Web and mobile search continue to develop as places where high-intent consumers find local businesses. This is driving a lot of call volume, especially in mobile search where the device itself is also a phone. Meanwhile, SMBs cite phone calls as their most valued lead source according to BIA/Kelsey research. Marchex’s recently launched CallDNA product represents an important area of call monetization: effectively tracking and measuring call quality. This is reaching all new levels in the age of big data. At BIA/Kelsey‘s Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media conference last week we heard from Ziad Ismail, Senior VP of Product & Engineering at Marchex about this new product.

“Currently we are seeing a new epidemic of call spammers” says Ismail, “receiving calls from various spammers can throw off analytics,” so this is where real-time call analytics comes in. Real-time call analytics is when technology is analyzing calls as they are happening. By doing this illegitimate calls are able to be cut out before they go onto the books. CallDNA also enables SMBs to know there is value in what they are doing. “SMBs need to know what actually worked in the system. Click targets are not very good but when you dig deeper it becomes obvious which calls are good and which are not and that is what is important” says Ismail.

Call monetization is a huge opportunity for companies in the call tracking world. In addition to Ismail’s discussion about this opportunity, a panel was also held at last week’s Leading in Local: Interactive Media conference to discuss best practices in the industry. Among this panel it was a universal feeling that the term “call tracking” was no longer an accurate description of what companies in the industry do. “Call tracking is a reactive technology” says Irv Shapiro, CEO, CTO and Founder of Ifbyphone, “it allows you to measure tech and re-optimize in the future. Our customers want more hits today so we need a proactive technology, not one for the future”. Dinesh Ravishanker, CEO and Cofounder of CallFire says “it is all about making sure when the call is actually delivered value is added at that time. We need to deliver when it is needed. Call intelligence, bringing intelligence to that phone call is where we are headed”.

On the other hand, the term call tracking is not completely irrelevant. J.Scott Hamilton, GM, North America at Response Tap says “we are all doing an element of call tracking, there is an association. The question is what type of an association is it. What we are focused on is what you want to track in your phone calls and then we will use that data to make or save you money”. Often the information that is tracks will help to improve the consumer experience. “When a consumer engages in a phone conversation, we need to enhance the customer experience. We need to make sure the caller’s digital experience is taken into account so that both parties are on the same page and are able to get their desired outcomes.” says Drew Thorne-Thomsen, VP of Business Development at Invoca.

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The shift from print to PC was disruptive. The shift from PC to mobile is also disruptive, but the implications are more complex as consumer behavior becomes increasingly multi-screen. Today, half of U.S. mobile searchers begin their purchase research process on the mobile phone, and 46 percent use their mobile phone/smartphone as their exclusive research device.

On the final day of BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference, Telmetrics CEO Bill Dinan and BIA/Kelsey Senior Analyst Mike Boland dug into the implications of “Path to Purchase” research conducted in the U.S. and U.K. by Telmetrics and xAd. In addition to running Telmetrics, Dinan is chairman of the Local Search Association.

The Path to Purchase data, which has been covered previously on Local Media Watch, offers a wide range of insights that small businesses and publishers can use as they build their digital presence or advertising/marketing solutions for advertisers.

The data framed a conversation about the growing role of mobile in consumer purchase decision-making. The following are a few of the findings and implications that Boland and Dinan kicked around on stage.

Fifty percent of mobile searchers use their device at the start of the search process, while 49 percent start their search on the desktop. “We are getting into more of a multi-screen world,” Dinan said.

The fact that 46 percent of mobile searchers use mobile exclusively points to a growing role for mobile devices in the path to purchase. “Mobile consumers are starting and staying on their mobile device for research,” Dinan said. “This suggests a growth in device utility and user skill. People are figuring out how to reference data on those devices, allowing them to stay on that device.”

“The PC was a disruptor to print,” Dinan said. “Mobile is sort of a distruptor but in a multi-screen world, it can help all ships rise.”

The migration of desktop to mobile compels publishers to move more quickly. “Many in print world lost the battle of print to online. Some have learned from this. Dex Media, for example, is moving to an actions based concept. That is one of the lessons learned.”

