Fifty plus industry leaders will grace the stage at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. We’re looking forward to a great show. Want to do some research before the event? Here’s some recent BIA/Kelsey blog coverage of the featured speakers (Click on the hyperlinks).

Acxiom: Scott Howe, CEO (Keynote, Day 2)

Alignable: Eric Groves, CEO (Future Stars, Day 2)

Booker: Josh McCarter, CEO (Scheduling ,Day 2)

Facebook: Joe DeVoy, Product Manager, Local Ads, Facebook (Social Media Shift, Day 2)

First Data/Perka: Mike Lazarro, Head of Planning (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

ForwardLine: Craig Coleman, CEO (Cultivating SMB Success, Day 2)

Groupon: Dan Roarty, VP, Product Development (Keynote, Day 2)

Local Media Association: Nancy Lane, President (Local Media Heavy Hitters, Day 3)

Radius: Megan Austin Karlen, VP (Smart Data, Day 2)

ReachLocal: Sharon Rowlands,CEO, (Keynote, Day 2)

SignPost: Stu Wall, CEO (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

Verve: Tom Kenney, President (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

Wanderful Media: Doug Kilponen, COO (SMB Retail, Day 2)

Yelp: Darnell Holloway, Sr. Mgr., Community Outreach (SMBs On Stage with Yelp, Day 1); Peter Curzon, Business Development ( Brass Tracks Mobile, Day 2)

YP: Jeff Federman, SVP, Digital (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

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What should SMB retailers do to level the playing field with larger regional and national retailers? There are no easy answers, but they should really focus on mobile and geo location targeting, says Wanderful Media COO Doug Kilponen. Search has major limitations for them.

“In the old days, you could create free traffic from Google and the like. But SEO is dead for small retailers,” says Kilponen, previously CMO at Merchant Circle. “It’s been taken up by the Amazons and Google of the world. If you do a search term on products, it is a black hole. You can rarely find a way out.”

Mobile, however, represents “new opportunity” for SMBs — albeit one that is misunderstood. “For small retailers, it is still about foot traffic,” says Kilponen. That means they should tap into location based services; engage local friends via social media; post products in certain categories; and target uses via promotions. Mobile SMB platforms such as Wanderful’s Find&Save Storefront provides “a stronger ROI than what we’ve seen in search,” he adds.

Kilponen is speaking on SMB retail at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. You can register here.

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When it comes to search, promotion, customer engagement and just getting found, the challenge for smaller retailers is to level the playing field with larger players (i.e. Macy’s, Kohl’s, Sears). That’s the idea behind Wanderful Media‘s new Find&Save Storefront, an App that allows SMB retailers to promote sales goods, seasonal collections and other items. Several hundred retailers have downloaded the App, which is in soft launch in several test markets. A major launch is planned for October.

The Storefront is an extension of Wanderful Media’s current mission with its Find&Save brand, which currently focuses on large retailer and brand sales “circular” information, which are distributed to about 500 newspaper sites around the U.S. on FindnSave.com and apps for iOS and Android devices.

The new effort marks the second time that Wanderful has tried to serve SMB retailers. Earlier iterations of Find&Save included ads from SMB stores. These were removed from the site’s relaunch in April 2013, however, because they were not really on par, aesthetically, with the larger retailer ads.

The Storefront App, which we found easy to use, enables SMBs to automatically claim locations by their phone number. Once their site and location have been claimed, they can tie geo-sensitive promotional offers or other verbiage to pictures of items they can take with a smart phone. SMB retailers can create as many offers or sales events as they want.

Find&Save Storefront is free to download and use, except for an “Evergreen credit” feature, which enables retailers to promote products beyond the 30 day free period for 99 cents each. Other premium products will also likely be introduced. Features that are being used for Storefront may also be borrowed for other Wanderful apps, such as its sophisticated dashboards for the business and its local peers.

VP of Product Grace Chan told us that Wanderful is poised to serve consumers and three distinct customer groups: “national retailers,” “regional retailers” and local “SMB retailers.” The SMB portion is especially relevant to the company because it has local sales forces set to hit the streets via its local newspaper affiliates.

