I saw an ad this morning for SurePayroll, which triggered me to learn more about the company. I was intrigued because while I had heard of SurePayroll, I had not realized it was part of the larger, more established small business payroll company Paychex. I discovered that SurePayroll was acquired in 2010 by Paychex for…
Yelp and Google have lots of internal data about what kinds of local business content consumers engage with. The information is not widely circulated, though Yelp has occasionally exposed it and has presented it at LSA’s digital marketing bootcamps for small businesses (SMBs). For its part, Google hasn’t offered much discussion of GMB profile best practices (beyond this). Some…
Due to a number of factors, it’s been long perceived that SMBs have struggled with executing digital marketing strategies. However, more recently, an increasing number of small businesses have delved deeper into their in-house digital marketing by investing more time and resources into these practices. A recent study from The Manifest looked at the digital…
Since the beginning of the internet, pundits have predicted that e-commerce will take over nearly every shopping and retail category. According to US government data, last year e-commerce captured a roughly $513 billion share of retail spending. That’s impressive until you recognize that total retail spending was more than $5.3 trillion in 2018. Accordingly, e-commerce is hovering at ~10% of…
BrandMuscle has released the 5th edition of its “State of Local Marketing” report (registration required). The report is dense and covers a range of small business marketing topics. It also has an extensive discussion of Co-Op/MDF issues. We’ll tackle the findings in multiple posts. At the highest level the report finds that a large majority…
Intuit has been gauging interest among small businesses for an on-demand bookkeeping service called Live Bookkeeping and is expected to launch the service in the near future. This has caused some consternation in the accounting world, sparking fears that Intuit is going into competition with its bread and butter — the community of accountants who serve…
If trend-setting in M&A for marketing technology is accurate, then McDonald’s just made a huge prediction – a $300 million one. Yesterday, they announced their first acquisition in over 20 years of, “Dynamic Yield”, a company that will help them provide a more real-time personalized experience for their customers. Just the other day I experienced…
There are numerous consumer surveys about chatbots that argue people prefer interacting with them for certain tasks. Others come out the opposite way. The reality is somewhere in-between and fairly well captured in new survey data from Uberall. The survey of roughly 1,000 US adults asked about their level of interest in interacting with bots from “major brands”: 40% were…
Despite the waning visibility of organic content, SEO is arguably more important than ever. The vast majority of search clicks occur on organic links/content. Yet, according to a survey from Clutch, only 36% of small businesses (SMBs) have an SEO strategy — though an additional 38% say they plan to in the future. Clutch uses the SBA’s…
Challenges of time and budget have been consistent themes for small business owners (SMBs) in executing online marketing. Even as many SMBs have become much more sophisticated about digital, there are SMB segments that feel frustrated, even overwhelmed by some of the challenges. LSA has found this anecdotally among attendees to its digital marketing bootcamps….