Dinan said understanding how mobile devices work is key to taking full advantage of the mobile opportunity. Making sure location information is at the forefront is critical.

“Mobile is inherently local, and the reason is location. Location is what makes mobile mobile,” Dinan said. “It is an action device about local. If something that is not about local comes along [during a search], I am moving on. So while it is important to be local, it is also important to appear local.”

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Local businesses are finding customers in lots of new ways with the expanding reach of social media and transaction capabilities. On the final day at Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media in San Francisco, a panel on “the new world of leads” with executives from Airbnb, Thumbtack and Lucky Oyster explored some of the opportunities.

Airbnb, of course, is one of the real breakouts in the space with ten million “guests” in 192 countries now participating in its apartment — as — hotel rental services. The company’s Joe Zadeh said the key to its “shared economy” service was understanding its clients. “People want to have more experiences, and they want to step away from having so many things,” he said. People don’t necessarily want to be an Uber driver after getting a ride, but they do want to become Airbnb hosts.

The company has been building its solutions based on need. For instance, it has developed a freelance photographer program because hosts need good pictures of their apartments. It is also working on providing “speed matches.” Guests “don’t want to wait six hours to get a response,” he said.

Lucky Oyster’s Matthew Berk, a longtime local industry executive and analyst, said that a key part of the new leads order is to provide a “structured” word of mouth platform about actual experience. It has been a ten year journey to provide digital word of mouth. For a local business, it will never be based on a tremendous volume of leads or reviews, he said. But you want to track it, promote it and bump it. The opportunity for innovation is in the form of discovering the right lead, he said.

Thumbtack’s Marco Zappacosta said leads for services have their own special criteria. The long term goal is to become a transactional marketplace, and the most convenient way for a seller to conduct his or her business. But “a lot of price discovery happens after the point of introduction,” he said, noting that Thumbtack now has a list of 30,000 contractors, and sends $200 million of business their way. His challenge: get more contractors. There is plenty of business, but a supply constraint.

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Local marketing has moved beyond a sole focus on new customer acquisition to also focus on customer loyalty and engagement. Using credit card registration and point-of-sale integration techniques, leaders in the space have found new ways to engage with millions of local customers and merchants.On the final day at BIA/Kelsey‘s Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media conference, a panel of industry leaders were brought together to discuss how transaction marketing is changing the way SMBs relate to their customer base.

One major trend that was discussed heavily was point-of-sales systems. Bringing all of the “big data” that SMBs acquire and making that information manageable and useful is where the future of transaction marketing is headed. Victor Ho, CEO of FiveStars, recognized the opportunity for POS systems in the SMB market and jumped on the opportunity. “All systems are integrated on a point-of-sale. When we looked at the market we decided there was an opportunity here. We then created a platform that worked through any POS.”

FiveStars‘ quick jump into the market proved to be the right move. The company now has just under 3 million memberships.

Panelists also discussed the development of the transaction marketing space. According to Jason Dailey, Senior Director at Microsoft Bing, “mobile devices and electronic wallets are going to be one of the next biggest things.” Looking at the broader perspective, Eckart Walther, CEO of CardSpring predicts that we will be seeing “more and more online companies capture online data.The levels of interest in transaction marketing are going up exponentially.”

With all of the new interests and innovation in the transaction marketing area, Albert S. Bitton, Founder and President of Local Commerce Association of Canada warns against SMBs becoming overwhelmed with all of the different products the industry now has to offer them. “The expectation of the industry is way too high. They have a lot they need to deal with and there are too many applications that small businesses will want to manage but they can’t. This is why I am excited about companies like Groupon and FiveStars because everything is integrated”.

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Five years into its existence, Groupon is grappling with the reality that it must evolve beyond simply fire-hosing leads at local merchants and begin helping merchants manage those leads and turn more of them into long-term, profitable customers.

In an onstage interview this morning at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference, Sean Smyth, SVP Partnerships at Groupon, described Groupon’s ongoing evolution from a pure demand generator for SMBs to an operating system that works as much on the yield as the demand side.

