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
What Kinds of Businesses Do Daily Deals Benefit Most?
Business owners are always looking for a silver bullet — a killer feature that will bring in new customers. The recent daily deals craze has held out the promise of this kind of customer acquisition, but when is a deal feature a silver bullet, and when is it is shot in the foot?
Why Niches Are Becoming More Important for Deals
In the month since Groupon’s S-1 filing, there has been a lot of criticism directed at the nascent daily deals industry. Some say that the deals model is unsustainable, while others claim that running a deal can cripple a small business. But before jumping on that bandwagon, it’s important to remember that online deals are still in their infancy…
Hyperlocal Post-Mortem: Lessons Learned From InJersey
When we made the decision this week to shutter InJersey.com — a network of hyperlocal sites across the garden state that I helped build, nurture, and raise like a child -—my biggest fear was that the effort would be branded a failure. In the age of Twitter, I was braced for the #epicfail hashtag. It came instead via Slate, in the form of a Jack Shafer missive…
Latest Posts
5 Leading Indicators of the Future of Local Search
The local search market is changing. On the buy-side, enterprise advertisers are starting to assert their control, demonstrating that they can leverage large footprints to compete in local with clean distributed data, and accurate claimed citations. Consumers, meanwhile, increasingly want to use their mobile devices for more activities than navigational search, expecting to be able to buy and not only find goods and services nearby. The advancements of local search are evolving so rapidly that a race to control consumer behavior may be brewing between the Davids and Goliaths…
LBMA Podcast: Retailigence Does Offline Pickup, Fooda Does Hyperlocal Food
In this week’s episode, Jack in the Box uses time as a marketing factor with Pandora; Netclearance lets you do indoor location with WiFi and BLE; Disney harvests energy from your finger. Run to the beat of the right song with our app of the week, TempoRun. And special guest Dave Roesch of the Atlantic City Convention and Visitors Authority teaches us how cities should be using location based marketing…
On The Heels Of New Funding, Swirl Rolls Out In-Store Mobile Marketing Platform
Boston-based Swirl Networks has announced has released a new in-door marketing tool, which provides tools for retailers to create and deliver personalized content to their customers based on the customer’s in-store location. The company launched a pilot program of the platform in May for retailers including Kenneth Cole and Timberland, and has now released the service to the general public…
How a Hyperlocal Editor-Publisher Team Scored Big in Suburban Nashville
One of the highest revenue producers on Michele’s List of independent hyperlocal sites is BrentWood Communications, which publishes four-year-old Brentwood Home Page in suburban Nashville, Tenn. Founders Kelly Gilfillan and Susan Leathers launched a second suburban site, Franklin Home Page, a year ago and a third, Nolensville Home Page, this summer. Total revenue for the sites is $251,000-$500,000 annually, a range attained by few hyperlocals, whether independents or part of corporate networks. Here’s how Gilfillan and Leathers did it…
MapBox Raises $10 Million in Series A Round
MapBox, a cloud-based map platform that allows users to design customized and interactive maps, closed a $10 million Series A round led by Foundry Group today. The Washington, DC. and San Francisco based company, which develops its service entirely on top of the open-source mapping platform OpenStreetMap, has plans to use the funding to grow its 35 member team….
RetailNext CEO: Brick-and-Mortar Retailers Are Not Under Threat
Online retailers have traditionally had a big advantage in terms of data, but in-store retail analytics company RetailNext has built a model that allows owners of brick-and-mortar stores to collect, analyze, and visualize in-store customer engagement data. The San Jose-based company, which has raised over $24 million, aggregates the data that is collected from customers and makes it actionable for retailers such as American Apparel, Bloomingdales, Verizon Wireless, and Family Dollar…
Street Fight Daily: Patch Staffs Top Sites Only, BrandNetworks Acquires Optimal
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Patch Will Staff Outlets In Top-Performing Areas Only, Memo Says (Poynter)… Social Ad Companies Team Up As Brand Networks Acquires Optimal For $35M (TechCrunch)… In-Store Analytics Firm Nomi Raises $10 Million, Looks Beyond Retail (Mashable)…
Case Study: Natural Food Chain Sees Steady Growth In Mobile Coupon Redemptions
One-in-five consumers has downloaded a supermarket app, and the majority of those consumers use their mobile apps at least twice a month. In an effort to get in on the trend, PCC Natural Markets, a health food co-op with nine locations in Washington, partnered with Chinook Book earlier this year on a mobile coupon app. “Print coupons are still very popular — we get a ton of them that come through our registers — but it’s inevitable that digital coupons will become more prominent,” says Tom Monahan, marketing manager at PCC.
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Reviews Are Now a Growth System for Multi-Location Brands