Act Like a Local – Enterprise Advertiser Wins

Your investments in branding and national advertising will only be impactful if customers can consistently find you online and at your doorstep.  Too often brand campaigns result in missed opportunities, frustrated customers and lost trust in the brand because of bad location data and missing information.  To compete successfully in local markets—and to avoid wasting marketing resources—national advertisers must adapt their digital marketing strategies to better align with consumer search behaviors, emerging geo-location technologies and competitive imperatives.

While consumers do seek opinions on brands from friends, family or reviews, when they want a specific product, page or brand web site they use natural search.  In fact, according to Forester Research, more than half of all consumers use natural search when they are looking for a product, service or brand.

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Accepting the BIAKelsey GOLOCAL Award

go-local-logo-agendaThis past week, at The BIAKelsey Leading in Local conference in Atlanta, Kelsey distributed its new GOLOCAL awards in three categories – Sales/ Revenue, Innovation and Strategic use of digital marketing.  Nearly forty entrants were considered for these three categories and three finalists in each category were brought to Atlanta for the announcement of the winners.

Placeable was a finalist in the Strategic use of digital marketing for the successful partnership with AAA CarolinasHeather Mcbrien of AAA Carolinas and I represented the team and I presented an overview of what we had accomplished together to the audience, which included empowering AAA Carolinas to emerge as a fierce competitor in their local markets across all three of their primary business units (car care, travel and insurance).  These results included:

  • Indexing some 1200 authoritative local landing pages for 230 locations
  • Generating 800% increase in organic traffic
  • Producing 35K new visitors per month
  • 25% conversion rate on all unique visits to phone calls, registrations and appointments

Included in Heather’s description of some of the softer benefits that have been generated by our campaigns together was that of the decrease in the number of tire kickers that have been generated.  Specifically, Heather described that the quality of leads generated are now far more qualified and in active transaction mode as opposed to window-shopping. Continue reading

5 Leading Indicators of the Future of Local Search

logo041211The local search market is changing. On the buy-side, enterprise advertisers are starting to assert their control, demonstrating that they can leverage large footprints to compete in local with clean distributed data, and accurate claimed citations. Consumers, meanwhile, increasingly want to use their mobile devices for more activities than navigational search, expecting to be able to buy and not only find goods and services nearby.  Read more at: StreetFight Magazine

Unlock the power of location data (part I)

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Location information has the potential to be a powerful strategic asset for digital marketers. Especially for enterprise advertisers with many locations that are trying to compete on the local level.

Web maps, web site store locators and mobile results are strong drivers of consumers to a business location. Accurate location information is obviously essential to the effectiveness of these drivers. Social networks, directories and search engines (i.e., SEO) are also very valuable delivery agents of consumers. Establishing data continuity and maintaining consistency of location information across these channels can make all the difference between a strong consumer brand experience and a sour one. Continue reading

Today LocationInsight became Placeable

Unknown-2Demonstrating that advertisers can and will accomplish more with clean location data that’s accessible, accurate and usable, LocationInsight today unveiled its rebrand as Placeable. This new corporate identity is designed to convey the company’s commitment to making large advertisers “placeable” on search engines, maps, directories, local pages and in the real world. Placeable’s advertisers are far more competitive locally than other large advertisers, because they power their campaigns with accurate, comprehensive, and reliable information about their locations.  Continue reading

Apple and Locationary: The Importance of Location Data

Apple’s acquisition of Locationary is another signal in the rapidly evolving ecosystem around location data.

Maps and location have moved from being a specialized utility to center stage in the multi-billion dollar world of search. The data quality struggles Apple faced when it replaced Google Maps on the iPhone with its own map application were just one high-profile example of the challenges and hard work underway in making the entire location marketing ecosystem work. Continue reading