News and Analysis
Raise Report: New Funding for DoorDash, ZenBusiness, Tinyclues
Every two weeks, we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. This week’s edition includes funding for Intello, Industrious, Justworks, and Virtualitics.
Street Fight Daily: Investments in Search Will Diversify, Inside Uber’s Social Strategy
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Search Spend to Diversify, Spreading Among Platforms Beyond Google… Uber Relies on Automation to Keep Its Paid Social Strategy Humming… Getting Detailed Insights Is Top Challenge for Programmatic Marketers…
What January’s New York Retail Traffic Patterns Mean for Media Delivery
In an effort to learn more about shopper behaviors and patterns, the data science team at the mobile location firm Blis analyzed post-holiday foot traffic patterns at Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Saks, and Lord & Taylor in New York City.
Commentary
Delivering Local Deals: It’s All About the Data
It’s become clear that the two hottest areas of digital media — deals and mobile — are colliding. Mobile payments (i.e. Google Wallet) are meanwhile closing the loop on decades-old deal redemption and tracking challenges. This has led to another important variable: Data. More specifically, mobile payment technologies open the door for more comprehensive consumer purchase data, which can fold back into the equation for more targeted deal delivery…
How to Use Flipboard to Create a Killer DIY Hyperlocal Publication in 5 Minutes
For anyone who owns an iPad, it’s no surprise that Flipboard is a breakthrough. The one-year-old application allows you to instantly turn any news site, social feed, or photo stream into a slick, tablet-optimized, ad-free magazine — a pretty neat parlor trick. Apple selected it as their app of the year and Time listed it as one of their top 50 innovations of 2010…
The Hyperlocal Journalist and the Salesperson
“I worry about the future of my profession when I see large segments of the online news industry failing to rigorously test the kinds of revenue models journalism needs to survive,” writes CJR’s Michael Meyer, who runs the News Frontier Database. “Taking our content seriously is a basic requirement, but are we taking ourselves (or even readers) seriously if we’re not wholly committed to monetizing it?”
Latest Posts
Why Attribution Is the ‘New Black’ in Local Marketing
Advertising performance measurement has never been a simple process, but cross-platform consumer media usage, mobile, and advanced targeting technologies have made the process of linking ad engagement to a consumer purchase action even more challenging. The next generation of proper attribution has become essential for the ad tech industry and marketers looking to make ROI-driven advertising decisions…
Why It’s So Hard to Create Marketplaces for Local Commerce
Recognizing the success of Uber, startups and incumbents alike rushed to replicate the company’s model in other verticals, developing new products to help business and consumers buy and sell local services like car repair, house cleaning, and haircuts. MyTime, the 9-month old project launched by RedBeacon founder Ethan Anderson, is one of these and is staying the course. When I spoke with Anderson last week, he outlined a few key strategic decisions and clever hacks, which have helped the company get some early traction for its marketplace..
Case Study: Cosi Drives In-Store Visits With Mobile Campaign
Traditional media buys can generate brand awareness, but when it comes to driving foot traffic, it’s all about mobile. “The most important thing for us is to drive traffic to either increase visits from current customers or to bring new customers in,” says Marc Lapides, director of marketing at Cosi, the fast-casual restaurant chain with more than 100 locations in 16 states and the District of Columbia. “We really wanted to find a way to use mobile technologies to drive people into the store.”
Street Fight Daily: eBay Acquires Shutl, Tracking Companies Set New Rules
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… eBay Acquires Shutl, Races Amazon To Your Front Door (ReadWrite)… Tracking Companies Agree to Notify Shoppers, But Retailers Demur (Wall Street Journal)… Why Longtime Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy Just Agreed to Work for Clinkle’s 22-Year-Old CEO (AllThingsD)…
What Legacy Local Media Can Learn From the Red Sox
In advance of 2013, the Red Sox again fired the team’s manager, changed the executive suite, and reinvented the workforce. The new goal: replace high-cost and complaining “superstars” with a talented new group who bought into the new model. The organization became more horizontal and the salary of the team dropped by 20%. Meanwhile, over the course of the year, productivity increased by 40%…
6 Tools Restaurants Can Use to Fill Tables at the Last Minute
With one in five dinner reservations resulting in a no-show, according to some estimates, restaurant owners are always searching for low-cost ways to fill empty tables at the last-minute. Increasingly, these frustrated restaurateurs are turning to hyperlocal vendors for a solution. Utilizing a combination of geotargeted messaging and real-time inventory control, restaurants are able to incentivize would-be diners to come in and fill tables that would otherwise have remained empty. Here are six tools that restaurants can use to fill tables at the last minute…
How Back-Office Innovation Is Transforming Local Marketing
Over the past few years, we’ve watched as a host of payment processing, point-of-sale and scheduling services have popped up, helping local businesses manage day-to-day operations in more efficient ways. Using the cloud, these ‘commerce’ software plays have begun to undercut a number of large legacy companies, shaking up industries which have remained static for decades. In a new report, Street Fight takes a look at the impact of supply-side technologies on the local marketing industry, detailing the opportunities and risks that these emergent services present to existing solutions providers…
How to Set a Pricing Structure for Your Hyperlocal Business
Most hyperlocal founders think the products they’ve developed are priceless. The small business owners they’re selling to, however, are likely to have a very different view. Deciding on a pricing structure is one of the most difficult challenges a hyperlocal business is likely to face in its earliest days. Here are six strategies for determining the right pricing structure as an early-stage startup from hyperlocal executives who’ve managed to crack the code…
Chart: The Local Marketing Landscape
The shift from print to digital is old news, but what’s shaking up the industry is the introduction of cloud-based business management systems — for everything from payments and point-of-sale to schedule — into the marketing mix. Marketers can write algorithms to connect supply and demand, automating the way businesses and consumers interact locally. Yelp meets Booker. Facebook meets OpenTable. These combinations will bring together consumer data from every stage of the purchase funnel, automate marketing plans and messaging, and reduce implementation and sales costs for both marketers and solutions providers…
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem