News and Analysis

Street Culture: Synup Culture in the Chaos of Super-Fast Scale

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Kevin Clark is pulled in a lot of different directions these days: having joined digital knowledge SaaS company Synup less than a year ago, he’s trying to hire lots of new employees, he’s in charge of business logistics on which he’s not necessarily an expert, and his boss might call him at any moment.

Street Fight Daily: The (Walmart) Empire Strikes Back, How Brands Forge Emotional Connections

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TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING… Inside Walmart’s Rise as a Legitimate E-Commerce Player… Motista Report Indicates What Brands Can Do to Spark Emotional Engagement… Did Ad Blocking Just Flip from Protection Racket to Mobile Marketing Savior…

At CallRail, Community Forums Prove Valuable for Product Development

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Community forums—online spaces where consumers and developers can interact and collaborate— are increasingly popular tools for companies hoping to improve their product development and ideation. The strategy is working effectively for marketing tech vendor CallRail.

Commentary

Where Online Ordering of Local Products and Services Is Headed

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Any local search site that sets its sights on powering transactions will need to take into account the broad range of consumer needs in the local space. But some products are likely much better suited to online purchasing than others…

The Art of Local Marketing: Becoming Selfie-Aware

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The jury is still out on the new Foursquare’s scalability and I’ve grown to like it. But it’s no Yelp killer. For one thing, Yelp has 1000+ local ad sales reps — one of its biggest and most underrated assets. I’ve long been bullish on Yelp for that and other reasons. And in the past month, a few things have shed more light on Yelp’s potential direction…

Traditional Businesses Still Failing to Reach Online Consumers

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An infographic from Marketecture offers a useful compendium of statistics pointing both to the great opportunity in local and the persistent gap between that opportunity and the actual practice of marketing by many small business owners…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Ditches Clicks, Village Voice On The Block

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyHere’s How Facebook Plans to Help Brands Find Out When Their Ads Actually Worked (AdWeek)… Village Voice Parent Company Will Explore Sale Of Papers (Poynter)… Apple Maps Connect For Small Businesses Expands Beyond The U.S. (9to5Mac)…

Zomato Lays Groundwork for a Stateside Push — With Yelp in the Crosshairs

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Last week, Zomato bought UrbanSpoon in a move that thrust the Indian restaurants-only reviews company into the North American spotlight. We caught up with Deepinder Goyal, the company’s chief executive, to talk about why he thinks food search is shifting to discovery…

As SMB Investment in Digital Increases, So Does the Need for Better Performance Metrics

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With all the noise in local marketing, how can SMBs reliably answer the ROI question? How can they increase the signal-to-noise ratio in their marketing metrics even as they increase their investments in online marketing? A good place to start is by focusing on one metric, above all else: Lead Acquisition Cost…

Street Fight Daily: Beacons Retarget Ads, Mobile Wallets Eye Loyalty

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Now Advertisers Can Use Beacons To Make The Shoes You Were Looking At Inside A Physical Store Follow You Around The Internet (Business Insider)… The Next Step for the Mobile Wallet? Loyalty Programs (Wall Street Journal)… Let’s Stop Laughing At Groupon (Fortune)…

Why Instacart’s $2 Billion Valuation Doesn’t Spell Bubble

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No story has rekindled concerns about valuations like the ascent of Instacart, a local logistics firm whose recently raised $220 million at a $2 billion dollar valuation. We caught up with Instacart’s Nilam Ganenthiran to talk about how a delivery network could reshape the competitive landscape of local grocery markets…

Local Marketing a Rising Priority for National Brands

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A new research microstudy commissioned by leading local marketing platform Balihoo and Gatepoint Research found that national brands across a variety of industries understand that driving consumers to locations or local agents is critical to their overall marketing strategy — and that local marketing efforts outperform national campaigns…

6 Ways SMBs Can Use Mobile to Reach Targeted Audiences

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Whether or not a mobile campaign proves successful for a small business hinges less on the content of the campaign than on whether the right audience is being targeted. In many cases, it’s up to hyperlocal vendors to educate SMB clients about the possibilities in mobile audience targeting. Here are six takeaways that vendors should focus on in those discussions…

Street Fight Daily: Expedia Buys Travelocity, Private Equity Eyes Digital First

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyExpedia Buys Travelocity, Merging Two of the Web’s Biggest Travel SitesCerberus, Apollo Bidding for Digital First Media (Capital New York)… For Digital, SMBs Need Somebody—and Money—to Lean On (eMarketer)…

Report: Digital Now Represents 40% of Local Advertising Market

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A new report released by Borrell Associates suggests that digital advertising will continue to be responsible for nearly all growth in local advertising in 2015. By the end of the year, the report estimates local digital advertising spending will hit $47.8 billion…

Big Possibilities for Brands With New Facebook Targeting Tool

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In October, Facebook launched a long awaited feature for many small business marketers: the ability to reach people nearby. Now big brands are finding ways to to leverage the new Facebook Local Awareness ads — and do so at scale…