6 Smart Ways Retailers Can Use Heat Maps to Drive Conversions
What do customer movements inside stores have to do with conversions? It turns out, quite a lot. Slight changes in routing can increase the traffic around promotional displays and help avoid bottlenecks. Some of the smartest retailers are installing beacons, WiFi, and other hyperlocal technologies as a way to generate heat maps that track customer flows.
Openings and New Hires at Sears, Uber, and Yext
Every two weeks, Geoff Michener covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week’s column, Sears snags the former CMO of Restaurant.com, Uber lands a Google product veteran, and Yext hires a sales executive for small business and partner channels.
Street Fight Daily: Uber’s $62B Valuation, Nextdoor’s New On-Demand ‘Casual Labor Exchange’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber Valuation Put at $62.5 Billion After New Investment Round (New York Times)… Nextdoor Is the Lastest Company to Enter On-Demand Services (BuzzFeed)… Why a Remote Work Policy Is Worth Considering (Street Fight)…
Beacons to Shine a Light on Consumers’ Murky Path to Purchase
Retail activity this holiday season promises to be more omnichannel than ever, courtesy of the ever-present smartphone. That raises the stakes for retailers in terms of their preparedness and complicates their attribution metrics. With online-to-offline shopping dynamics in focus, this may be the long-awaited breakout year for beacon technology.
Getting Pushy with Notifications Can Pay Off with Millennials
With the volume and velocity of messaging in the digital economy increasing seemingly exponentially, brands everywhere need to weigh not only what information and content they share but also how much and the delivery channel they use. When it comes to highly connected millennials who use location-based apps, a new study indicates brands and retailers stand a good chance of cutting through the clutter with push notifications.
The Price of Free Listings
When the Yellow Pages directory came out once a year, if your business’ phone number was printed incorrectly, you were in trouble. It was the same with local business listings on the internet, except that instead of one or two books, there were thousands of websites carrying your bad data. This added up to a serious headache for multi-location brands and a serious opportunity for solutions providers that could bring order to the free business listings chaos. Here’s a look at how listings management has evolved.
Local Visionary Award Winners Announced
The 2015 Street Fight Summit in New York saw the presentation of the first annual Local Visionary Awards, an eight-category competition designed to honor the very best campaigns, companies, ideas, and individuals in local marketing and commerce. The Innovator of the Year award went to Yext CEO Howard Lerman.
Street Fight Daily: Facebook’s New Retail Features, Local Mobile Ad Spend to Reach $6.5 Billion by 2019
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Woos Retailers and Shoppers Alike with New Features (Gigaom)… Mobile Spend by Local Advertisers Forecast to Hit $6.5B by 2019 (MediaPost)… Security, Data Breaches Slow Down Mobile Payments Adoption (eMarketer)…
Yext Gets in the Customer Engagement Xone
Fast-growing Yext is broadening its suite of location-based targeting products with the launch this week of Xone, a beacon-based program for businesses to engage in-store consumers with relevant content. Xone’s central feature is Tips, which enables businesses to customize and deliver messages to smartphone users who pass within range of an in-store Xone Beacon.
Street Fight Daily: Facebook Wants Your TV Ad Budget, Are Ad Blockers ‘Highway Robbers?’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Why Sheryl Sandberg Says Big Brands Should Spend Their TV Ad Budgets on Facebook (Adweek)… Ad Blocking Companies Are Like Highway Robbers, IAB Says (Wall Street Journal)… Instacart Hires Its First CFO (TechCrunch)…
Openings and New Hires at Yext, Acquisio, and ServiceTitan
Every two weeks, Geoff Michener covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week’s column, Yext hires a slew of new executives, Acquisio brings on local marketing expert Sebastien Provencher as VP of product, and ServiceTitan appoints a new head of sales.
Street Fight Daily: Goldman Sachs’ Advertising Report, App Search Company Tests Mobile Ads
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Goldman Sachs: Online Advertising About to Be ‘Fundamentally Restructured’ by Apple, Google, and Facebook (Business Insider)… App Search Engine Quixey Now Taking a Crack at Mobile Ads (Recode)… Shopify Partners with U.S. Postal Service to Woo More Retailers (Reuters)…
Street Fight Daily: Google Introduces Android Pay, Foursquare Wants to ‘Fake’ Beacon Tech
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Android Pay Is Finally Here (Huffington Post)… Dennis Crowley Explains Foursquare’s New ‘Magic Trick’ (Business Insider)… Uber’s Chinese Rival Quietly Backs Its U.S. Rival Lyft (Wall Street Journal)…
Street Fight Daily: Small-Scale Shipping Firms Are Having a Moment, Jet.com Struggles
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Growth of E-commerce Pushes Funds Into Small-Fry Shipping Firms (Reuters)… Jet.com Runs Into Turbulence With Retailers (Wall Street Journal)… Not Just An App: The Front End Of The Trillion-Dollar, Full-Stack Revolution (TechCrunch)…
The Price of Free Listings Revisited: A Hyperlocal Business Perspective
The proliferation of online directories and directory services has made the local business owner’s life harder. It means more places to manage vital information and more third-party providers that control access to directories. Between the time and effort required to manage aggregators and the volume of citations, few small business owners do it themselves. As a result, the only stakeholders that truly know what information is authentic often are left out of the conversation.