News and Analysis
7 Location Analytics Firms for Malls and Shopping Centers
If you want to see what retail innovation looks like first-hand, walk into a shopping mall. Faced with the option to transform or die, shopping mall operators across the country are choosing to fight back against the shifting tides in retail.
Here are seven tech firms that malls, and other retail giants, are relying on to collect and study location data gleaned from shoppers’ mobile devices.
With Shoelace, Its Latest Foray into (Local) Social, Google Aims to Do for Friends What Tinder Did for Dating
Perhaps Shoelace is less ambitious than Google+. But is finding friends, or others with whom to socialize, not the most central and yet unachieved aim of social networking? One that hinges on location and would be a gold mine for advertising, as it captures users far down the sales funnel, all the way at the point where they are ready to get together to spend some time at a local business? What if, in the same way online dating has gone from disreputable to de rigueur over the course of 10 years, finding friends online is something young people all do in 10 years, an engineering problem that Tinder rival Bumble is already trying to crack?
That would be a pretty big social network. The ambitions may not be so modest.
Retailers Are Using AI for Onboarding, Associate Retention
The retail landscape is going through an evolution, with mom-and-pop stores on Main Street being replaced by e-commerce outlets that rely on sophisticated algorithms to manage virtually every aspect of business operations.
While most headlines about the transformation of retail focus on the consumer-side of the equation, there’s even more change going on behind the scenes. Competition between e-commerce and brick-and-mortar is forcing innovation in the way retailers approach the challenges that come with onboarding and retaining in-store associates.
Commentary
Unlocking Audiences for Brands: Uniting Client Goals with Demographic Research
Uniting your client’s instincts with actionable data from social media, keyword research, content analysis, and analytics creates a hyperlocal strategy to reach their most interested clients. There are four key strategies for marketing companies that want to take their clients beyond mere traffic increases to high ROI and conversion rates.
When Breaking Google’s Guidelines Is Almost Necessary with GMB
A couple of months ago I was helping a physical therapy business on the Google My Business Forum that was filtered out of the local results on Google because of the Possum algorithm update in 2016. In this case, the culprit was a completely different physical therapy business down the street (about a two minute walk away).
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