In roughly 2012 Facebook offered search advertising in its results. It was later abandoned. But today the company announced it’s going to be testing search ads again with a few automotive and e-commerce advertisers (US and Canada). Facebook said in a statement that it will determine whether the test is “beneficial for people and businesses” before determining whether to…
Large brands have the marketing dollars to outspend most local competitors, but the process of ad or content creation and distribution takes a long time for these brands. As businesses get bigger and bigger, the inevitable checks and balances that go into place become increasingly more time consuming. Despite the various business advantages brands have…
Recently Moz (and Darren Shaw) released the 2018 Local Ranking Factors survey. Moz also published the “State of Local SEO” report. The findings are based on a survey of roughly 1,400 local marketers, representing agency and in-house marketers from both small and large organizations. SEO used to be the top digital marketing focus for most small businesses (ranking in Google search…
This year, the National Retail Foundation estimated that over 164 million consumers planned to shop from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday. The estimate showed 67 million intending to shop on Small Business Saturday, 78% of whom “will do so specifically to support small businesses.” Launched in 2010 by American Express, Small Business Saturday promotes the…
Software reviews portal Capterra recently sponsored a survey of 715 small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to determine their attitudes toward technology investment and adoption. The survey, which included small and larger SMBs, showed that most are aware of the importance of new technology but many hesitate to invest, in part because of a fear of…
There’s no longer any debate about whether reviews influence consumer purchases across categories and industries. And while most local businesses understand the general proposition, to what degree do they act in accordance with that idea? A new report from LSA (commissioned by SOCi), “The Great Conversational Divide: What SMBs Don’t Understand About Reviews and How…
The latest Tech Adoption Index podcast is a combination clinic and therapy session for anyone who has ever tried to build software products for small businesses. At the recent Tech Adoption Summit in San Francisco, Neal Polachek interviewed Ted Paff, a former VC turned entrepreneur who founded Customer Lobby in 2007 and sold it in 2017. Today, when Ted isn’t…
There’s a significant gap between the importance small businesses place on social media as a marketing channel and their confidence that it’s working. That was reflected in a recent survey from Sensai (n=468 SMBs) that sought to understand “behavior, usage and attitudes around small business marketing.” Despite the fact that 57% of SMBs reported that…
One can make the argument that Google My Business (GMB) has evolved from being a “listings management” tool to something much more like a lite CRM platform for local business owners. The company introduced a new version of its GMB app for business owners this morning. The company has increasingly referred to its own local…
What makes building and selling innovation to small, local businesses so challenging? Bob Yakominich – Broadly’s Vice President of Sales and a veteran of American Express, Zip and CitySearch, among others – joined the Tech Adoption Summit to share some perspective. Unlike enterprise companies, SMB owners wear many different hats — they work both in the…
