It's always useful to ask actual small-business owners what they really need to run their businesses, what their objections are to the various digital marketing solutions being pitched to them and what messages resonate with them. We did just…
Building a business that involves acquiring thousands of small merchants as customers and then driving mass quantities of quality leads to those merchants is one of the toughest challenges in the local space. HomeAdvisor is one of a relatively few companies out there that…
The energy in the SMB space is moving away from the narrow notion of selling advertising products for lead generation to provisioning a much wider range of marketing services. These solutions are focused not just on acquiring customers, but also…
Homejoy, the San Francisco-based on-demand home cleaning startup announced it will shut down on July 31st, leaving customers who have already paid for services to request refunds while Google has swooped in to hire the company's development team for its…
SMB scheduling and operations platform MyTime is bringing the local On-Demand economy (LODE) to established SMBs, as opposed to the "gig economy" where the discussion usually lies. We discussed with CEO Ethan Anderson during a Keynote at BIA/Kelsey NOW (video below).…
It’s late, you’ve returned to your car after an evening ballgame to find the tire is flat. What do you do? With parking place reservation app ParkWhiz, a Chicago-based iOS and Android developer, the answer is now embedded in the same app you used to find and book the parking spot. The company has partnered with Urgent.ly, which provides roadside assistance to drivers, to offer Urgent.ly services in its app, at the touch of a button. ParkWhiz app users get immediate help and the company shares part of the revenue generated by Urgent.ly for the referral.
Rocks Digital 2015 was held June 29-30 in Dallas, Texas. This year's digital marketing conference brought two days education, information and resources to business owners, digital marketing agencies and enterprise level service providers. The Rocks Digital conference is the brain child…
In the increasingly competitive local on demand economy (LODE), building relationships and lifestyle should come before traditional "selling." This according to Porch VP of Marketing Joanna Lord, who kicked off BIA/Kelsey NOW in what many believed to be the highlight…
Two well-known players in SMB marketing services today announced a partnership to integrate their platforms to provide end-to-end customer acquisition/retention services for SMBs. The new partners are WordStream, a major SEM and search services provider (and Google Premier SMB Partner), and…
Wanderful Media, the newspaper-owned promotions company, has expanded on its original Find&Save coupon portal, which now includes 500 national and regional merchants, and 18,000 brands. The new expansion efforts are focused on Cash Dash, a geolocation promotions feature found within…
Amazon.com, the online retail giant, intends to dip its toe into the on-demand market to solve the problem of same-day delivery. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Amazon will use local drivers coordinated through an Uber-like logistics system and…
What are the fundamentals that make the Local On-Demand Economy (LODE) tick? It's an important question to begin to reveal where there are entry points for innovation and business opportunity. We answered this question on Friday during BIA/Kelsey NOW in…
BIA/Kelsey's NOW conference today in San Francisco highlighted the Uberification of the local space and its impact, pro and con, on traditional marketing channels, especially advertising. "It is about evolving markets," said event head Mitch Ratcliffe. Some people grossly simplify…
What is deep linking and why is it critical to the future of the mobile app economy? What's up with Pinterest and Instagram's new "buy" buttons? And what's the economic forecast for the on-demand economy? These are a few topics…
How big is the market housekeeping startups such as HomeJoy, Handy and Thumbtack? Is the business big enough to justify Amazon Home Services' leap into the market? We'll answer that question the last week before BIA/Kelsey NOW, coming up on…
Google has been launching lots of products to carry its search dominance into a mobile world. Given that 4 out of 5 mobile minutes happen in-app, this sidesteps the very place where its dominance has been established: the browser. We…
BIA/Kelsey is partnering again with the Local Media Association to produce this year's LMA Native Advertising Interactive Summit next July 15-16 in Washington, DC where we'll share our latest native ad forecast, insights about marketplace dynamics and trend lines of…
The Local On-Demand Economy (LODE) will be all about transactions. The ease of transaction between buyer and seller will need to match the lowered-barriers and "immediacy" of the on-demand service and experience itself. Otherwise, LODE's promise won't be fulfilled. It's…
Button, the New York-based developer of mobile deep-linking integration tools for use in local on-demand services, announced the launch of Uber integration into third-party applications. Foursquare used the tools to add a button to its location-based social sharing application to…
How big can the Local On-Demand Economy get? We'll be examining this question in several blog posts this week as we prepare for BIA/Kelsey NOW, which happens June 12th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Use the…
