BIA/Kelsey is partnering again with the Local Media Association to produce this year’s LMA Native Advertising Interactive Summit next July 15-16 in Washington, DC where we’ll share our latest native ad forecast, insights about marketplace dynamics and trend lines of how we’re seeing this sector evolve. (Note early bird discounts offered through June 15th). The plan overall is to offer a mix of data, best practices, hands-on workshops and take-home ideas for getting your native ad business into higher gear.

The program covers a lot of ground in just a day and half. Nancy Lane, LMA president kicks things off with white board session where she’ll be joined by several other speakers to Schurz Communications’ Kerry Oslund, VP of Publishing and Emerging Media, will share a disruptive new approach to native advertising they’re finding to be successful. Of course, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post has done a lot of innovation around brands and native advertising as we’ll hear from Kelly Andresen, Director of the WP BrandStudio & Planning who will share winning case studies. You’ll hear speakers from Advance, Gatehouse, Desert Digital and Dispath among others discussion pricing and packaging native ad campaigns, content strategies, outsourcing, selling native effectively and since it’s Washington, we’ll also hear from Laura Sullivan, a staff attorney with the Federal Trade Commission who’s following native closely.

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Retail SMBs are more poised than their counterparts in other verticals to adopt sophisticated digital advertising and marketing. This is clearly shown by BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor ™ (Wave 18) survey of small businesses.

Retail SMBs are already highly oriented to digital media, with plans to spend 43 percent of their total ad budget on digital media in the next 12 months*. They rank social media marketing, SEM/SEO and email marketing as their top priorities for advertising and promotion in the next 12 months*.

There are multiple signals in the LCM data that we think point to big expansion into digital by Retail SMBs:

— They’re experienced in maintaining customer lists, with 71 percent having maintained a customer list for over a year. With 61 percent of their customer lists  in digital form, they’re well positioned to move into marketing automation services like CRM (where they’re still at a low utilization level of 21 percent).

— They’re big users of ecommerce, with 90 percent reporting ecommerce sales.

— They’re highly satisfied with the mobile advertising they’ve done so far, reporting high ROIs — although usage of mobile advertising and marketing is still modest.

— They’re big on customer loyalty programs, which are used by 43 percent of SMB retailers. Since only 30 percent of these programs have been digitized, we believe this too represents another growth opportunity.

— They’ve registered an interest in many advertising and marketing services, particularly ecommerce services, online satisfaction surveys, email marketing, and online leads management.

In sum, we believe local retailers will be upping their digital game on multiple fronts in the near term. Since they’re such a staple of their communities, this shift will reinforce the broad and rapid digitization of daily life.

*The 12 month period following the Local Commerce Monitor Wave 18 survey, conduced in Q3, 2014.

These were a few of the top-level findings of the latest cut of LCM 18, focusing on SMBs in the Retail vertical. Clients of BIA/Kelsey can access this report through our client portal. The report is also available for purchase, and more information on the LCM survey is here.

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But there’s still a gap: most SMBs’ email marketing tactics are fairly basic. They typically send the same promotions to everyone on their list. Or, if they segment the audience, it’s a very basic segmentation. This unrefined approach is sometimes called “batch and blast”, or “spray and pray.”

At a workshop at last week’s ad:tech San Francisco, several speakers discussed how email sophistication is evolving quickly. Although much of the discussion focused on brand advertisers, the lessons are just as useful to SMBs. This is especially true for SMBs using an agency or third party service provider.

Here are the top takeaways from the workshop:

— There’s a “unique customer journey” for each customer. Try to understand what that is: understand how each customer got to the website (or other online property). The journey will say a lot about that customer’s interests and motivations.

— The advertiser needs to speak to each customer individually, with a tailored message. This is especially true for the best customers, or power users.

— Typically, over 50 percent of the audience for a given marketing email is seeing it on a mobile device. This favors simple, bold visuals, short lead-ins, and buttons big enough for fingers (40 pixel diameter, minimum).

— Social media and email should be used together, in a complementary way. Advertisers should try to use one to leverage the other — which also means advertisers need to have the capability to associate a customer’s activity on social media with email they receive from the SMB.

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How is Facebook reinforcing its position in local? What are the business opportunities still left to come in the Local on-Demand Economy (LODE)? And what were the best things we saw at ad:tech? These are a few topics we tackled over the last week, aggregated into the Local Media Watch newsletter.

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Click below for the latest issue and subscribe (free) to get it in your inbox during its regular Thursday circulation.

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All eyes are on Facebook when it comes to localized marketing. This was pronounced in the company’s recent revelation that 40 million SMBs now have active Pages (2 million advertise). And BIA/Kelsey’s own survey data indicate that social is the most prevalent marketing channel.

The biggest drivers for this according to Czaja are reach and targeting. More than 1 billion people use Facebook daily, the vast majority via mobile.  As for targeting, it’s more accurate on Facebook than most other digital media he asserted. This involves lots of granular audience profiling.

“We’re talking about real people and not cookies,” he said, adding that businesses can enhance targeting by “bringing their own data onto Facebook” for retargeting. FB can also target look-alike audiences with similar characteristics to a brand’s existing customers or target audience.

The full session video is below.

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Content and intelligence drive results in social media marketing according to SOCi founder and CEO Afif Khoury. He presented findings during a segment on social media at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL (video below). This takes form in an actionable six-step process.

