Local marketing has been all the rage for the past few years. All kinds of startups have popped up to help small business owners use technology to reach more customers. It’s easy to forget that local marketing doesn’t only happen online. Radio and live events are two marketing channels that have been complemented instead of replaced by technology. That’s good news for Townsquare Media, since they’re a Greenwich, CT based “local media and entertainment company that owns and operates radio, digital and live event properties in 66 small to mid-sized markets across the country.” The last part of that sentence is important because it means that they have jobs all across the country. Townsquare Media owns more than 300 radio stations, and that makes them the third largest owner of radio stations in the U.S.
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You’ve probably noticed that most of the small businesses that you interact with aren’t all that tech savvy. Whether you’ve visited their websites or tried to make a purchase, it’s often glaringly obvious that the owner shouldn’t be anywhere within 50 feet of a computer. The problem is that being online and tech savvy is becoming more and more important to running any kind of business. Merchants who can’t keep up will have a hard time. MOpro makes it easy for business owners to do all of the technical and marketing things that they might not be able to do on their own. They’re a Los Angeles, CA based company that expands “the digital possibilities for small businesses.”
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How many times have you received a punch card from a business to work your way towards some sort of free merchandise? How often have you actually held on to the card long enough to redeem it? The only time a punch card worked for me was when I was buying for a group and maxed out the whole thing at once. The obvious replacement for punchcards is a smartphone app, and Belly is a Chicago, IL based company that is making it easy for merchants to offer loyalty programs. The nice thing is that you only need one card/app for every merchant (as long as they use Belly). All you have to do is flash your card or a barcode from the app in front of the merchant’s Belly iPad and you’ll get credit for your visit.
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I keep finding myself talking about local marketing, and there’s a good reason for it. It’s an industry that has taken off in the last couple of years. Previously, the Yellow Pages and newspapers dominated local marketing. The web has eroded large parts of those businesses, but it has taken a while for new options to reach critical mass. Then businesses like Groupon and Yext realized that they could use the same sales strategy that the Yellow Pages and newspapers used, but sell marketing products and services that are results focused. Yodle is another one of these companies. They’re based in New York, NY (with offices across the country), and their mission is “to connect local businesses with consumers so simply and cost-effectively that business owners can’t imagine any other way to advertise.” They aim to achieve this by making online advertising a whole lot simpler for the average small business owner.
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Yesterday we talked about social media marketing. Today we’re going to dive into local business marketing. I’m far more excited by the latter–maybe it’s because there’s something that I love about small businesses or maybe it’s because the payoff from local marketing seems like it can come much more quickly. We’ve seen a variety of companies including Groupon, SinglePlatform, and BrandMuscle that have developed products and services to help local businesses market themselves, and today we’re going to look at a company that has taken a slightly different approach to local marketing. Balihoo is based in Boise, ID, and they are “the premier provider of Local Marketing Automation technology and services to national brands with local marketing needs.” In other words they help big companies with lots of locations tailor their marketing efforts to specific locales.
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The Washington Media Scholars Program runs a case competition for college students every year. Participating can get you a scholarship, a trip to DC, networking opportunities, and even extra credit for a class. Learn more here.
What are you up to this weekend? I know that it’s getting to be that time where professors cram in mid-terms (or prelims as we called them at Cornell) before Spring Break, but that’s no excuse to stay in the library all weekend. You need to get out and have some fun, and that means knowing where to go. Finding a good time on a college campus usually isn’t too hard, but once you move into the real world going out and organizing friends can get really frustrating. You’d think that Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and other social networking sites would make it easier to meet up with friends and find cool events/places, but they haven’t really done that yet. That’s where The Hotlist steps in. They’re a New York City based startup that has developed “a social discovery engine that enables you to view what’s happening today, tomorrow and throughout the week among your Facebook friends and the entire world!” The Hotlist was name one of the Top 100 Web Sites of 2010 by PCMag.com, and they’ve received a ton of other press mentions. But it’s really up to you to judge how hot The Hotlist is.
