Now we are wrapping up our Second Edition. Our seven independent judges have just completed their work, and the finalists in three key areas — Innovation, Sales/Revenue and Strategic Use of Digital Marketing — will be highlighted at the start of Day 3 of our Dallas NATIONAL show next week. The finalists include:

Innovation

• “Sears’ Online Social Review Innovation” — Yext
• “Local Video Ad Campaigns Deliver Results for Wendy’s” — Sightly

Sales/Revenue

• “Bill Luke Dealership Increases RAM Truck Sales” — Haystak Digital Marketing

Strategic Use of Digital Marketing

• “Lead Generation & Social Audience Engagement” — G/O Digital
• “PowerChord STIHL Southeast First Watch YouTube” — PowerChord on behalf of STIHL
• “ShopRite Store Opening Promotion via Bucks Happening” — Happenings Media
• “UMB Bank” — Placeable
• “Just Said Yes Campaign” — WeddingWire
• “Inspiring a Mobile Audience to Take Action” — xAd + Goodwill Industries & Ad Council
• “Nationwide Just Say YES — Digital Marketing for Maytag” — Nationwide Marketing Group, Netsertive and Maytag by Whirlpool

Sponsoring the Awards is Where2GetIt, which is one of our leading sources and advisors in NATIONAL, working with over 500 brands. CEO Manish Patel tells us that “The finalists represent the tremendous talent and diversity we are seeing every day in our work with national brands in this incredibly fast-growing space.” Come to the NATIONAL event in Dallas, and cheer ’em on! The top three winners will be announced at the end of the session.

The post GOLOCAL Award Finalists Set for BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL Next Week appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor survey reveals that online search is now the most popular channel choice for local shopping (nearly 57 percent on consumers utilize it in their buying process). The trend is further accelerating as mobile penetration and session activity surge. For instance, 40 percent of consumers who leverage smartphones for local shopping do so once or more per day.

All of this points to the critical need for small-medium businesses (SMBs) to maintain accurate, fresh, engaging and non-duplicated content. Duplicate listings can confuse consumers and harm SEO rank, both of which impair the discoverability and selectability of a merchant.

On Thursday, June 5 at 2 p.m. eastern, Yext’s Christian Ward and Local SEO Guide’s Andrew Shotland join me for a free webinar examining the duplicates problem and proposing solutions and best practices for overcoming it. BIA/Kelsey will also share findings from its Local Commerce Monitor and Consumer Commerce Monitor studies that identify key disconnects between consumer shopping trends and SMB advertising/promotions habits, which are exacerbated by duplicates.

Also, attendees can access the new whitepaper from Yext – “The Definitive Guide to Duplicate Listings.” Register for the free webinar here.

The post Upcoming BIA/Kelsey & Yext Webinar: Solving the Duplicate Listings Problem appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor survey reveals that online search is now the most popular channel choice for local shopping (nearly 57 percent on consumers utilize it in their buying process). The trend is further accelerating as mobile penetration and session activity surge. For instance, 40 percent of consumers who leverage smartphones for local shopping do so once or more per day.

All of this points to the critical need for small-medium businesses (SMBs) to maintain accurate, fresh, engaging and non-duplicated content. Duplicate listings can confuse consumers and harm SEO rank, both of which impair the discoverability and selectability of a merchant.

On Thursday, June 5 at 2 p.m. eastern, Yext’s Christian Ward and Local SEO Guide’s Andrew Shotland join me for a free webinar examining the duplicates problem and proposing solutions and best practices for overcoming it. BIA/Kelsey will also share findings from its Local Commerce Monitor and Consumer Commerce Monitor studies that identify key disconnects between consumer shopping trends and SMB advertising/promotions habits, which are exacerbated by duplicates.

Also, attendees can access the new whitepaper from Yext – “The Definitive Guide to Duplicate Listings.” Register for the free webinar here.

The post Upcoming BIA/Kelsey & Yext Webinar: Solving the Duplicate Listings Problem appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Content marketing has been around a while among SMBs in analog form — after all direct mail, product catalogs and brochures are all about using rich content to promote a business and drive sales. The growth of the Internet, and in particular social media, as a marketing channel, has elevated content marketing to greater importance. This has led to a new paradigm for how SMBs build their brands and reputations, and how they get discovered by potential customers.

BIA/Kelsey Senior Director of Industry Strategy and Insight Abid Chaudhry has written our next Leading in Local Insight Paper, “Content Marketing: the New SMB Paradigm.” In the paper, Chaudhry outlines the case for content marketing — it derives from changing consumer purchase behavior. He also describes the new ecosystems that has emerged to create and distribute original SMB content.

The following is a brief excerpt from the upcoming Insight Paper:

Managing content online has become a critical component for SMBs — the value conveyed from a robust content program reaches beyond exposure to apply value to discovery, customer engagement, and performance across all digital channels. Increasingly, content marketing tactics like social media posts or blog entries can prompt engagement with potential customers, creating new opportunities for SMBs with a minimal amount of effort.

