News and Analysis
Heard on the Street, Episode 4: Growing the SMB Pie with Ilir Sela
What are the nuances and tactical imperatives of selling pizza locally? For one, it compels a highly verticalized approach: It’s all about focus and specialization on the sector’s unique operational challenges, according to Slice Founder and CEO Ilir Sela, our latest guest on Heard on the Street.
How Savvy Restaurateurs Make the Most of Online Ordering
“What increasingly separates top-performing restaurants from the pack is their ability to transform insights from data into strategies to grow,” says Liam Oliver, director of products for Valassis Local Solutions. “Savvy restaurateurs drive incremental revenue by designing promotions that raise the average order value.”
Street Fight Daily: Google to Follow IAB’s GDPR Approach, How Restaurants Can Crush Digital
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… In Significant Move for Publishers, Google Plans to Commit to IAB’s GDPR Approach… How Savvy Restaurateurs Make the Most of Online Ordering… Banned from Amazon: The Shoppers Who Make Too Many Returns…
Commentary
Why Location Is Key to Mobile Monetization
As location becomes an ever bigger opportunity in mobile, a few questions are worth digging into further. One of those is how precise that location data is. Another important topic is the way success is measured in a local campaign aimed at driving offline actions, whether a call or an in-store visit…
Social Isn’t Search: Why Apple Should Think Twice About Foursquare
Though the cachet of the Foursquare name might make this idea sound appealing, my sense is that it could only be executed successfully if handled very carefully by Apple. With the prominence already given to socially driven results from Yelp, Apple would risk becoming a search service dominated by social content…
Daily Deals: Still Lucrative for Local Publishers
Given the challenges facing pure-play daily deal companies (and the saturation of news stories chronicling their issues), a casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the deals space is experiencing a major downturn. Recent studies, however, suggest a more bullish outlook for deals in 2013…
Latest Posts
xAd CEO: Small Businesses Still a ‘Huge, Huge Market’ for Ad Tech
Location marketing company xAd, which started as a search advertising firm five years ago, generated over $65 million in run-rate revenue by the end of last year, half of which came from small and medium-sized businesses. Street Fight recently caught up with the company’s chief executive Dipanshu Sharma to discuss the challenges in finding recurring revenue in mobile, how location can solve that problem, and where the money would come from to build a lasting local advertising company in mobile…
8 Tools to Send Messages to Shoppers Based on In-Store Movements
Forty-four percent of shoppers now say they’ve used their smartphones for product research while standing in a store’s aisles, which means marketers who fail to connect with customers through effective in-store messaging are losing out on engagement at a critical time in the buying process. Here are eight tools that merchants can use to send offers or promotions based on their customers’ real-time indoor movements…
Street Fight Daily: Square Discusses Sale, Facebook’s Local Ads
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Mobile-Payments Startup Square Discusses Possible Sale (Wall Street Journal)… Facebook ‘Nearby Friends’ Will Track Your Location History To Target You With Ads (TechCrunch)… TPG-Led Group Closes $450 Million Investment in Airbnb (Wall Street Journal)…
Putting Small Businesses on the (New) Google Map
Google Maps is a key resource that businesses can use to get more local searchers to discover them online. But can it also help them get more leads? The simple answer is yes, but it’s a not as easy as simply claiming a listing. It’s only by taking advantage of all that Google Maps has to offer — and then tracking how traffic from your maps listing converts into leads and customers — that you can see just how powerful accurate, optimized maps listings can be…
Niche Site CHARLIE Goes Big With Underwriter Le Creuset
After an initial stint doing publicity in the movie industry in Los Angeles, Caroline Nuttall migrated to Charleston, S.C., and fell “head over heels” for its “beauty and progressive culture.” She expressed her passion for the city by creating the local digital magazine CHARLIE, whose words, images and design capture the many faceted, old-new richness of her publication’s namesake. Here Nuttall tells Street Fight how she navigated CHARLIE to new revenue streams, including an underwriting partnership with national cookware maker Le Creuset.
Street Fight Daily: Facebook’s ‘Nearby Friends,’ Twitter Debuts App Promo Suite
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook’s “Nearby Friends” Feature Aims for More Offline Connections (Recode)… Twitter’s New Ad Unit Is A Huge, Huge Deal. Here’s Why (Forbes)… Citymapper Just Got Off the Funding Bus and Is Now $10M Richer (VentureBeat)…
LBMA Podcast: Mahana’s Brian Menell and Richard Bagdonas
Top stories of the week include Quantum Dots, Apple, the Lego Movie, American Express, Amazon’s Dash, Tesco, Uber’s Rush, Breeze, Santa Monica’s Wellbeing Project, Traffle’s travel app and SmartMat.
Recent Studies Show Mobile’s Broadening Reach
The reports underline what we might call the inherently local nature of mobile search. Whether you are in a store contemplating a high-ticket purchase or downtown hoping to discover a new restaurant, the phone in your hand is your portal to timely and actionable information as well as marketing incentives that are increasingly likely to gain your attention…
Case Study: Frozen Yogurt Chain Integrates Payments Into Mobile App
No clear frontrunner has shown up in the mobile wallet space, and businesses like Orange Leaf Frozen Yogurt are tired of waiting for one to appear. Instead of utilizing an existing mobile payment platform, the frozen yogurt chain is rolling out its own mobile wallet as part of an update to its iPhone and Android app. When its mobile payments solution debuts this summer, Orange Leaf customers will be able to pay for purchases with their smartphones at the POS…
Street Fight Daily: LevelUp Eyes ‘Zero Interchange,’ Zuckerberg on Graph Search
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… LevelUp Thinks It Has Found A Way To Charge Merchants A 0% Credit Card Processing Fee (Business Insider)… Zuckerberg: Facebook Graph Search Is ‘A Five-Year Thing’ (SearchEngineLand)… Seamless Delivers Tips Agreement (WSJ)…
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem