Reveal Mobile Predicts Big Holiday Season Ad Spend for SMBs, With Social, Location At the Top

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This coming holiday season, social, location-based advertising will dominate small business ad spend, according to a recent survey conducted by Reveal Mobile, a location-based marketing company. The survey also indicated that brands are increasingly comfortable with location-based tactics like geotargeting.

Amazon Furthers Embrace of SMBs with Storefronts

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What Amazon has done is create a channel for the entrepreneurial impulse of small business owners that would appear to sidestep local commerce completely. But has local really been removed from the equation?

Report: Half of Very Small Businesses Suffer Financial Losses from Website Hacks

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Half of all the small businesses with five or fewer employees examined in a recent report by GoDaddy have suffered a financial loss due to website hacking, and for one in eight, that loss was more than $5,000.

Is Google Playing the Long Game with SMB Websites?

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“When you look at this Website growth + the Local Knowledge Panel with Posts + AMP + Progressive Web Apps, we are starting to see the outlines of an “open web” that Google totally controls. Or at least they control the profitable parts,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm in their latest biweekly column.

Street Fight Daily: Google’s Long Game with SMB Websites, Video Ads Rise—Will Fraud Rise With Them?

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TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING AND MEDIA… Is Google Playing the Long Game with SMB Websites?… More Digital Videos Are Coming—How Will They Affect Ad Fraud?… Causal IQ Reimagines Role of Programmatic Solutions Provider, Leveraging Intimate Influencers…

3 Tips for Managing Local Services Ads

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Google expanded Local Services ads to the San Diego area in November 2016 and has been rapidly expanding this platform across different verticals and markets in the USA over the last two years. If you’re considering running Local Services ads, here are three things to know before getting started.

Facebook Takes a Stab at Local—Again

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“As it stands, Facebook’s latest local effort is of academic interest but hardly seems a reason for businesses to actively re-engage with the free side of the social giant’s features. From a competitive viewpoint, it hardly seems the stuff of legend needed to take on the current local search hegemon, Google,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm in their latest biweekly column.

Womply: Prime Day Coincides with Bump in Small Retailer Revenue

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It would make sense to assume that Amazon’s e-commerce extravaganza results in a decline in foot traffic for brick-and-mortar retailers, especially small ones. Womply’s data science team has intel that says otherwise.

Why Google’s Mobile Speed Update Smells Like Trouble for Small Businesses

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The murky guidelines surrounding just whom and how many people and sites the mobile speed update may affect—and how exactly businesses in the line of fire are to amend unsatisfactory practices—spells potential trouble for small businesses.

How AI Helps Local Businesses Compete With the Biggest Brands

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Historically, the world of advanced analytics has been the domain of huge enterprises with large budgets. But with big leaps in AI capabilities, even the smallest business can now access insights that were previously only available to “the big guys.”

How the End of Network Neutrality Could Affect SMBs and the Public Interest

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For many years, the government’s assessment of the public interest was to encourage Web access to all. The current FCC, however, contends that this position is better met by eliminating the net neutrality rules — that SMBs will be able to have a variety of ISP options based on their actual needs with the end of the net neutrality rules.

Empyr Partners with Vendasta to Expand Its SMB Reach

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Online-to-offline marketing platform Empyr has announced a partnership with Vendasta that has the potential to rapidly scale up and deepen its customer base. The deal makes Empyr’s CPR (cost-per-revenue), performance marketing platform available on Vendasta’s marketplace, which sells digital solutions through more than 2,000 local marketing agencies.

Research Roundup: Comparing Franchisees and Independent Professionals

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Comparing some surveys focused at opposite ends of the local small business spectrum — franchise operators and self-employed professionals — it feels like, though the industry is selling these groups the same marketing and commerce technology and services, the two segments are more different than similar.

Tried and True Marketing Tactics SMBs Can Borrow From Premium Brands

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Many small-but-growing businesses have a multi-store operation and a dynamic online presence, but simply can’t afford the custom-built, integrated retail and ecommerce systems that keep a premium brand’s customer experience tight and consistent. Here are some tactics they can employ to hack that problem.

Sponsored Content: Using Your Website as a Customer Engagement Tool

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Websites remain a foundational marketing element for companies of all sizes and they are likely the “home base” for customers finding the detailed information they desire as well as the basics, like store hours, contact information, product details and links to social channels. While on the surface it may seem like websites are the opposite of engaging—static, one-size-fits-all, impersonal—the fact is with a little bit of strategy, businesses can create a website that provides customers with a truly engaging experience with clear calls to action as part of the customer’s journey.

Selling to SMBs: AIDA and The Conversion Zone

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I’m often asked by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists alike to talk about what changes throughout the course of the “bell curve ride” in selling to small and medium-sized businesses — and how organizations need to adapt at each stage in order to ensure continued success. Here’s the best way I can explain how it all works.

How Online Lenders Can Refine Their Targeting of SMBs

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The combination of doubling down on the minority of SMBs that are most likely to be receptive to capital and making it easy to engage these SMBs across on/offline channels with personalized, automated campaigns can make all of the difference.

How Local Businesses Can Survive and Thrive in the Age of RankBrain

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A great site with proper titles, tags and meta descriptions alongside good and relevant ad copy, and an intelligent approach to drive the maximum number of relevant clicks, is the best defense for the local business against the self-awareness of the RankBrain machine.

How Much Do You Know About Your SMB Customers?

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They say that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, but when it comes to landing SMB clients, that’s simply not the case. That’s why we went out to more than 500 local merchants and asked them about their experiences in local marketing. The result? The Local Merchant Report…

New App From GoDaddy Wants to Help Entrepreneurs Brainstorm Business Ideas

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The app is a community space that fields and vets ideas from its users. People can log on and anonymously enter a concept they have for say, starting a local gardening service and receive support and advice in the form of “loves” — which is sort of like a Facebook like.