As engagement and usage of the Internet and mobile web continues to increase, consumer taste and expectations have also evolved. Consumers are increasingly becoming accustomed to rich, targeted and contextual advertising and marketing experiences. While brand and agency advertisers have been able to respond to this new paradigm quickly, SMBs are finding that a lack of fresh content and relevancy can cost them.

Increasingly SMBs are applying greater value to lead sources derived from content marketing based sources, and this trend is likely to continue as the gap between traditional and digital advertising acceptance narrows.

Watch the Local Media Watch blog for more excepts from “Content Marketing: The New SMB Paradigm” leading up to its publication in mid-April.

Also, check out this clip from a recent BIA/Kelsey Analyst Roundtable, where Chaudhry talks about the big ideas driving SMB content marketing.

Request a briefing for more information on BIA/Kelsey research and insight.

The post A Look Ahead at “Content Marketing — The New SMB Paradigm” appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Content marketing has been around a while among SMBs in analog form — after all direct mail, product catalogs and brochures are all about using rich content to promote a business and drive sales. The growth of the Internet, and in particular social media, as a marketing channel, has elevated content marketing to greater importance. This has led to a new paradigm for how SMBs build their brands and reputations, and how they get discovered by potential customers.

BIA/Kelsey Senior Director of Industry Strategy and Insight Abid Chaudhry has written our next Leading in Local Insight Paper, “Content Marketing: the New SMB Paradigm.” In the paper, Chaudhry outlines the case for content marketing — it derives from changing consumer purchase behavior. He also describes the new ecosystems that has emerged to create and distribute original SMB content.

The following is a brief excerpt from the upcoming Insight Paper:

Managing content online has become a critical component for SMBs — the value conveyed from a robust content program reaches beyond exposure to apply value to discovery, customer engagement, and performance across all digital channels. Increasingly, content marketing tactics like social media posts or blog entries can prompt engagement with potential customers, creating new opportunities for SMBs with a minimal amount of effort.

As engagement and usage of the Internet and mobile web continues to increase, consumer taste and expectations have also evolved. Consumers are increasingly becoming accustomed to rich, targeted and contextual advertising and marketing experiences. While brand and agency advertisers have been able to respond to this new paradigm quickly, SMBs are finding that a lack of fresh content and relevancy can cost them.

Increasingly SMBs are applying greater value to lead sources derived from content marketing based sources, and this trend is likely to continue as the gap between traditional and digital advertising acceptance narrows.

Watch the Local Media Watch blog for more excepts from “Content Marketing: The New SMB Paradigm” leading up to its publication in mid-April.

Also, check out this clip from a recent BIA/Kelsey Analyst Roundtable, where Chaudhry talks about the big ideas driving SMB content marketing.

Request a briefing for more information on BIA/Kelsey research and insight.

The post A Look Ahead at "Content Marketing — The New SMB Paradigm" appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

One of the most promising concepts in local are “Write Once, Publish Everywhere” platforms for SMBs. With local businesses needing to communicate more and more deals, new features and special events to their customers, it makes sense to get them on a network to reach more people with one effort.

Yext and Google’s “tag” networks really got the concept going. These enabled an SMB to self-serve a promotion (“$2.00 off tonight”) throughout a network. The tech has since been applied to a wide variety of networked features, including photos, videos and menus — all wrapped in a suite of marketing services.

They’ve also been applied to mobile, which enables more “on the go” activity. Constant Contact’s $65 Million + acquisition of SinglePlatform in June was a strong validation of the space.

The services are terrific, but they haven’t been an instant hit. Pricing has been tough. Is it worth $30 a month? $100 a month? Or should it be bundled in for free? So has the challenge of getting SMBs to pay for one more “value added” service.

Last week, we talked to MeNetwork, one of the more established contenders in the emerging space. The company is based in Boulder, CO and was started in 2010 by banking, technology and ad agency vets.

MeNetwork sees itself as an SMB promotion platform that provides a comprehensive set of “write once, publish everywhere” services. One of its differentiators is that it is pushing a dedicated MeNetwork mobile app in addition to white-labeling its services with strategic partners. It’s risky, but potentially rewarding.

The company also enables easy point-of-sale redemption of offers via QR codes and Bar codes (with compatible POS devices) — something that will make increasing sense as more smart phones are plugged in, asserts COO/CTO Craig Page.

While the service helps manage and process promotions for its customers, it is also mindful that many of them already work with loyalty programs. MeNetwork seamlessly integrates with them, says Page. The aspiration is for MeNework to become the central hub for all of its customers’ promotional activities.

Pricing has been set at $500 a year (approximately $41 a month). Sales channels include self-serve, local media and vertical partners as well as convention bureaus and downtown associations.

Visitors bureaus in New Orleans, San Francisco, and Austin are already actively selling. The New Orleans center sold 200-300 SMBs off the bat, says Page. The company is also working internationally with a division of European Directories in Austria.

Working with outside sales sometimes produces higher than expected churn, and MeNetwork initially saw annual churn rates at 52 percent (actually, pretty low in this area). Churn rates have fallen to 12 percent however, as the company worked to train its reps to provide comprehensive and consistent customer care.

