patient,’ the L.A. Times: Will His Rx Be ‘Local’?
My hunch is that Patrick Soon-Shiong will find that applying advanced technology to local news is not as challenging as conquering cancer, especially if he listens to what Angelinos say is their biggest concern by a wide margin – getting from their home to work or other day-to-day destinations.
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The Road Ahead: What Autonomous Cars Teach Us About Marketing Automation