News and Analysis

Infographic: Cyber Monday Goes Mobile

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Smartphones are gaining momentum as the preferred platform for Cyber Monday shoppers. Consumers have their smartphones with them everywhere they go, including work, making it essential for retailers to have a winning mobile marketing strategy.  

Black Friday Is a Boon to Local Retailers. What About ‘Small Business Saturday’?

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Womply Senior Manager of Communications Dallin Hatch says he was surprised to discover just how big Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become for small retailers. He was also surprised to see what a little impact Small Business Saturday has on seasonal sales.

Captivate Partners with Location Tech Companies to Deliver Geo-Targeted OOH Ads

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Captivate is getting more sophisticated, collaborating with tech-savvy partners to deliver OOH ads based on its audiences’ interests and locations. This year, Captivate announced its “Places” platform, which centralizes its planning and data analytic tools and “puts them in one place for the marketplace,” Shapiro said.

Commentary

Online Reviews Providing Insights That Help Brands Compete

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The evidence is in. Reviews on social media have a material impact on the capital investments made by nationwide brands. The key is strength in numbers: A national brand will be more likely to have the critical mass of reviews required in order to move beyond anecdotal evidence and glean statistically significant results.

Editor’s Take: The Perils of Uberization for the Local Economy

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On-demand is a convenient rubric for speaking about a certain type of currently faddish platform, but not every underlying service or product is the same. Transportation is not the same as home services or restaurants. By extension, not everything Uber does will work equally well outside of its particular niche. Demand-based pricing is a prime example.

Connecting the Local-Mobile Economy, One Step at a Time

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Hyperlocal, mobile, on-demand contextual commerce enabled by buy buttons within mobile apps — that’s the new string of buzzwords making the rounds at industry conferences. The market reality: It’s going to take a while for this string to play out in the connected local economy. A key reason is that even as mobile disrupts search, most marketers and merchants can’t expect to get their own app on a majority of users’ home screens.

Latest Posts

6 Strategies for Increasing Conversions in Mobile Food Searches

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Sixty-three percent of consumers use smartphones and tablets to find local businesses, and 23% of those local business searches involve restaurants. Here are six strategies that restaurants can use to help convert mobile search traffic.

Panel: Different Kinds of SMBs Require Different Kinds of Marketing

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At a panel discussion hosted by CoInvent last week in New York, SMB experts talked about a range of topics, including social media marketing, SEO strategy, and the importance of paying attention to online reviews.

Street Fight Daily: Google Tests Direct Hotel Booking, Yelp Sued By Delivery Drivers

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Tests Direct Hotel Booking (Search Engine Land)… Drivers Sue Yelp Over Unpaid Tips for Food Delivery Service Eat24 (Fortune)… Deep-Fried Crystal Ball: Seamless’s Recent Missteps Pave the Way for Competitors (Digiday)…

Why All SMBs Need an Ecommerce Strategy

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While online research to offline purchase is the more common path-to-purchase, future-looking SMB retailers will holistically consider an ecommerce strategy as more and more consumers embrace online shopping.

Case Study: SMB Marketing Firm Uses Chat App to Convert Clicks to Leads

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With the goal of retaining and converting more leads for his agency, Outlook Bench Group’s Nii Akwei went in search of a product he could use to connect with website visitors in real-time.

Street Fight Daily: Food Delivery Wars, Nokia’s Mapping Tech

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… The Billion Dollar Food Delivery Wars (TechCrunch)… Everybody Wants to Own Nokia’s Mapping Technology (Skift)… Mid-year Report: The Newspaper Industry’s Billion Dollar Challenge (Poynter)

Boston-Based Dispatch Retains a Startup Mentality as It Sets Its Sights on Big Growth

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Dispatch grew from three employees to 25 in the past 10 months, and the company is on an upward trajectory. As it scales, the executive team is hoping to maintain the small-time ambiance of a startup while segmenting responsibilities.

Raise Report: New Funding for Yieldify, Zosi, Adored, and Airbnb

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Every two weeks we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. In this edition, new investments include big votes of confidence for Onefinestay and UrbanClap.

LBMA Podcast: Beacons on Buses, Apple’s New Patents

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On the show: Selfridges Tiffany & Co brings flagship store to augmented reality; Starbucks taps Lyft for free frappucino deliveries; Uber acquires mapping team from Microsoft; TCS acquires Loctronix. Special guest is Jeff White of Gravy.

Street Fight Daily: Google’s Plan for Mobile Search, Uber’s “Lead Generation” Defense

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Reinventing Google for a Mobile World (New York Times)… Uber: We’re Not a Taxi Service,“We’re a Lead Generation” App (Business Insider)… Location Is Everything: Talking Mobile Programmatic With Avazu’s Yi Shi (AdMonsters)…