News and Analysis
Consumer Dollars Are Up for Grabs—If Retailers Can Master the Basics
To maintain the business of today’s consumers, consistency is key. Just under 70% of respondents said they’re less likely to return to a store after just one subpar experience. As for what earns a shopper’s approval, only 19% of consumers said they seek out food or entertainment from stores. More important are fundamental technical capabilities like mobile app integration and access to WiFi. Two thirds of shoppers even said retailers are too focused on experimental tech and should pay more attention to the building blocks of good retail strategy.
Consumers Hungry for New Content Discovery Channels on Mobile
The content consumers are craving is personalized and brief. Over 40% said they would like content experiences between 15 and 30 seconds, and another 26% favored engagement somewhere between 30 and 90 seconds. Despite amplified privacy concerns of late, 68% indicated a willingness to trade some personal information in exchange for content tailored to their interests.
Brands still trigger-happy on mobile push notifications may want to reconsider. Twenty-five percent of respondents ranked them as their least liked content delivery method among current and future modes of discovery.
Does Influencer Marketing Have a Transparency Problem?
Although the average share of budgets spent on influencer marketing is just 10%, that figure is growing as visual platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest see explosive growth.
The problem? Brands are often focusing on misleading vanity metrics in an attempt to justify those investments. For example, many marketers track follower counts as a primary indicator for determining brand and influencer partnerships. Growing evidence shows that follower counts do not equate to true impressions or reach data, giving brands a false sense of how their campaigns are performing.
Commentary
Mobile Marketing and the YouTube Cookie Shift
Google recently announced that YouTube will turn to logged-in user data to verify views and ensure that relevant advertising reaches the right consumers. This will allow publishers, brands, and marketing to draw on all the highly contextual demographic and behavioral data that Google gathers from mobile consumers.
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Airbnb Plans to Expand Service Offerings, On-Demand Assistant App GoButler Pivots
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Airbnb Plans to Offer Add-On Travel Services This Year (Bloomberg)… GoButler Pivots to Fully-Automated Service, Starting with Flight Search and Discovery (TechCrunch)… Can LifePost’s Digital Obits Provide Clues for Sustainable Local Publishing? (Street Fight)…
Brands, Meet the Data Amplifiers
Data amplifiers distribute and publish your data to a broader audience than you could ever do on your own — what I call the “network effect.” Your brand becomes more visible because your business data becomes more open and accessible to the influencers who are in a position to help customers find your business.
Retailers Shift Focus to Offline Affiliate Marketing
Location analytics represent the new battleground in retail, but imagine if you could apply the same analytics for online attribution to offline purchases. Offline affiliate marketing does just that, giving retailers the tools to analyze data from in-store purchases similar to what they can do for online purchases.
Street Fight Daily: Google to Further Penalize Mobile-Unfriendly Websites, More Layoffs at LivingSocial
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google’s Latest Mobile Search Algorithm Update Makes Having a Mobile-Friendly Site Even More Important (TechCrunch)… LivingSocial Is Laying Off More Than 50 Percent of Its Staff (Recode)… Uber Debuts Family Profiles to Let You Pay for Others’ Rides (TechCrunch)…
Yodle Weighs in on How Google’s SERP Change Has Affected Online Ads for SMBs
With a few weeks of empirical data, we now have a much clearer sense of how or if this change has affected local AdWords campaigns. At Yodle, we have seen a negligible effect on the performance metrics of the search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns we run on behalf of our local small business clients.
Street Fight Daily: Groupon’s New Merchant App, Google Announces ‘Analytics 360’ Ad Products
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Groupon Launches New Merchant App That Puts the Daily Deal Front and Center (TechCrunch)… Google Introduces Products That Will Sharpen Its Ad Focus (New York Times)… Yelp’s Founder Once Thought No One Would Want to Post Opinions on the Internet (Chicago Tribune)…
5 Online-to-Offline Attribution Tools for Merchants
Seventy-nine percent of consumers say they research prices online before making purchases in person. Without the ability to identify which digital channels are most effective, merchants have no opportunity to optimize their strategies or understand the growth opportunities within online channels.
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The Road Ahead: What Autonomous Cars Teach Us About Marketing Automation