Groupon reported about 19.9 million Groupon NA users in the third quarter, operating in 565 cities around the world. The company works with roughly 500,000 merchants. While a large number, 500,000 represents just a fraction of the roughly 30 million merchants worldwide in Groupon’s core verticals.

Smyth acknowledged that its early efforts weren’t always helpful to merchants, referencing widely publicized incidents where an excessive stream of deals strained some small businesses beyond the breaking point. The progression from “blunt instrument” demand generator to platform has forced Groupon to get into the weeds and really understand how its customers’ businesses work.

“We needed to learn what it means to run a good mani-pedi place,” Smyth said.

Groupon has been adding capabilities to build out this operating system concept. It acquired Breadcrumb, a tablet-based point of sale system for restaurants, a key Groupon category. It has also added a payments and reservations as core capabilities.

“We are looking at different chunks of how we optimize things for the merchant,” Smyth said. “We are still in the beginning phases of moving from the demand side to the yield side [for small businesses].”

On any given day, Groupon has 65,000 deals running in North America. Smyth’s job is to find partners to help Groupon expand demand to meet its robust supply of deals. “We have tens of thousands of partners now. We are looking for more help on the distribution side.”

The post At Leading in Local: ILM 2013: Groupon Grows Up appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The entrance into a new digital age has brought endless changes to the world. Current media is in a state of transformation, undergoing great modification in its traditional medium form – from print to digital. The century old Radio industry is not excluded from this transition. It is facing ever increasing competition from new and innovative digital media outlets that are available to local advertisers, but within this competition lies opportunity.

Publisher Eric Rhodes, a leading voice for progressive radio, gave his take on “the new digital stuff” and introduces new areas for the radio industry, such as “the connected car” in the first session of Day 3 at Leading in Local conference.

BIA/Kelsey’s advertising revenue forecasts illustrate that national advertisers play a significant role in the purchasing of advertising opportunities across many different local media outlets. In 2012, our estimates are that national brands spent $45.2 billion dollars in local media advertising such as direct mail, television, print yellow pages, radio, out-of-home and more. This amount accounts for more than a third (33.6 percent) of all spending in local media. “The Radio industry is caught between two worlds” said Rhodes. Current radio owners are invested heavily in transmission costs and they see no compelling reason to back out of it now. They have seen little decline on listening time in the last years – only between 1-2 percent. Compounded with the difficulty to monetize digital radio when consumed out of market areas, makes the idea of transition far more difficult. The radio industry is waiting for things to get further developed, but entities such as Clear channel and iHeartRadio are investing heavy and it may be too late for the traditional players in the space to transition. As we know, digital moves fast, so although Radio maybe okay now, it may not be with continuation of newer developing technologies in the digital space.

The “connected car” emerged as one of the most important touch-points on the horizon for radio, given that the car is where audiences continue to report that a good deal of radio listening continues to happen.   Tech savvy consumers are already listening to streamed audio in their cars via blue-tooth through their smart phones, or connecting through plug-ins, and the configuration of the dash board could make a real difference to Radio’s future. People are no longer carrying radios on them. However, Rhodes said “It’ll take 8 years for 50 percent of the U.S. cars to have connected dashboards and 16 years for 100% of them to be connected.”

The question remains: Where and when does the transition need to happen?

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At this week’s Leading in Local conference we continued to make our Future Stars program a new tradition and staple. From now on, we’ll be holding startup competitions in order to invite “new blood” into the atmosphere. This builds from the Future Stars program we launched last year.

This week we had 7 strong companies compete throughout the first few days of the show for audience votes. The “Future Stars Alley” that served as their home at the conference was a perfect arena to congregate and sniff out what’s happening in early-stage innovation. We would like to thank a previous winner of our future stars programs, PunchCard, for allowing us to use their application as the future stars alley “passport”.

The voting was extremely tight but four companies emerged as finalists. The actual session featured 7 four minute pitch-style presentations, commentary from industry expert, Rick Blair, and free beer for the guests and attendees.

It was a great time and CIAmedia emerged as the winner, based on audience votes. They get bragging rights, a nice trophy, free registration to an upcoming BIA/Kelsey preference and one hour of BIA/Kelsey analyst time for strategy development and positioning.