At the same time, however, Chan notes that SMB needs “may not be exactly the same” as those of regional and national retailers and brands. Local business owners, for instance, pay less attention to brand exposure. They mostly want to drive traffic to the store. They may be less interested in issuing coupons or discounts on a constant basis.

“These merchants like to make ‘offers’ to drive store traffic, not coupons,” said Chan. Or they might simply use the site to introduce a new collection of clothes, or focus on clearance goods. “‘Coupons’ make them think they are leaving money on the table,” she says.

Placing items on the App also takes some planning on the part of SMB retailers. It takes just eight seconds to build an offer, says Chan, but many SMBs aren’t ready to sit down and do that. That’s an area that requires more attention from SMBs, she says.

Wanderful Media COO Doug Kilponen is a featured speaker at BIA/Kelsey’s SMB Digital Marketing conference Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. You may register here.

The post Wanderful Media Targets SMB Retailers with ‘Find&Save Storefront’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

When it comes to search, promotion, customer engagement and just getting found, the challenge for smaller retailers is to level the playing field with larger players (i.e. Macy’s, Kohl’s, Sears). That’s the idea behind Wanderful Media‘s new Find&Save Storefront, an App that allows SMB retailers to promote sales goods, seasonal collections and other items. Several hundred retailers have downloaded the App, which is in soft launch in several test markets. A major launch is planned for October.

The Storefront is an extension of Wanderful Media’s current mission with its Find&Save brand, which currently focuses on large retailer and brand sales ?circular” information, which are distributed to about 500 newspaper sites around the U.S. on FindnSave.com and apps for iOS and Android devices.

The new effort marks the second time that Wanderful has tried to serve SMB retailers. Earlier iterations of Find&Save included ads from SMB stores. These were removed from the site’s relaunch in April 2013, however, because they were not really on par, aesthetically, with the larger retailer ads.

The Storefront App, which we found easy to use, enables SMBs to automatically claim locations by their phone number. Once their site and location have been claimed, they can tie geo-sensitive promotional offers or other verbiage to pictures of items they can take with a smart phone. SMB retailers can create as many offers or sales events as they want.

Find&Save Storefront is free to download and use, except for an “Evergreen credit” feature, which enables retailers to promote products beyond the 30 day free period for 99 cents each. Other premium products will also likely be introduced. Features that are being used for Storefront may also be borrowed for other Wanderful apps, such as its sophisticated dashboards for the business and its local peers.

VP of Product Grace Chan told us that Wanderful is poised to serve consumers and three distinct customer groups: ?national retailers,” ?regional retailers” and local ?SMB retailers.” The SMB portion is especially relevant to the company because it has local sales forces set to hit the streets via its local newspaper affiliates.

At the same time, however, Chan notes that SMB needs “may not be exactly the same” as those of regional and national retailers and brands. Local business owners, for instance, pay less attention to brand exposure. They mostly want to drive traffic to the store. They may be less interested in issuing coupons or discounts on a constant basis.

?These merchants like to make ‘offers’ to drive store traffic, not coupons,” said Chan. Or they might simply use the site to introduce a new collection of clothes, or focus on clearance goods. “‘Coupons’ make them think they are leaving money on the table,” she says.

Placing items on the App also takes some planning on the part of SMB retailers. It takes just eight seconds to build an offer, says Chan, but many SMBs aren’t ready to sit down and do that. That’s an area that requires more attention from SMBs, she says.

Wanderful Media COO Doug Kilponen is a featured speaker at BIA/Kelsey’s SMB Digital Marketing conference Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. You may register here.

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On the heels of last year’s LEADING IN LOCAL: SMB Digital Marketing show in Austin, we’ve just announced our agenda for this year’s big event in “The Big Easy”: New Orleans.

Our initial slate of Keynotes include:

Acxiom CEO Scott Howe;
ReachLocal CEO Sharon Rowlands
Google’s SMB Revenue director Steve Espinosa
Facebook’s Leader of SMB/Product Insights Joe Devoy

Additional Featured Speakers:

Sprint’s Karen Noel, GM, Small Business
Groupon’s Dan Roarty, VP of Product Marketing

Also at the event: Search marketing leader Kevin Ryan. Ryan will be debuting his new business best seller, “Taking Down Goliath: The Digital Marketing Strategy Guide for beating competitors with 100 times your spending power.”

