Companies that are successfully transforming their sales teams to serve a fast changing local and SMB marketplace tend to follow a common set of best practices. These include a focus on customer-driven key performance indicators, a heavy reliance on data to drive all aspects of sales, and sophisticated segmentation to maximize sales effectiveness and manage …

In BIA/Kelsey’s Feb 21st webinar, National Marketers Refining Localization Strategies – A ‘Leading in Local’ Conversation, (available on-demand), the discussion focused on how national brands are increasing their efforts in marketing their products on a local level. Balihoo’s Marketing Director, Susan Tormollen, along with Jed Williams, BIA/Kelsey Senior Analyst, analyzed key findings from a new …

Verve Mobile’s CEO Tom MacIsaac is bullish on local publishers’ ability to drive this revenue growth by selling local audiences not just to local advertisers but also to national brands seeking access to local audiences in a trusted context, through partners like Verve.
The secret sauce is Verve’s ability to deliver quality location-based audiences into a …

Pay for Performance is the Holy Grail in SMB advertising. SMBs only want to pay for leads that their advertising programs deliver. But moving SMBs from inclusion to performance has never been easy. Recent progress in lead quality assessment has been critical in moving performance media closer to the mainstream, as has the movement toward …

The website development firm vSplash is playing in a fertile field with its Buzzboard product, a tool that enables local media salespeople to use the quality of small business digital presence as a starting point for a sales conversation.
The folks at vSplash recently gave us a demo of the tool, which is loaded onto a …

Amazon doesn’t usually speak at industry gatherings. But that was before it needed to reach out to the advertising community to sell display ads on its sites, ads on Kindle, national and local offers on Kindle, and extend its promotional reach on third party sites. Hence a luncheon keynote today from Seth Dallaire, VP of …

In the past 12 months, local radio and television stations have made significant strides to bolster their online activities, and it is generating noticeable revenues.
As will be detailed in BIA/Kelsey’s upcoming Investing In Television® and Investing In Radio® publications, in 2011 local television stations saw a 19.0 percent increase in their online revenues to …

We have been meeting with a number of media salespeople, tracking articles about the transformation of the sales process, developing a number of theories specific to transforming the media sales process plus what is needed to support the transformation. We will be exploring a number of these theories and observations supported by sales rep interviews …

For newspaper publishers and newspaper readers, iPad apps tend to be nice to have but not especially important. Given the choice of rich newspaper apps like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I actually opt for the browser versions over the apps: I can see a lot more at once, they’re updated …

We’ve long known that coupons provide real traction for SMB advertising. Nothing beats a customer walking through the door with a coupon in hand. But a lot of SMB website publishers haven’t really focused on them.
DataSphere, on the other hand, has had a coupons product for some time. But it only recently has really …

The news came over the wires this weekend  that Bob Pittman has been named as the new CEO for radio and outdoor giant Clear Channel Communications. Pittman, who is the opening keynoter at ILM West Dec. 12 in San Francisco, steps up from Chairman, Entertainment and Media Platforms.  Pittman is the first CEO of Clear …

While this news has been out for a little while, we thought it was interesting that a company with powerful TV assets would initiate a deal with a company that provides high-quality, affordable video commercial content for local advertisers. After all, isn’t this what TV has been doing since the ’40s. What gives?
Anyone who’s ever …

BIA/Kelsey moderated a panel on “the Out-of-Home User Experience” (click on image for link to streaming video) at MediaPost’s Digital Out-of-Home Forum (DOOH) in New York. DOOH is the third-fastest growing ad medium after mobile and online video.
Paul Lindstrom, senior VP, Nielsen OnLocation, kicked off the panel with data showing video engagement is about 80 percent …

The San Diego Union-Tribune is buying DiscoverSD. com, a lifestyle website founded in 2006. The acquisition, in the works for six months, was made with an eye toward expanding the UT’s fast growing Daily Deal business arm, which is expected to generate $10 million this year in new revenues.
The merger of the …

In the first of many possible partnerships with local media companies, Centro has teamed up with Morris Digital Works to create a network that allows advertisers to place geo- and vertical- based ads across a broad spectrum of local and national sites. Other local media partners are likely to team with Centro on similar networks. …

SMB reseller WebVisible went through difficult changes last year, downsizing from 320 to 130 employees and retreating from an ambitious direct marketing program. But it has kept core partners intact; key members of the CEO’s installed executive team have stayed intact; and the company has aggressively ramped up its technology program. It is now poised …

Local sales leaders are now jumping into the deal-a-day phenomenon. Yesterday, Citysearch said it would push deals hard to its thousands of advertisers. Today, ReachLocal announced that it was buying DealOn Media. Specific terms weren’t disclosed, but ReachLocal is valuing DealOn at $10 million. DealOn will be keeping its name for now, and CEO Rich …

We’ve been starting to see the signs of recovery for the past few months. Companies that have been cutting costs and back office expenses are now realizing they need to get the sales end of their businesses moving again. Throughout the recession, salespeople who could at one time demand higher base salaries, fringe benefits, signing …

Citysearch is getting into the deals space, offering a mix of curated daily deals, coupons and other offers from providers such as Groupon, The Dealmap, Restaurant.com as well as from its own base of thousands of advertisers. CityGrid advertisers may also participate.
The service, similar to The Dealmap and 8coupons, is mobile-oriented. It is launching …

Facebook created quite a stir (again) with the recent projection that its global revenues could surpass $4 billion in 2011 … the majority coming from small businesses that are self serving. Now Twitter is abuzz, as eMarketer predicts that top-line income will triple to more than $150 million in 2011, and surge to $250 million in 2012. Considering …