The post MeNetwork Aims at the One Stop Mobile Marketing Platform for SMBs appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Our audience might be upset that Jed’s Burgers, a fictitious business set up for the Yext PowerListings demo isn’t real. What may be more upsetting is the fact that 20 percent of local searches will return the wrong information. Lerman is passionate about preventing this problem and his enthusiasm for Yext’s new PowerListings was clear at the final afternoon session, “Yext: PowerListings Across Platforms.”

So what’s the best way to get accurate and timely SMB info out there for end users? Go to the business itself. That’s the central idea behind PowerListings, which enables businesses to update their info against 24 partner sites.

“This system is about speed and control,” Lerman said.

The post ILM West: What’s the 411 for SMBs? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

If you’re a publisher, Yext CEO Howard Lerman wants to share his plumbing with you. Not literally, but in the “presence product” marketplace, where Yext will soon open up its Tags platform to enable participating publishers to create their own to-market tags offering. This is done by leveraging Yext’s API (i.e., “the plumbing”).

Lerman’s enthusiasm for tags is as transparent as the API that he’s now allowing publishers to leverage. Since launching Tags two months ago, Yext has enrolled more than 1,000 paying subscribers with simple, flat-rate pricing.

Merchant tags (special offers) are created in a blink, populate a dozen premium publisher sites (Yelp, Citysearch, Superpages.com, etc.), boost search rankings, and can be changed in real time. This is step one in Lerman’s master merchant vision: allowing locals to disseminate relevant information instantly.

He’s even willing to work with Google, which to date has been unwilling to work with him. Very willing, in fact. Lerman spent much of his ILM East address highlighting the powerful impact that Google Tags are having on the overall marketplace … for local advertisers and sellers alike.

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As my colleague Jed Williams has previously written, Yext’s Tags initiative is a big one, going up against Google Places with a broad (and “open”) network of 20 participating Internet Yellow Pages and online directory sites, including AOL’s MapQuest and Patch, Citysearch, Superpages, Yahoo and Yellowbook.

Yext CEO Howard Lerman describes Tags as “full-time, real listing information” that will eventually go beyond simply updating text promotions. Future versions will also include deals and photos. “You can do a lot of things,” says Lerman.

All these things require businesses to take it into their own hands to update the tags. It won’t be a problem once SMBs see how easy it is to do, says Lerman. “It is a myth that SMBs won’t self-service.”

As for pricing, Lerman explains that the $99 monthly fee has been designed to be split between Yext, as the host, and participating publishers. The fee, of course, is considerably higher than Google Tags, which are priced at $25 a month. Lerman believes they are being deliberately under-priced in order to position an upsell with Google Boost.

But the network reach will be greater, and the ease of adding new publishers easily justifies the fee. If Google wanted to join the Tag network, all the merrier, says Lerman.

Meanwhile, the royalty share for publishers is based on “a complex model of usage,” with three tiers. A well-used Citysearch tag, for instance, might be in the first tier, while some smaller affiliates might be receiving third-tier revenues. Any publisher that brings in the advertiser will also get a chunk of Yext’s host fee, adds Lerman.

For Yext, Lerman emphasizes that the tag initiative is an especially important one. The company’s business today is largely based on pay-per-call services, which remain robust, he says. But revenues from tags should surpass pay per call “within six months.”

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The conference will kick off on Tuesday, Sept. 14, with a keynote address from Yext CEO Howard Lerman. Yext launched Yext Rep in May and announced a co-branded deal to offer its solution toSuperMedia advertisers in June. Lerman will likely discuss Yext Rep as well as his overall vision for how leads are driven to SMBs in the near future.

Mid-afternoon Tuesday, we’ll have a panel dedicated to the topic of reputation management with representatives from three leading reputation management players on hand: Moon Valley Software, Solfo/YellowBot.com and VendAsta. They’ll enter a discussion with BIA/Kelsey moderator Matt Booth, who will pepper them with questions about how they convince media players (i.e., directory publishers) that they need to provide their SMB advertisers with a tool to monitor, respond to and/or update their presence, reviews and performance online.

Brendan King of VendAsta will talk about its StepRep product, which has been around since 2008 and features some cool social graph tools. Emad Fanous will talk about YellowBot’s success with its Weblocal.ca rollout that occurred in March. One of the newer kids on the block is Moon Valley Software’s MyRepMan product that officially debuted in May. Pete Ryan will be on stage to talk about how MyRepMan, which MoonValley co-markets with partner Acxiom, adds functionality such as a scoring tool and syndication model (on top of basic monitoring of reviews, blogs, listings data and the like) to help track SMBs’ progress online.

These very short presentations will lead to a discussion where the tough questions about reputation management will be put to the panelists. If you’re looking for a better understanding of what rep management is, and whether it’s a genuine opportunity for companies selling marketing services to SMBs, make sure you make this 3:45 p.m. panel on Tuesday, Sept. 14.

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