Special thanks to all competitors (listed below), our special guest judge, Rick Blair and voters. It was a lot of fun and we’ll continue to do it at each conference. Your feedback is also encouraged for how we improve it. We hope to see you in the audience (or on stage) for future competitions.

Winner
CIAmedia

Runners up
Place Full

SpinGo

Sharetown

Field of competitors

Moment Social

Perfect Audience

WhoDoYou

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Local search has taken off in multiple directions, driving commerce and engagement for merchants via enhances listings, maps, video, and even store inventory. At BIA/Kelsey‘s Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media Conference held this week in San Francisco, a panel of experts in the local search area were brought together to discuss the cutting edge in search issues and techniques.

As always with local search, content was a hot topic. “I love when people say content is hard because really it is so easy” says Will Scott, CEO of Search Influence. Getting SMB’s to put all of their content online is often a struggle but social media is a great way to get content out there, according to Scott. Azim Tejani, Chief Revenue Officer of YaSabe, discussed how they “encourage users and others to answer questions that come from the community.” By commenting they access content that is “not very social.”

When it comes to the future of local search, tackling the international market is where GoDaddy is headed according to Raj Nijjer, Sr. Director, Product Management. “It is a huge opportunity and a huge market”. Gideon Rubin, CMO Local Market Launch sees things a little differently. He is looking back to the fundamentals. “We still need to participate in the fundamental activities, the market is still small so we still need to participate in the fundamentals.”

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Small businesses are more interested in social today. The challenge is finding the right mix of content and advertising, do it yourself and managed service, that maximizes the opportunity for local businesses.

A panel today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference, “Social-Local: Boosting Sales and Engagement,” took a whack at these questions. The session featured Joel Hughes, SVP, Strategy and Emerging Businesses, Constant Contact, and Chris Marentis, CEO, SureFire Social.

Hughes: Constant Contact is a big name in the SMB space — millions of very small businesses use their low cost email marketing services. The company is following its customers into social media marketing, and feels it is getting a grip on the right mix of services to drive results.

“Email marketing is something SMBs have traditionally understood,” Highest said. “Social media has become a very hot area for small businesses.”

ConstantContact has spent much of this year testing a “recipe” for small business social marketing success. The recipe that is emerging is a combination of content (postings) plus ads and campaigns in different combinations.

“SMBs want do it for me (DIFM). Getting them started is a big piece. Many will start with DIFM, and move to DIY (do it yourself). Others will want to maintain outsourcing.”

Marentis: Marentis’ company is focused on the national-local opportunity, helping national marketers engage with local customers through franchise or dealer networks.

“We like to focus on idea of working with national businesses have an opportunity to harness the power of independent businesses they rely on for volume (franchisees, dealers, etc.),” Marentis said. “This requires integrating services, and that is more than a dashboard.”

Marentis offered a case study, Gutter Helmet, a company that offers gutter protection services (which he concedes is about as boring a category as they come). He said the company was able to drive down its cost per lead substantially using an integrated program that included content marketing.

“They were paying $90 a lead (driven mostly by PPC),” Marentis said. “Now paying $20 a lead, and organic is driving more than 55 percent of their site traffic.”

He said businesses need to begin understanding that content marketing is not a cost, but an investment. And measuring and attributing results is key to that education process.

“The key is measurement, so you can show them what they are getting out of it.”

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The keys to any sales person being effective using LinkedIn are finding the right people with the right connections, leading with insights that are valuable to your target audience, and being able to leverage relationships to lead you to decision makers or other prospects. “There are on average 5.6 decision makers in most organizations and it is important to understand who those people are to be the most effective,” says Koka.

When advising sales teams on effectively using social media sites like LinkedIn, Koka recommends:

1. Build your profile to showcase your skills, insights and experience to build your reputation
2. Develop your network with people who can help you achieve your goals
3. Gather insights that are important to your audience and targets
4. Contribute your insights in meaningful ways within groups and forums

Sales people and sales teams need to understand that buyers are researching sales people and companies before ever allowing them to make a one-on-one connection. Sales people who position themselves as experts, who provide solutions from solid companies, are ultimately more successful than their counterparts who ignore the value of social selling.

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