Constant Contact Rolls Out Digital Coupons for SMBs
Email marketing giant Constant Contact has rolled out a new coupon feature as part of its growing online marketing tools platform. The new service makes it possible for small businesses to offer discounts based on a given set of criteria such as increasing revenue and attracting long-term customers, within a single integrated resource…
Foursquare Introduces Ads For Small Businesses
This morning the company rolled out its flagship small business advertising product, capping a two-year effort to solve the company’s toughest challenge yet: making money. With the new product, which the company has been piloting in New York since May, local businesses will be able to buy ads that surface in the search results pages or home screen of its popular mobile app…
Study: Digital Ad Revenues Grow As Mobile Accelerates
Internet advertising revenues surged in the first half of 2013, reaching $20.1 billion on continued growth in the mobile sector, according to new study commissioned by the IAB, and conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Mobile revenues, which include both smartphones and tablet media, more than doubled in Q1 and Q2, growing from $1.2 billion in 2012 to over $3 billion this year…
In Push to Measure Mobile ROI, Marchex Beefs Up Call Analytics
Marchex, the publically-traded call analytics firm, has released two new products this morning aimed at improving its ability to attribute calls to mobile actions and to determine the actual quality of a call. The move comes as a number of advertising technology firms have launched new attribution services in recent months, scrambling to measure return on investment for an increasingly interested, but skeptical, brand advertiser…
Placeable Launches New Feature to Help Fix ‘Dirty’ Local Data
Two months after a major rebranding, the Denver-based Placeable has launched a new tool to help big brands clean up their location data. The feature, called Placeable Plot, allows marketers to update and manage location data for a brand’s brick-and-mortar stores across apps, search engines, maps, social networks and marketing campaigns…
Study: More Local Shoppers Using Mobile Devices for Retail Purchases
As mobile devices become smarter, consumers are turning to their devices for more than last-minute directions and simple searches. A new study from Local Corporation finds that the the smartphone, once thought of as a place where consumers went for quick bits of information, is moving deeper into the decision cycle, playing a larger role in more in depth research, once associated with with tablet behavior…
Digital First Partners With PaperG For Digital Ads
Digital First Media has teamed up with PaperG to build custom multi-device advertising campaigns for both desktop and mobile. The partnership allows PaperG, which automates display advertising campaigns for small businesses, to provide Digital First Media’s network of nearly 1,000 sales representatives with a full-service platform ad solution for mobile and desktop…
Study: Mobile Users More Willing to Share Location Than Browsing History
When it comes to mobile marketing, consumers are more willing to share the places they go in the real-world with brands than the websites they visit, according to a new study conducted by Millward Brown. The research, which surveyed 1,572 consumers who have downloaded a mobile app in the past year, found that 43% of respondents were willing to share their location with companies compared to one of every ten who said they would share their browser history…
In Nod To SaaS Future, ReachLocal Rolls Out Lead Management Product
The company is extending its subscription ReachEdge product to a general audience, providing tools for merchants to not only generate, but also manage leads that come directly to a business’s website or through a display or search campaign. Kris Barton, the company’s director of product, says the problem that software needs to solve for small businesses today is that of converting demand into customers…
Conference Notebook: For SMBs, Content Marketing May Not Be So Easy
Brands are lauded when they post or tweet the right thing at the right time — and many social media evangelists spread the gospel that in an always-on, interactive consumer culture small businesses need to do the same. But that line of thinking neglects the high costs associated with content creation, and ignores the problematic economics of content marketing for small businesses…
GoDaddy Cleans Up Marketing and Simplifies Product to Woo VSBs
The internet services company announced a major rebrand this morning, chucking the racy ads and convoluted site for a cleaner product and entrepreneur-focused pitch aimed at repositioning GoDaddy as a small business marketing firm. The rebranding includes a new marketing campaign as well as a redesign of both the company’s site and its flagship website-building product…
BlockAvenue Pivots From Utility to Media, Becomes CO Everywhere
Tony Longo and Dan Adams, the founders of Block Avenue, are doubling down on media. Two years after launching the service as a tool to rate locations, the company has rebranded as Co Everywhere, and released a mobile app to help people explore the world around them. Users can pick a featured place, or outline a geography on a map, and peruse content from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare and a other sources that come from within the area…
5 Things SMBs Need to Know About Their Customers in the Multiplatform Era
In a Street Fight webinar Tuesday sponsored by YP, Greg Sterling, a senior analyst with Opus Research and contributing editor at Search Engine Land spoke with Sanjay Sood, YP’s SVP of consumer platforms, about new strategies small businesses can use to get discovered by consumers in the smartphone age…
Street Fight Daily: Pay-Per-Gaze Advertising, 17.4% of Global Web Traffic from Mobile
How Pay-Per-Gaze Advertising Could Work With Google Glass (New York Times) … Google and Waze Finally Start Showing Off Each Other’s Tech (VentureBeat) … 17.4% of Global Web Traffic Comes Through Mobile (Mashable) …
PriceGrabber Acquires Snapette
Mobile shopping app Snapette is getting a new home. The company, which has 1.5 million users, is being acquired by e-commerce platform and shopping site PriceGrabber for an undisclosed sum. For Snapette, it’s a play for scale. The company boasts partnerships with over 200 brands and retailers worldwide, but PriceGrabber puts millions of shoppers in touch with more than 12,000 merchants and sellers, driving more than $1 billion in annual sales…
Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Acquires Locu, Zillow Snaps Up StreetEasy
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… GoDaddy Acquires Merchant ‘Finder’ Startup Locu for $70 Million (AllThingsD)… Leaked Revenue Figures Illustrate Need For Hundreds Of Patch Layoffs (TechCrunch)… Internet Impacts Roughly $1.83 Trillion in Offline Buying (ScreenWerk)…
With New Ad Product, Placed Connects Dots for In-Store Visits
Slowly but surely, technology firms are finding direct links between the ads we see on mobile devices and the places we visit in the real world. Placed has partnered with xAD to launch a new product called Placed Retention, which uses the company’s panel of participating consumers to determine whether a mobile user who was exposed to an ad appeared within a store days later…
Brands Hope to Use Mobile to ‘Conquer’ Competitors’ Locations
Mobile-local ad network xAd has released a new report that shows a substantive increase in interest from brands in so-called “geo-conquesting,” the technique of targeting messaging to users at or near a competitor’s location. During the second quarter, nearly one third of every lat-long targeted campaign run on the network included some form of geo-conquesting strategy…