More great speakers (We’ll end up with 40 or more):

Yelp’s Darnell Holloway, Sr. Manager, Local Business Outreach
NOLA Media Group’s Ricky Mathews, President
Morris Communications’ Steve Gray, Director of Strategy and Innovation
The Houston Chronicle’s Warren Kay, CRO
ForwardLine’s Craig Coleman, CEO
Search Influence’s Will Scott, CEO
BizHive’s Kim Feil, CEO
Wanderful Media’s Doug Kilponen, COO
Perka’s Rob Bethage, Co-Founder and VP
Booker’s Josh McCarter, CEO
Agendize’s Alf Poor, President

Will we see you down in New Orleans? Check out the full agenda here. And please register here.

The post Just Out: Hot Agenda For LIL: SMB Digital Marketing (Sept. 22-24, New Orleans) appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Wanderful Media, which has been tasked by the newspaper industry to remake the circular industry in the mobile social era. has raised a new round of $14.5 Million. Altogether, the company has raised $50.5 Million since its September 2012 launch.

The company is primarily known for Find&Save, which relaunched one year ago. It now serves 500 affiliate sites, including all Top 50 DMAs. Find&Save provides geo-targeted distribution of offers for 375 retailers and 150,000 retail locations. While iPhone and iPad apps have been Find&Save’s initial focus, an Android version was launched today.

Speaking at the Local Search Association meeting today in Huntington Beach, CA, CEO Ben Smith said the company is set to put the new money to work. Upwards of $10 million will be committed this year to app distribution and “making sure people are installing our apps,” he said.

“It’s much like managing your SEO — it’s not trivial and requires significant investment,” said Smith. He added that mobile customers typically only use 10 apps on a frequent basis. “The better way to approach mobile is to consider geo/location data as a way to augment and craft customized marketing messages,” he said.

Facebook integration is also key to “tying it all together,” added Smith. “We get the geo/location data from the mobile app — but Facebook provides the demographic context required to make the data acquired by Wanderful actionable.”

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In prepping for our Leading in Local conference in Atlanta in three weeks, I’m revisiting the ways that large national advertisers are localizing their mobile campaigns. As we discussed in our fresh forecast release, large brand advertisers comprise the majority of U.S. mobile ad spend (for now…).

Another preview of Atlanta sessions comes from the “National-Local” session we did at our last conference in San Francisco in December. There I interviewed the Weather Company and Wanderful Media about their strategies to help large brand advertisers localize mobile efforts.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Weather Company session (formerly The Weather Channel), including the full session video. Now it’s time to spotlight the Wanderful media segment. CEO Ben Smith and I drilled down into mobile local shopping and the app strategies behind Find & Save.

The video is below, and we’ll carry on the discussion in Atlanta in three weeks. Email me for a discount code to register (mbolandATbiakelsey). I’ll also be doing a webinar with Mobile Marketer next week that hits on the Push Alert topic that Ben Smith and I discuss around the 15 minute mark.

The post Leading in Local Video: Mobile at the Heart of the National Impact appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

For the last month or so, I’ve been playing with the developer build of Wanderful Media’s Find & Save iPhone app. Today the app launched, just in time for the barrage of shopping holidays that the online and retail worlds continue to seemingly invent (Home Appliance Tuesday!).

In seriousness, the app addresses a unique use case at the intersection of local product search and deals. There are a handful of apps in this category each with different combinations of features. Find & Save differentiates on search & browse usability and depth of local shopping content.

The latter comes from Wanderful’s longstanding position of distributing circular content. This gives the company a comprehensive user experience, rather than the “cold start” challenge of many local shopping apps. And if we need to say it again, data will make or break mobile shopping.

Oft-underrated push-alert functionality is also included — key for the mobile use case developing around location based discovery. That will be pushed forward (no pun) in local shopping by things like iBeacon and Google Glass. Until then,push alerts are key (see Valpak app).

