Mobile usage growth correlates to call volume to local businesses, which underpins the call growing call monetization opportunity. Several companies are working with this opportunity by building call analytics platforms, a key piece of the puzzle.

Invoca is one of those companies. The company, which says it has grown its revenue 12X since 2012, has pushed the ball forward with a new application, Invoca for Salesforce. The app allows marketers to manage inbound calls via their mobile devices.

“While technology like marketing automation, bid management and web analytics allow marketers to track the online customer path to purchase, as soon as someone picks up the phone, the chain is broken,” Invoca President Eric Holmen told us. “Marketers are left flat-footed when it comes to driving their highest converting leads.” The new application “works towards fixing this blind spot.”

The opportunity is underscored by BIA/Kelsey data, which projects phone leads driven by mobile search to reach 72 billion annually by 2018. Our Local Commerce Monitor (LCM) survey of SMBs meanwhile pegs phone calls as the most valuable form of customer lead.

As the volume of call-based leads to businesses continue to grow and be highly valued by local businesses, we expect that players in the space will continue to refine products to meet the demand. This growth and competition will be a driving force of the call monetization opportunity we’re covering closely.

The post Invoca: Call Analytics Fix the ‘Blind Spot’ in Digital Marketing appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Mobile usage growth correlates to call volume to local businesses, which underpins the call growing call monetization opportunity. Several companies are working with this opportunity by building call analytics platforms, a key piece of the puzzle.

Invoca is one of those companies. The company, which says it has grown its revenue 12X since 2012, has pushed the ball forward with a new application, Invoca for Salesforce. The app allows marketers to manage inbound calls via their mobile devices.

“While technology like marketing automation, bid management and web analytics allow marketers to track the online customer path to purchase, as soon as someone picks up the phone, the chain is broken,” Invoca President Eric Holmen told us. “Marketers are left flat-footed when it comes to driving their highest converting leads.” The new application “works towards fixing this blind spot.”

The opportunity is underscored by BIA/Kelsey data, which projects phone leads driven by mobile search to reach 72 billion annually by 2018. Our Local Commerce Monitor (LCM) survey of SMBs meanwhile pegs phone calls as the most valuable form of customer lead.

As the volume of call-based leads to businesses continue to grow and be highly valued by local businesses, we expect that players in the space will continue to refine products to meet the demand. This growth and competition will be a driving force of the call monetization opportunity we’re covering closely.

The post Invoca: Call Analytics Fix the 'Blind Spot' in Digital Marketing appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Last week at SMB Digital Marketing, Russ Laraway, Senior Director, SMB at Twitter added to the marketplace chorus espousing the notion that Content Marketing is king.

Many of Twitter’s moves in this area are well known, as content marketing is at the heart of the company’s monetization strategy, estimated $1 billion revenue, and the driving force towards its freshly announced (tweeted) S-1 filing to go public.

Content marketing so far has taken form in Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. These have mostly been used by brand advertisers, but how does Twitter reach the SMB long tail? Of its content marketing initiatives, a partnership with Mail Chimp starts to answer this.

This arrangement takes form in a “lead gen card”. This allows companies working in email marketing (and potentially other formats) to provide a call to action that automatically authenticates and populates users’ information when they’re signed in to Twitter (think Facebook Connect for lead gen).

“If you think about lead gen, there is friction from the marketing message to generating demand and the actual collection of the lead information,” he said. You need impressions, engagement, then a click, then good website, then ultimately users fill out a form. This is lots of friction and it’s going to be even worse in mobile.”

Lead gen cards will come SMB-friendly including the ability to export leads to a CSV file and also lots of coaching about ways to set it up and use it frictionlessly. Overall, this drives towards having more tangible offline actions that can be driven (and tracked) from Twitter activity.

“On Twitter, outcomes are important,” said Laraway. “It’s a cost per engagement model, such as Promoted Tweets or Promoted Account [where] you pay when someone follows you. For SMBs, we need more accountable formats: How do you connect Twitter outcomes with off-twitter outcomes. That’s the idea of where we need to head.”

The post SMB Digital Marketing Conference: Twitter Drives Towards SMB Marketing appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Amidst all the talk at the second day of SMB Digital Marketing, challenges faced by small businesses and hard recommendations on the best practices for lead generation was offered by Chris Mancini, CMO of Reply.com. Citing the need for easier solutions for the smaller merchants, Chris provided some insight as to the nature of the problems being faced by these small businesses and how they are responding to them via lead generation techniques.

From a recent survey of Merchant Circle customers, Chris provided some interesting data points on the challenges that these small and medium businesses face when marketing their services:

• 59% of these small businesses cite as one of their biggest challenges the need to address all of their various marketing channels
• 59% get an unsatisfactory ROI form Google Ad Words
• 37% cite low quality leads, 47% say it is difficult to use
• 40% say they spend at least 5 hours a week on marketing their businesses
• Only 19% have developed a mobile web site
• 85% have not conducted a daily deal in the past six months.

In order to provide solutions for these challenges, Reply.com provides a marketplace for these SMBs to conduct lead generation programs. Lead generation allows these SMBs to pay form media that is most suitable for them. This performance based marketing can be outstanding for these small businesses as it allows them to accurately measure the ROI of these marketing expenses. According to Chris, the potential for lead generation has a long way to grow, especially in several different lines of businesses.

What the lead generating programs provide to these SMBs is just another method of these businesses to reach potential new and existing customers in a most efficient way. Reply.com is one of several companies that can help SMBs in this area.

The post SMB Digital Marketing: Best Practices for Lead Generation Detailed appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

In the diverse yet confusing local advertising ecosystem, the new mandate calls for media companies to engage local business clients with holistic solutions that engage their customers in new ways. Deals and mobile optimization have received the lion’s share of attention, but targeted lead generation is another vehicle through which publishers can connect with local merchants.

Reply.com is pursuing more cost-efficient and effective lead gen models through its real-time auction marketplace for multi-targeted (intent + location) leads. Now it is introducing a white-label platform for publishers to fuse “competitive quote buttons” into their directories that deliver advertisers enhanced clicks from prospective customers.

The first publisher to enroll is MerchantCircle, which will integrate the technology to pair category-specific local service providers with online customer prospects. Other media companies are expected to partner soon. Reply’s marketplace serves leads across several verticals, predominantly auto, real estate and home improvement, but also moving into education and insurance.

Reply.com also works with a variety of channel partners to service SMBs, in addition to its telesales force and self-service option.

Reply.com COO Sean Fox will address the evolving local leads marketplace in a presentation at ILM East, March 21-23 in Boston.

The post Reply.com White Labels Targeted, Local Lead Generation for Publishers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.