Here is this week’s roundup of the top news items related to local marketing and advertising, local media, technology, local commerce, consumer behavior and more. Insight & Commentary LSA Forecast19: Is the SMB World Moving from SaaS to SaaT? (June 11, 2019) LSA Insider: “The Local Search Association presented its 2019 forecast for the small business…
Among the many excellent sessions at LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SaaS/SMB held this past week in the Washington D.C. area was former HubSpot CRO Mark Roberge’s talk on why usage and engagement are the most important metrics for SMB SaaS players to worry about, particularly in the early stages of a product. Mark, now a lecturer at…
Most SMB software products offer customers improved efficiency and time savings. But the upfront investment in learning and training is a big ask for busy SMBs. One of the key threads in the latest wave of LSA’s SMB survey research, now called the Modern Commerce Monitor™, is that small business owners are underutilizing SaaS products,…
Last week’s LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SaaS/SMB event finished off with a conversation about the environment for acquisitions and rollups featuring a panel experienced in evaluating and acquiring small business software companies. The panelists were well situated to evaluate the SMB software environment. Sarah Jordan is CMO of EverCommerce, a Denver-based company formed out of PaySimple that…
AI is a buzzword that shows up in nearly every piece of marketing collateral or press release. However, for most people working in technology, it’s still something of a black box. Demystifying AI and the role it can play in B2B customer acquisition and retention was the big topic that data scientist Dalia Asterbadi tackled…
LSA proprietary data shows 79% of small business owners would prefer a single, integrated software solution or provider to solve multiple operational or marketing problems. Only 21% said they would rather work with point solutions. That finding offers some important context for the discussion of SaaS and tool integrations. At the LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SaaS/SMB event…
Andrea Kayal, CMO of Upserve, a restaurant operations app company in the Vista Private Equity portfolio, spoke at our LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SaaS/SMB event last week. Andrea walked through Upserve’s model and approach for leveraging their best customers as a means to influence prospects. She hit on a couple of themes. One, if you can show a…
Most companies targeting small businesses aren’t as effective as they could be because they fundamentally don’t understand their customers. This was a key point made by Sydni Craig-Hart, CEO and co-founder of Smart Simple Marketing, who spoke earlier this week at the LSA’s LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SaaS/SMB event in Washington, D.C. Craig-Hart observed that too many SaaS…
At this week’s LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SaaS/SMB conference, we heard a variety of perspectives from a panel of experienced industry leaders. Danica Greenwood, a former Yellow Pages executive with Hibu, who now leads sales teams at Paychex — the $25B (market cap) provider of payroll and human resource services to small and mid-sized businesses — shared…
Small businesses are moving their operations steadily into the cloud, they are seeing real benefits from doing so, and yet they are substantially underutilizing the capabilities of the software they’ve purchased. At this week’s LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SaaS/SMB event, I unveiled our new Modern Commerce Monitor™ (formerly Tech Adoption Index) SMB survey data using this three-part…
