News and Analysis

Report: Consumers Seek Transparency From Brands on Social Media

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In surveying 1,000 U.S. consumers, the social media management platform Sprout Social found that 86% believe transparency from businesses is more important now than ever before, and more than half say they want brands to be more transparent on social media.

How Brand Marketers Can Capture Consumer Attention on Mobile

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With mobile ad spend set to surpass television for the first time this year, brand marketers are in a frenzy looking for smarter ways to generate the highest possible ROI from their investments. The problem, it seems, is that many brand marketers aren’t fully comfortable with mobile strategy.

Street Fight Daily: Google Introduces ‘Ad Strength’ Metric, What Brand Marketers See in AI

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TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING… Google Introduces ‘Ad Strength,’ New Metric to Assess Relevance of Ad Copy… Survey: Multi-Location Brands Warm to AI, See It as Most Useful for Email… Tech Industry Pursues a Federal Privacy Law on Its Own Terms…

Commentary

5 Steps for SMBs Looking to Dominate the Local Competition

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SMBs’ natural advantages are being eroded by the techniques that social and mobile technologies make available to larger businesses. But they can gain back the advantages they’ve always had by operating differently. Here are five steps that can serve as the starting point for competing more effectively in the new social economy…

Why So Many Local Search Sites Are Adding Business Services

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Strategies around SEO, listings management and SEM have long helped businesses generate clicks, calls and store visits. And while this remains true, search sites have recently begun putting more emphasis on adding tools and services that look to accelerate the purchase process…

On-Demand Local Services: The End of SMB Advertising as We Know It?

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On-demand local services flip the traditional local advertising model. Instead of marketing proactively to generate demand, that demand is captured and revealed for service providers to react in real time. Put another way: Marketing is replaced with a commerce engine…

Latest Posts

7 Online Booking Platforms for Independent Businesses

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online booking platforms are providing a way for independent businesses to meet a rising demand from consumers who want to schedule, confirm, and in some cases even pay for local services through their mobile devices…

4 Musts for Making Mobile Click-to-Call Work

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In a Street Fight webinar Thursday sponsored by Telmetrics, Jay Weintraub, CEO and founder of grow.co, and CJ Arseneau, VP of marketing for Telmetrics, addressed how companies are moving closer to tracking customer purchase behavior from an online impression to offline action…

LBMA Podcast: RetailLoco at SXSW

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This episode was recorded after RetailLoco at SXSW in Austin. Asif and Rob highlight some of the key points that emerged from the conference as well as offer their take on what this means to businesses – both retail and technology…

Street Fight Daily: FTC Considered Google Suit, Sears Bets on Inventory Ads

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… FTC Staff Wanted to Sue Google for Ripping Off TripAdvisor and Yelp (Skift)… Has Google Perfected the Retail Search Ad With Its Local Inventory Offering (AdWeek)… 45% Of Offline Retail Sales Will Be Web-Influenced By 2020 (Forrester)…

Nextdoor Sports a Valuation Over $1B — But How Will It Make Money?

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For Nextdoor, a transactional model might explain some of the investors’ faith, and may provide a clear path to revenue growth than trying to untangle the knot that is local advertising…

Small Businesses and the Impact of Mobile Optimization

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Rather than competing with the big directories for search ranking, small businesses need to fit themselves within the dominant mobile search paradigm and ensure their profiles on third party sites are optimized for the needs of mobile consumers…

#LDS15: Taking Programmatic Advertising Into the Real World

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“Programmatic [advertising] is getting more complex in the ecosphere,” Andrew Beckman, CEO of Location3 Media said. “When you’re able to have the right messaging across all channels, and [the consumer] is moving around with their phone or searching from their desktop, I believe you’ll be able to attract that consumer into your store or purchase something within a specific local area.”

Street Fight Daily: Apple Pay’s Slow Growth, Postmates Delivers Starbucks

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… 85% Of iPhone 6 Owners In The U.S. Haven’t Bothered Trying Apple Pay, Study Claims (VentureBeat)… Starbucks Delivery Is Real and It’s Coming to Seattle and the Empire State Building (Recode)… GoDaddy’s IPO To Value Web Hosting Company At $2.87 Billion (Reuters)…

How Brands and Publishers Are Thinking About Beacons

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“The data and analytics is important but in the end, it has to be about improving the customer experience first,” said Jennifer Bordner, marketing manager at Old Navy, during a panel at SXSW Interactive in Austin Tuesday. “What can technology do that feels more natural than an extra burden. In the end, it’s about bridging that gap between the physical and digital [experience] in a way that feels natural.”

7 Ways Hyperlocal Vendors Benefit From Self-Serve Sales Models

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By doing away with expensive sales teams and giving local merchants a way to buy ads or services through automated systems, vendors can keep acquisition costs low and also reduce churn…