News and Analysis

Location Targeting Presents Opportunity to Capitalize on Growing Memorial Day Spending

With eight-in-10 U.S. adults now planning to spend an average of $486 over the holiday weekend, Vistar and MFour found that Memorial Day weekend has become one of the most popular shopping holidays of the year.

NinthDecimal Launches Toolset to Identify True Growth Metrics

The omnichannel marketing platform NinthDecimal announced major changes to its measurement platform this morning, as it launches new KPIs designed to provide insights into what’s driving customer growth and acquisition for brands.

SMB OS Operators, Part III: Booker

Recently acquired by MindBody, Booker has been living out the principles of SMB OS long before we started calling it that. In this interview, Booker CEO Josh McCarter explains how his business helps SMBs go beyond typical marketing tactics to attract and keep customers coming back.

Commentary

Information Wants to Be Free, but Local Data Is Currency

The sizable overlap between consumer-generated information and enterprise control is experienced every day in the world of local search.Though few local search companies could exist without licensed data, once that data gets inside their walls, it becomes a foundation upon which consumer-generated data adds value to a service…

How Enhanced Targeting Will Change Local Commerce in 2013

Restaurants are moving away from the traditional daily-deal model and demanding more targeted services. In 2013 we will see the marketing landscape dominated by three types of marketing services addressing more specific merchant goals: snipers, niche pure plays, and the cycle-conscious…

Local Mapping Services and the Public Trust

The towering presence of Google in the mapping world today is testament to its success in product development, but this also indicates something else. People don’t just think of maps as a product to be consumed. It seems that we have begun to consider mapping services as a public trust…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Ebay Settles Proxy Dispute, Gowalla Founder’s Second Take

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyEBay, Carl Icahn Settle Heated PayPal Dispute (Wall Street Journal)… Gowalla Founder Josh Williams Raises $2.1 Million To Have Another Go At Local Mobile Discovery Apps (TechCrunch)… Bezos Confirms AmazonFresh Expansion Plans, Says Drones Are for Real (Recode)…

Case Study: Texas Pharmacy Leverages Beacons for In-Store Offers

Rather than going it alone and creating a targeted marketing platform from the ground up, Tarrytown Pharmacy owner Mark Newberry opted to work with a hyperlocal startup that was looking for businesses to test out its platform. The company, Shelfbucks, offers personalized deals to people shopping in store using iBeacons…

Mobile Ad Revenues Growing Faster Than Previously Expected

A new study from BIA/Kelsey finds that mobile advertising revenues may be picking up at a faster clip than previously thought. In the U.S. Local Media Forecast, the research firm projects that mobile ad spending in the U.S. will rise from $7.22 billion in 2013 to $25.47 billion in 2017, a 20% increase from what the company projected last year. Meanwhile, the share of mobile ad spending spent on locally-targeted ads continues to grow as well — albeit at slightly slower rate than previously expected…

Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Moves Ahead With IPO, Mapquest Reboots

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyMapQuest Aims For Reboot With New Content, Partners, UI (SearchEngineLand)… Go Daddy Said to Pick Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan for I.P.O. (New York Times)… Yelp’s Deal With Yahoo Has Small Businesses Crying Foul (Wall Street Journal)…

Study: 80% of Mobile Searches Result in a Purchase

Brand marketers have started to catch up with consumers on mobile, but small businesses still remain far behind — and it may be starting to affect their bottom line. A new study finds that consumers are increasingly turning to their mobile devices to search for local businesses when they are ready to buy, but the information they want is often inaccurate, incomplete, or non-existent.

Will Mobile Ad Tech Consolidate? Not Yet, Says Verve CEO

There’s a debate, particularly within mobile advertising technology, over whether location is a feature or a sector unto itself. Street Fight recently caught up with Tom MacIsaac, chief executive at Verve Mobile, one of the earliest mobile-local advertising technologies to the market, to discuss the prospect of consolidation, the data quality problem in mobile, and what the endgame might be for location ad tech…

Street Fight Daily: Google Books Hotels, What’s Next for Square?

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyGoogle Checks In to the Hotel Business (Wall Street Journal)… A Sale or IPO or More Funding? Here’s What Might Be Next for Square (Recode)… Uber’s Threat Finally Hits as Postmates Surges to 10k Deliveries a Week (Pando)

Reconsidering Location for On-the-Go Consumers

Out-of-home works because it is exactly what its name implies. That’s a powerful advantage. But with great power comes great responsibility. And in order to capitalize on this advantage, we need to re-think our approach. Once we start regarding out-of-home as a behavior (specifically, of consumers on-the-go) instead of just a set of location-specific screens, our success is almost guaranteed…

6 Strategies for Measuring the Impact of In-Store Messaging

By 2016, mobile is expected to have a $327 billion influence on in-store sales, but many of the merchants who utilize these hyperlocal technologies are having difficulty determining the true ROI of their campaigns. Here are six strategies for businesses to measure the impact of their in-store messaging campaigns…

Closely Raises $3M to Turn Its Social Analytics App Into a Business

Closely, the maker of Perch, a social analytics app for small businesses, has raised $3 million in a series A round of funding led by Grotech ventures. Amid a chaotic local marketing industry, the company has quietly built out a novel business model which draws on learnings from the consumer world to solve one of the most dire problems in the business technology industry: selling to small businesses…