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I don’t know about you, but I try to recycle when its convenient. Like the time my college roommates threw a huge party and I stole all of the empty cans and returned them for the nickel deposits. It was easy money. But I must also admit that I’ve thrown away plenty of recyclables when there wasn’t a proper receptacle for them. Environmentalism is great; however, people respond to incentives, and a healthy Earth a century down the road isn’t much of an incentive for the average person. People need a push, and that’s exactly what RecycleBank does. They’re a New York, NY based company that rewards people for “taking positive green actions.” By doing things like recycling at home, you can earn RecycleBank points. Those points can be redeemed for rewards ranging from Amazon Gift Cards to museum memberships, with lots and lots of other options in between—you can even donate your points.
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Yesterday I was playing beach volleyball when my girlfriend ran up to me as excited as could be. She had taken a walk and spotted a celebrity on the way. Ok, celebrity may be a bit of an overstatement, but Jill Zarin of Real Housewives of New York City is certainly famous. So, we grabbed our camera and tried and failed to get a good paparazzi shot. Back when I lived in Connecticut, a celebrity sighting beyond Paul Newman or Don Imus was pretty unusual for me; however, now that I live in downtown Chicago, I’m seeing famous people left and right. I see Oprah and Jesse Jackson at the gym. I’ve had breakfast next to Charles Oakley, seen Greg Olson out on the town, and dined at the same restaurant as Johnny Damon. Celebrity chefs like Rick Bayless and Graham Elliott have restaurants a few blocks from my apartment, and I’ve even seen the entire Chicago Blackhawks team with the Stanley Cup. If I wanted to share all of those sightings with you in real-time, I could do it on JustSpotted. It’s a celebrity-spotting site run by a San Francisco, CA startup called Scoopler.
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Last night I went out to dinner with my girlfriend and her family. It was a restaurant that I’d never been to before, so I looked it up online to see what I should expect. The user experience on the restaurant’s website was pretty terrible. It was built in flash, and had a splash page that took forever to load. The menu was an image instead of HTML, and I never could load any pictures of the food. This doesn’t surprise me, because restaurants aren’t web businesses. They should excel at being a restaurant and leave the web stuff to someone else. That’s where SinglePlatform comes in. They’re a New York City based company that “provides restaurants one stop to manage their digital presence and gain customers.” SinglePlatform not only enables restaurants to publish all of the information that they want to share, but it also syndicates the restaurant’s content throughout a publisher network of “review sites, mobile applications, and related local guides.”
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While yesterday’s post was about a company that offers weekly deals on discounted gift cards, we did touch on how much growth there has been in local marketing. Local is tough because it requires customization. If you have only one store, you just go about business as usual, but if you’re a franchise of restaurants, for example, how do you ensure that your marketing messages and materials are tailored specifically for each market that you’re in? BrandMuscle is a Cleveland, OH based company that provides “expert local marketing services and develops robust web-based marketing software solutions that enable marketers to generate the absolute greatest return on their marketing investments.” They make local marketing easy, and they do it for some pretty big names.
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I’m an unabashed Groupon fan. How can I not support the Chicago based company that started the group-buying frenzy? Moreover, I’m just flabbergasted at the amount of value that they’ve been able to build in such a short time. The only problem with creating an extremely lucrative new market when you have little or no IP is that the competitors come out in droves. There are a lot of Groupon wannabes. A lot. Many of them will fall by the wayside as they realize that they’re not capable of building out the kind of sales/business development team needed to grow a group-buying business, but there are a few competitors that seem to be doing quite well. One of them is LivingSocial, which is based in Washington, DC (maybe they should focus on group-bribing of politicians, or is that called lobbying?). They now offer daily deals in 52 cities, and they have nearly $50 million in venture funding. They weren’t profitable yet as of March, but you have to think that they’ll get there soon.
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