Why Mom-and-Pops Will No Longer Pay for ‘Social Media Management’
The social media hype bubble has burst, and most very small businesses have not realized their ROI in social media. They’re not willing to pay my company — or anyone else — hundreds of dollars a month to market their company on Facebook or Twitter. Instead they are diverting those dollars to pay per click options, SEO, optimizing their websites for conversion and mobile, or targeted local media advertising…
Survey ‘Paywalls’ May Not Be as Good as They Sound for Local Media
While surveys may be a good source of revenue, it’s not a long-term solution for local news sites:There is an inherent supply-and-demand issue — not very different from the one that arises with online display ads. As more and more publishers adopt Google Consumer Surveys, Google can begin dropping its publisher payout because it has enough supply…
Understanding the Local Consumer’s Online Path to Purchase
Consumers are using the web to become highly informed about everything they buy, and what they see (or don’t) about a business online affects whether they purchase from that company. It’s much more complex and time-consuming for small businesses to reach these digital consumers than ever before, so it’s up to solutions providers to help clients create and sustain a total web presence…
Yodle CEO: Nearly 40% of the Leads We Generate Come From Mobile
In the fast-churning world of small-business-focused digital start-ups, Yodle’s nearly eight years in the business already make it a bit of a veteran player. Street Fight recently caught up with the company’s CEO, Court Cunningham, to talk about the future of mobile advertising and why small business websites are still so important as marketing channels…
Selling Local Is Hard — Here’s What You Need to Do to Make It Work
For the past couple of months I’ve been testing a new targeted local online advertising product as part of my fellowship project at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.The test has been essentially to sell the product to regional businesses within a given market. And at the end of the two-month trial, after calling on more than 150 businesses multiple times, I have a much greater appreciation not only for local salespeople but for the brands in the marketplace that can sell local…
What We Mean When We Talk About ‘Hyperlocal’
When we launched Street Fight, we expanded the term “hyperlocal” from its traditional use pertaining only to passionate, driven, highly local publishers who were the first to act on the erosion of local media’s business. We have applied it to include anyone who is disrupting and taking market share from traditional media and offering local businesses new ways to reach consumers…
What Multilocation Brands Need to Do to Prepare for Facebook’s Graph Search
National brands have invested nearly all their Facebook resources in building and supporting brand pages for the purpose of publishing content and managing customer relationships at the corporate level. But these brands don’t do business at the corporate level.They do business at the local level through large, brick-and-mortar networks. When it comes to Graph Search, these physical locations and their corresponding local Facebook pages are what really matter…
Bringing SMB Point-of-Sale Systems to the Cloud
The introduction of SaaS POS has broad implications, not only for payment firms like Square, but also a host of other loyalty and lead generation start-ups that have worked to tie into the point of sale over the past 18 months. It brings scalable access to real-time data on nearly every inch of local retailers’ operations, not only accelerating existing sectors like loyalty and rewards but opening new opportunities for key services like live inventory search…
Under a Bushel in Bay Area, a Model for Hyperlocal
Redoubtable hyperlocal editor Tracy Record, who told me about Claycord.com, described it in her inimitable way: “When I stumbled onto it recently, it made me cry. It is so much like what we do, down to the community’s comments and involvement.” To find out more about the site, I posed a variety of questions to its founder, editor, and publisher…
Apple May Have the Hardware, But Google’s Winning Hyperlocal
The hyperlocal interface will overwhelmingly revolve around a mobile experience with advertising and commerce tied to location and in-the-moment activities or sentiments. By ceding that real estate to Google with a sub-par user interface and experience, Apple is handicapping its future efforts to earn a significant chunk of that market…
Local Listings Spread — From One Site to Hundreds
One recurring theme at last week’s Street Fight Summit concerned the ongoing project of creating, organizing, and aggregating data and content associated with location. For SMBs, the new marketing strategy favors dispersed deployment of enhanced content across multiple media and mobile services…
For Hyperlocals, How Long the Roller-Coaster Ride?
Borrell Associates delivered an upbeat 2013 projection last week for an increase of 31% in ad spending in the local digital space. But even as the outlook seems brighter for local online, highly regarded hyperlocal editor and publisher Mike Fourcher announced his plans to leave the helm of his two neighborhood sites in Chicago…
National Advertisers: Time to Get Local
“Local” is often thought to be synonymous with SMBs. In many media like television, however, huge portions of the local ad spend is from national brands buying up geographically specific advertising inventory. The same thing is happening in mobile. The projected growth in local mobile ad spending will mostly come from national advertisers that localize campaigns…
Leveraging Converged Media in Local Digital Marketing
Converged media is a term many local marketers might have heard of but may not be familiar with in terms of digital media environments. Essentially, converged media is the area of overlap between any two of three media types: paid, owned, and earned. This overlap is rich with opportunity and should be a focal point in any local digital marketing program…
Big Data and Local Search: The Netflix Precedent
We’ve entered an era when product decisions can be made not by analysis of demographics or user testing but by extremely fine-tuned measurements of current user activities. For local search, the question becomes just how many of our passive online activities can be converted into data points to be examined for purposes of marketing and product development?