Increased investment, a bullseye on customer acquisition, yet unconvincing results. These are the core themes emerging from Manta’s recently-released Q1 SMB Wellness Index, a survey of small business owners focused on social media. They are the very themes called out in BIA/Kelsey’s LCM 16 SMB research. SMBs continue to pour more time and energy into …

Significant news in the online presence/reputation management space came across the wire at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference last week in Boston, as VendAsta announced $8.25 million in Series B funding to accelerate the company’s holistic identity/reputation/social management solution.
In just over two years, it has established a deep network of local publishers (Cox Media Group, …

Tuesday at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local Conference, HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan emphasized that the local marketing game has changed – dramatically, secularly. Traditional “push” marketing techniques (usually requiring large budgets) no longer resonate with many consumers. Rather, small/medium businesses must be nimble and creative, qualities at the foundation of the company’s inbound marketing approach.
“It’s much …

Today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference, CBS Radio President and CEO Dan Mason underscored radio’s sustaining power as a megaphone and community connector, while also discussing its role in the fragmented digital audio ecosystem.
CBS has moved aggressively into digital with local sites that aggregate radio and TV content. It fields a national editorial staff, …

Traditional media is in the throes of transformation, seeking to diversify beyond legacy models and serve customers with an array of new products and services. At BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference, Gannett Digital Marketing Services President and CEO Vikram Sharma reintroduced the monolith as something much more – a full-fledged “digital marketing services company” buttressed …

Today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference, Hill Holiday EVP and Chief Media Officer Cindy Stockwell gave a street-level view of the opportunities and challenges confronting brands as they seek to localize their advertising/marketing. While there are voluminous channel and platform choices, Stockwell stressed three universal precepts: “add value to consumers in whatever channel they …

Declaring that deals have officially “jumped the shark” could well be an overstatement, considering that revenues are still on the uptick (BIA/Kelsey forecasts that the U.S. market will grow to $5.5 billion by 2016) and hundreds of companies continue to invest in the channel. However, the broad deals market is clearly evolving and segmenting in …

BIA/Kelsey Senior Analyst Mike Boland began the ILM West mobile superforum by sizing the magnitude of the mobile-local advertising opportunity (while also noting its current shortcomings): $5.8 billion by 2016, or 58 percent of the total mobile market.
Much of the early mobile ad trial that carries the hope of driving higher premiums (and thereby closing …

BIA/Kelsey forecasts digital advertising/marketing to grow to about 25 percent of the local ad spending pie next year. This growth puts companies on the hook to develop integrated marketing strategies that connect the entire purchase funnel to drive revenue, a very difficult task.
On Wednesday, Nov. 14th, BIA/Kelsey and Balihoo held a Webinar on this very …

As many in our  interactive local media community can attest, the pace of change and disruption in social media is dizzying. New networks, native ads, SoLoMo, social commerce…we could go on for days.
At BIA/Kelsey’s ILM West 2012 conference in L.A. Dec. 4-6, we’re placing a major focus on social media business models. The headliner is …

Among the many headlines that emerged from SMB Digital Marketing 2012 (CRM, digital loyalty, performance marketing), one that caught the attention of most in the room was the research return that social ROI is shifting dramatically toward customer acquisition. In fact, BIA/Kelsey’s LCM 16 survey highlights suggest that 42 percent of SMBs now turn to …

The “Making Sense of Mobile Advertising for SMBs” panel at SMB Digital Marketing 2012 was aptly named, as the mobile needs of small businesses vary widely by category and level of sophistication, among other dynamics. Dick Larkin (VP, American Marketing & Publishing), Mary Beth Brendza (CEO, App Express) and Henry Tam (VP Self-Serve Advertising, Millenial …

The success of the deals space and emergence of big data has opened the door to transactional marketing that drives new revenue for businesses. Key revenue streams are emerging such as monthly/annual fees, commissions for loyalty business, bounties for new customers and mark-ups on transactional fees. Major tech players and VCs …

The opening day of BIA/Kelsey’s SMB Digital Marketing conference provided a stark reminder of the persistent challenges in reaching local businesses. Groupon VP of Global Merchant Marketing Sanjay Gupta offered a different view – a reality check of the assumed reality checks. Call it the “what SMBs think vs. what they do” dynamic. As just one …

Facebook investor and press events have become spectacles unto themselves, where distilling signal from noise is a tricky task. But that’s what we’ll flesh out here in the aftermath of the company’s first earnings call post-IPO…a call that featured an appearance from Mark Zuckerberg, nothing overly substantive from Facebook execs and persistent questions about the …

Though BIA/Kelsey’s LCM 15 survey suggests that SMBs are still sluggish to adopt mobile websites (fewer than 10 percent) or other forms of mobile marketing, we believe mobile momentum will finally accelerate as business owners’ personal comfort with the device grows. Manta’s Q2 SMB Wellness Index, which reveals that proprietors use their mobile phones frequently for …

For traditional media companies with legacy businesses to harvest, mobile platforms offer a critical opportunity to forward-shift toward tangible growth. At MLM SF, digital media executives and vendor partners shared a variety of actionable mobile successes that indicate that, at long last, mobile’s time has arrived.
Media can deploy effective mobile solutions to clients big and …

The “why” of SMBs going mobile is well-established. The “how” is murkier, and served as the fulcrum of a “best practices in product development” roundtable at MLM SF, with mobile developers taking different tacks in how to onboard and optimize local businesses.
MoFuse CEO Annette Tonti emphasized that they approach the market “with the belief that …

As mobile usage reaches ubiquity and revenue generation becomes the much-debated next frontier, Pandora finds itself at the nexus of this movement — rapidly accelerating its mobile usage while iterating on its ad platform to monetize that base at a similar pace. At MLM SF, VP of Audio Sales Doug Sterne noted that the company …

In the run-up to Facebook’s ballyhooed IPO, BIA/Kelsey has released Wave III of its U.S. Social Media Advertising Forecast, which reveals overall market acceleration in 2012 and 2013, and steady growth in locally targeted social spend.
From 2011 to 2016, U.S. social ad revenues will climb from $3.8 billion to $9.8 billion (21 percent CAGR). Several …