Commentary
Deals Plus Ads Equal a Bundle of Conversions
Deals companies that want to remain relevant must diversify their solution sets to include other services for local merchants. At the same time, publishers who are looking to expand digital revenues through deals and offers need to overcome some of the objections raised by merchants. We wondered what would happen if we bundled local deals with other advertising products, like display ads. The result was that publisher sales conversion rates nearly doubled…
Patch CCO Talks Election Coverage: Virtual News Teams, Trending Hashtag
The election was a big national story, but it was also an important local story — and served as yet another crucible to test how deeply hyperlocal network Patch has woven itself into the 850+ communities it serves across the country. Rachel Feddersen, Patch’s Chief Content Officer, spoke with Street Fight this week about how the network approached and executed its election coverage, and what potential lessons the event had for the rest of the news cycle.
Memo to Google: Solve the Local Data Problem With Local Data
I think we can now state definitively that the big upsurge in claimed listings that might have occurred as a result of Google’s choice to embed local listings within its social network, a little over five months ago, will not happen on its own. Rather than achieving Facebook levels of adoption, Google+ Local is still an arena where participation depends heavily on early adopters as well as the assistance of local SEO consultants and companies like mine…
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A ‘Connected’ Closet? As if — or Maybe Not
DigitasLBi Labs, the agency’s tech incubator in Paris, has built an in-store shopping assistant that uses image recognition software and Bluetooth low-energy beacons to match, recommend, and display possible additions to a shopper’s wardrobe. The group developed the “inspiration corridor” in conjunction with Klépierre, a french real estate company that operates malls across the country, and has installed the prototype in a Parisian shopping center…
7 Strategies for Leveraging In-Store Beacons
Indoor beacons are bridging the gap between physical locations and digital experiences, and allowing developers and businesses to interact with consumers based on their proximity to specific locations. But as with any new technology, indoor beacons do have their limitations and marketers need to be strategic in order to get the best use out of them…
Street Fight Daily: Airbnb’s Grand Plans, Foursquare’s Recommended Future
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Inside Airbnb’s Grand Hotel Plans (Fast Comapny)… Foursquare CEO: How We’ll Tell You Where To Eat And What To Order (ReadWrite)… Matt Cutts: Google Mobile Queries May Surpass PC Search This Year (SearchEngineLand)…
How Data is Transforming the Local Purchase Funnel
For years, the local marketplace largely missed out on a data revolution that has transformed commerce on the web. But the rapid adoption of the smartphone is quickly bringing the local shopping experience to parity with ecommerce, transforming the consumer journey and dramatically improving the targeting capabilities available to marketers today…
Why Booker Wants to Blur the Line Between Marketing and Operations
Last year, Bain Capital poured $27 million into Booker, a company that builds scheduling and business management software for small and medium-sized salons. Today, the New York-based startup is working to push deeper into the front office, building a new suite of tools that use a business’s operational data — booking data, payment information and the like — to engage with existing customers, and in some cases, find new ones…
Phone Leads for Local Businesses: The Unsexy Cousin of the Click (Part II)
Beyond bringing in big leads — and SMBs paying handsomely for them — call monetization will be compelled by something else: Opportunity cost. We forecast call volume to SMBs to explode (65 billion by 2016) as a result of increasing mobile usage trends. That’s going to mean a whole lot of calls to answer…
Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Preps IPO, JustEat Eyes London Markets
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… GoDaddy Prepares for IPO (Wall Street Journal)… Just Eat Preps IPO In London, Aiming To Raise £100M (TechCrunch)… CMO One-to-One: LivingSocial Evolves from Deals Site to Deals Marketplace (eMarketer)…
Streets Ahead: Google Chat, and Instagram Reels