The free app joins Find & Save’s iPad app with a similar feature set, but more tailored for on the go use (Read: higher buying intent). There are also lots of personalization features to save items or retailers, in order to be alerted later when nearby…back to push alerts.

More on the feature set can be seen in the bullets below provided in today’s release. You can also download the iOS app in the App Store.

–All sales nearby. Shoppers will receive a list of all nearby stores with their latest sales based on up-to-date retail circulars and their current location. The app provides a map view of stores in the area and details like phone number, address and directions.

— Browse weekly ads. Whether they are browsing through the latest holiday circular while in the store, or checking out weekly ads of stores nearby, shoppers can browse sales across all retailers in one app.

— One shopping list across all devices. Instead of carrying around a bundle of circulars, or having to multiple lists scattered around a purse, Find&Save for iPhone brings the shopping list to the back pocket. Shoppers can access, create and/or edit the same shopping list on FindnSave.com, Find&Save for iPad, and Find&Save for iPhone.

— New sale alerts. Shoppers can follow their favorite stores and opt-in to get notified whenever there’s a sale.

— Share deals with friends. Whether shopping alone or with friends, the app comes in handy for shoppers who want to quickly share finds via text or email.

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Wanderful Media will use Goodzer‘s local retail inventory data to support its recently relaunched Find&Save localized shopping platform. Goodzer’s data includes more than 2.5 billion inventory items from more than 500,000 U.S. retail stores.

The newspaper consortium-owned Wanderful Media recently rolled out a retooled version of Find&Save. Wanderful hopes the retooled platform will reinforce ties between the newspapers and the national retailers and brands that have traditionally driven their (estimated) $4 billion circular/insert business.

“The Goodzer relationship arms consumers with shopping intelligence through its local merchandise data, bridging the process of online discovery and the actual sale in a local store,” said Ben T. Smith, IV, CEO of Wanderful Media. “This comes on the heels of the launch of Find&Save, an online community that engages shoppers around local sales and products, with the intent of driving shoppers into local retail stores.”

Goodzer recently launched an API that gives app developers, publishers, mapping/GPS providers, agencies and others the ability to build products around its data.

According to Goodzer, the deal with Wanderful aims to produce a more robust online/mobile version of the “discover shopping” user experience of browsing print circulars. Goodzer hopes to power similar experiences through other newspaper partnerships.

The Goodzer product information includes price, store location and product descriptions.

Wanderful Media provides reach into local markets across the nation with Find&Save, which is currently available in 50 of the top 50 DMAs (designated market areas). and presently has access to almost 100 million unique visitors per month throughout its network.

Here is one example of the Find&Save integration with a newspaper partnership, in this case the Washington Post.

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The consortium of 12 major newspaper companies that last year purchased Travidia, a digital circular vendor, has relaunched as Wanderful Media. The consortium, previously known as ShopCo., has committed $22 Million to the venture. It has also introduced a new tablet version of FindnSave.com, a site that launched last year under the old Travidia regime.

FindnSave enables local newspapers to customize a host of promotions – i.e. deals, coupons, sales, classifieds, inventory — as a single presentation. CEO Ben Smith, a cofounder of Merchant Circle, says that FindnSave is the first of many products that the company hopes to launch. The company is working with 239 local media titles, and has a presence in 47 of the Top 50 markets. It hopes to soon reach 600 unique local websites (many brands have multiple sites).

Smith notes that he’s adding new technology and marketing smarts to the company, including 15 Silicon Valley based employees, who will take a “small team” approach to development. The company has 60 employees with the majority working at its production facility in Chico, CA, north of Sacramento.

The new product was developed based on extensive talks with its 42 national retailer clients. The lean back tablet experience of its new app promises to deeply engage its target customers, says Smith. “It is discovery shopping,” supported by the newspaper industry, which he reminds us, continues to grab $4 Billion a year in ad dollars from retailers.

Smith also cites research showing that the circular form factor remains more engaging than search or display ads for retail. Ultimately, he sees his job as updating the form factor and extending the accounts.

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