Weekly News: Rep. Management Evolution, Local Search Growth, Google Assistant Calling SMBs

Here is this week’s roundup of the top news items related to local marketing and advertising, local media, technology, local commerce, consumer behavior and more.

Insight & Commentary

Q&A with Mike Blumenthal about GatherUp and the State of Reviews (October 28, 2018) LSA Insider: The review management company co-founded by Mike Blumenthal, GetFiveStars, recently changed its name to GatherUp. I caught up with Mike to find out what prompted the name change and about his perceptions of major trends in the online reputation segment. Using Co-Op Dollars to Amplify Small Business Saturday (October 31, 2018) LSA Insider: With less than one month to go until this year’s Small Business Saturday, marketers should seek as much exposure as possible for their local business clients to coincide with the event. A great avenue for doing this is through co-op advertising, both online and offline. Don’t Panic: Location-Powered Mobile Marketing is (Still) the Future of Advertising (October 31, 2018) StreetFight: To succeed at local-mobile advertising, all the data needs to be accurate for mobile advertising to work and please consumers. It’s all or nothing: the device ID, the lat/long, the POI (place), and the quality of the media need to be correct. Oh, and you need to do all this in real time and at scale, too. What we’re talking about here takes innovation. And innovation takes analysis.

Strategy & Tactics 

SMBs Don’t Want Calls & Probably Will Delete Your Emails. Now What? (October 25, 2018) LSA Insider: Despite increasing SMB resistance to being “sold,” many media and technology companies continue to prioritize traditional inside sales efforts. However, a traditional sales approach is what the majority of SMB/B2B buyers want. Why aligning marketing with your customer journey matters (October 25, 2018) Search Engine Land: Marketing, sales and content should all be aligned and calibrated to each stage of the customer journey for maximum results. However most companies struggle to match this ideal in practice. Are Holiday Campaigns Launching Too Late in the Season? (October 25, 2018) StreetFight: Black Friday has historically been seen as the official kickoff to the holiday shopping season, but new research from the data solutions company Lotame and the digital intelligence firm Jumpshot indicates that consumer interest actually peaks almost one month earlier. Retailers that wait until late fall to launch their holiday campaigns could be missing out on sales.

Stats & Studies

Report: 54% of SMBs Are DIY-ing, but Larger SMBs More Likely to DIFM (October 31, 2018) LSA Insider: For nearly 20 years there has been a heated debate about small businesses (SMBs), digital marketing and self service. The basic industry bias has always been that sales reps or some human involvement is required to close sales and that most SMBs won’t “self-serve.” However, the reality is now more nuanced and complex Google CEO: Local-Mobile Search Grew 50% Last Year (October 31, 2018) LSA Insider: Google Maps was introduced in 2005. And sometime before that, Google had started to offer localized results in search. Yet it wasn’t until the introduction and mainstream adoption of the iPhone and Android that Google began to focus in a very serious way on location and online-to-offline consumer behavior. Survey: 88 percent seek driving directions after a local voice search (October 26, 2018) Search Engine Land: A new survey from Chatmeter finds that 90% of smartphone owners use their device’s virtual assistant. Roughly 40 percent of consumers “use voice search to ask for directions, an address or business hours for a nearby location” and just over one quarter (27 percent) of respondents say their “number one use for their voice device is to find a local restaurant, shop or business.”

Industry News

Google asks SMBs if they’ll accept calls from Google Assistant (November 1, 2018) Search Engine Land: Google is asking Google My Business profile owners whether they’re willing to accept “Google Assistant calls.” The company explains that this means two things: 1) let customers use Google Assistant to book restaurant reservations and appointments and 2) allow Google Assistant to confirm factual information about the business. Agencies must now confirm client relationships before enabling Facebook Pixel (November 2, 2018) MarTech Today: Facebook is updating its policies around who can enable its Pixel and event sets, now requiring agencies to confirm their relationship with clients before leveraging either ad-targeting tool for client campaigns. 80% of Amazon advertisers plan to increase budgets in 2019 (October 25, 2018) Search Engine Land: A new survey marketers found that nearly half of the respondents are currently advertising with Amazon. Of those advertising, 37 percent said they currently spend up to 10 percent of their annual digital advertising budgets on Amazon. Another 24 percent said Amazon accounts for 10 to 25 percent of their annual ad spend.

Member News

Yext creating local knowledge graph, adds Snapchat to data network (October 24, 2018) Yext introduced a redesign of its platform that seeks to better position its customers’ data for “conversational” interactions via voice and chatbots. It also announced that Snapchat would join its data distribution network. Cuebiq Launches AI-Driven Platform to Measure the Offline Consumer Journey Building upon Cuebiq’s established attribution capabilities, the Clara platform integrates offline analytics and audience insights, empowering marketers to map, target, and measure offline consumer behaviors all in one platform, turning offline insights into actionable business and marketing strategies.

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