Part of the advantage of having the Internet in the palm of our hands is the convenience of looking up businesses quickly and easily. Within seconds of research, we can discover a business’s location, hours of operation and personal reviews and photos from other consumers. Yelp, the popular ratings and review platform for restaurants and…
Do you know how to permanently boost your client’s conversion rates with reviews? This seems like a spammy claim to make. The kind of claim that fly-by-night operators and snake-oil salesmen are prone to make. Is it possible to achieve a permanent boost? Not only is it possible, it’s both a reasonable and achievable goal —…
It’s critical for brands to localize social media marketing and reputation management. It’s no secret that digitally savvy consumers have an affection for online shopping, but brick-and-mortar retail is not dead, the competition for local stores to win customers’ business is just changing. Multi-location brands possess the local presence advantage, compared to e-commerce stores, and…
The first part of a split session on Tuesday morning at LSA19 focused on the challenges associated with acquiring small business customers in a noisy and competitive market. The session was presented by Dan Olson, CEO of UpCity. Dan kicked off the session by detailing how the traditional customer acquisition ‘funnel’ has transformed into a…
Super Bowl 2019 was a bust for a number of reasons—some of which are in marketers’ control and others of which aren’t. It’s nobody’s fault that there were more punts than touchdowns or that the halftime show didn’t inspire viewers, but the ads and the marketing campaigns around them showed a lack of creativity—many were…
Though the consumer journey is more variable and complex than ever, it’s clear that shoppers conduct online research before almost every offline purchase. The data confirms this. LSA research shows 70% of adults do internet research “every time” or “almost every time” before buying. During this process, consumers expect to find the accurate local business…
No one disputes the influence of reviews and ratings on consumer buying decisions. A 2018 study conducted by LSA for SOCi found that reviews and ratings were the “most important” influence on purchase decisions, outweighing all other factors, including pricing/discounts, business location — even personal recommendations of a friend or colleague. In addition, 71% of consumer…
$1 Trillion. That’s how much U.S. consumers are expected to spend this holiday shopping season, according to eMarketer. Low unemployment, strong income growth, and high consumer confidence will create a spending bonanza that will hit this historic level, a 5.8 percent increase over 2017 and the strongest growth since 2011. Now here’s the $1 trillion…
For businesses that are just starting out and have only a small number of customers, a single negative review or criticism on social media can be devastating. This is especially true for businesses who have too few positive reviews to balance out the damage. For this reason, one of the small business marketing services that…
During a recent webinar, LSA’s Greg Sterling and SOCi’s Monica Ho discussed the results of two parallel surveys conducted by both companies, one of online US adults and the other of local business owners and decision makers. The studies aimed to answer the following questions and “bridge the online gap” between business understanding and consumer…