Social media continues to come in proximity with localized marketing, shown most recently by Facebook’s announcement that 40 million SMBs now have active Pages. And BIA/Kelsey’s own survey data indicate that social is the most prevalent marketing channel.

But the opportunity is greater among national advertisers that are increasingly localizing campaigns. National entities are generally more adoptive than SMBs when it comes to emerging media like social. And their size makes branding (conducive to social media) critical.

The why has largely been made evident, per the above and lots of evidence in the marketplace for social’s collision with local. The remaining question is how, and that’s where we’re seeing lots of experimentation and standards development from companies like SOCi.

“Most national brands seem to think they can capture a national audience with a single page,” said Khoury. “What they’re leaving behind is the hundreds of local pages that are getting reviews, getting comments, getting activity, but there’s nobody there.”

The session clip is embedded below and stay tuned for much more conference video and highlights.

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SMBs in the entertainment vertical love video advertising. We’re talking movie theaters, event venues, catering, on-demand performers*, etc.. As is conducive to their craft, they’re big fans of online video, particularly website and YouTube videos. They’re also big on cable and broadcast TV.

This is according to BIA/Kelsey’s latest cut of SMB survey data (information below). On average, these Entertainment SMBs spend 12 percent of ad budget on video, much more than overall SMBs. When applied to their high ad spending, this notably produces an average annual video spend of $4,000.

This class of SMBs are also heavy users of social media of all types, and have a high interest level in advertising and marketing services. This is the wrap: Entertainment SMBs are good prospects for video and social media products. They use a lot, spend a lot, and they have their antennas out.

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These were a few of the top-level findings of the latest cut of LCM 18, focusing on SMBs in the Entertainment vertical. Clients of BIA/Kelsey can access this report through our client portal. The report is also available for purchase, and more information on the LCM survey is here.

*SMBs in Entertainment is a roll-up category that includes: Restaurants, Bars, Hospitality (Catering/Hotel), Music, and Entertainment – miscellaneous.

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What is are the cultural factors driving the Local on-Demand Economy (LODE)? What’s the Futurist View of Local Media?” And are Snaps (Snapchat) the new local check-in? These are a few topics we tackled over the last week, curated and aggregated into the Local Media Watch newsletter.

LMW is now weekly, so we’ll be posting it here every Friday. Entire issues are available on the web or subscribe (free) to get it in your inbox during its regular Thursday circulation. Click below for the latest issue.

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Not only are SMBs in the Professional Services vertical heavy users of Social Media for advertising and promotion, they are highly engaged on social media, according to LCM. 3/4 reported that they track “likes” in social media, while 57.4% monitor customer comments online.

There is a big opportunity with this group to offer CRM solutions because Professional Services SMBs stay connected with their customers but only 20% say they use a CRM system. 88.0% have maintained a customer list for a year or more, while an additional 6.4% have maintained a customer list for less than a year.

The full report can be viewed and downloaded by clients of BIA/Kelsey here. This report is one of a series of drill-down reports on the findings from Wave 18 of BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor? survey. In the coming weeks we will be looking at SMBs by additional vertical categories. Our Home and Trade Services SMB report is already available. To learn more about our LCM survey of small and medium-sized businesses, click here.

Click here to purchase the Professional Services SMBs — LCM Wave 18. To purchase any of our other Local Commerce Monitor drill-down reports, check out our new BIA/Kelsey Shop.

*Professional Services vertical includes consulting, legal, architecture, and computer software. Financial Services SMBs are not included, but will be profiled in their own vertical report.

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Social Media’s place in the local marketing pantheon continues to be cemented in our SMB survey data.  More evidence came with Facebook’s announced 40 million SMB active Pages (2 million of those advertise). Twitter, Vine, Instagram and Meerkat are also localizing in different ways.

But what about Snapchat? It’s the fastest growing social media among Millennials — a behavior worth watching if you consider the generation’s influence and buying empowerment as it cycles into the ranks of the adult consumer population. But is there a local play?

This started to be answered when it localized the OurStories format — curated collections of snaps around a specific topic or theme. Local OurStories means that these themes can now have geo-specific relevance, such as a college campus, sports team, or event.

The latter has been the killer app for OurStories so far. This started with EDC and more recently caught fire at Coachella. These event-based OurStories not only have heavy engagement but lots of advertiser-friendly attributes, in being curated, Millennial-rich and massive (up to 25 million views).

Sponsored OurStories so far include Samsung and Heineken, making them much more oriented towards national brands than SMBs. Interestingly, this makes Snapchat’s competition for ad revenues less about social apps and more about another reach-based local media: television.

But the differentiating factor for OurStories could be the explicit location context. Consider the location targeting challenges that others face, such as mobile ad networks that defer to inaccurate or inferred location. We discussed this challenge recently with ThinkNear and xAd.

OurStories get users to make their location known as a natural part of the social-sharing process. This makes it a sort of location check-in a la Swarm, but with much deeper and more sustained engagement. The question is how Snapchat bottles that as a promotional vehicle.

So far that’s been all about big events, but could it apply to smaller pockets of localized promotions that have greater frequency? That would mean any business where location and temporal relevance matter. Think: flash sales, happy hours and any “perishable inventory.”

Most of all, Snapchat’s signature ephemerality is aligned with time-sensitive promotions, making it a “native” integration. It could join the list of social sharing tools that monetize the locality of the user experience. First for brands then potentially — as shown by Facebook and Instagram — for SMBs.

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