Digital Marketing News: 1-Year Anniversary of LOCALACT

Every week we’re collecting a host of links, videos, and assorted analysis on the ever-changing world of digital marketing. We invite you to skim, share, analyze, argue, and refute – just so long as you don’t get embarrassed at the water cooler again. We’ve taken a few weeks off, so here’s the latest digital marketing news and trends in the past couple of weeks.

 

Celebrating the 1-Year Anniversary of LOCALACT

On this day one year ago, we announced the official launch of LOCALACT; the premier platform built to power and scale local digital marketing for franchise systems and multi-location businesses. In the 12 months since LOCALACT was launched, we’ve helped thousands of franchisees across brands like FASTSIGNS, Anytime Fitness, HoneyBaked Ham and more grow their local digital marketing presence and turn online advertising into offline revenue. Here’s a few details on how the digital marketing platform has expanded and where it’s headed.

Since the platform launched in September of last year, we’ve been working incredibly hard and are thrilled to have launched the following:

• Localized website analytics that can easily present traffic, visitor, and conversion data to single location or franchise owner without risking shared access
• Powerful advertising programs on the most impactful social media channels – Facebook and Instagram – with expansive reach, localized targeting, and the option for co-funded media spend.
• Search engine analytics focused on the visibility of your business listings, which have opened up true rank and position data, while also providing discovery tools for long-tail localized searches
• Advanced segmentation tools to provide reporting insights based on location groupings.

“When looking back at what we’ve accomplished with LOCALACT these past twelve months, I’m incredibly proud of all the work our team has put in to provide a centralized solution for managing local data and local advertising for our partners,” said Location3 CEO Alex Porter. “And the best part is, we’ve got a strong product road map in front of us that includes some incredible feature releases and updates coming down the line over the next year as well.”

Two big updates still to come in 2018:

• Local Pages that are seamlessly connected to LOCALACT
• New data partnerships and channel integrations

If you have questions about how you can grow your business and revenue with our digital marketing platform,  LOCALACT, or would like to schedule a free demo, contact us today to get started.

Smart Ads Only Threaten Agencies That Don’t Deliver on Strategy

As ad technology advances, industry professionals continue to push the idea that small businesses can ditch their agency partners and take over their own online advertising. The latest development driving this conversation is Google Smart Ads, which purport to automate ad campaign creation, management and optimization.

But as Location3 CEO Alex Porter points out in a recent post on LSA Insider, that idea relies on the assumption that agencies are strictly execution-based – that at their most basic level, agencies only exist as a static middle man between businesses and their ad campaigns. Porter gives us a clearer picture of the role of the agency in an advertising landscape that increasingly features automation and machine learning and developing features like Google Smart Ads.

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

“But if an agency is looking at AdWords and Facebook as only parts of a greater strategy that includes attribution, organic, reputation management, social media, content, and design, then automation becomes an opportunity to save time and energy on tasks that were previously done manually. More than that, that time and energy can now be focused on processes that can’t be automated (for now) – creative and strategic leadership.”

For more insight, the entire post can be read here.

Webinar: Is Automation an Existential Threat to Agencies?

Porter’s post, “Smart Ads Only Threaten Agencies That Don’t Deliver on Strategy”, was in response to Greg Sterling’s post, “Will Google’s Smart Ads Kill the Reseller Channel?“. This back and forth spawned a webinar, “Is Automation an Existential Threat to Agencies?”, in which Porter and David Mihm of Tidings discussed the topic at length. Check out the replay for more analysis, and let us know where you stand!

Location3’s Lacuesta Contributes to Local Citation Survey

The fourth edition of BrightLocal’s Expert Local Citation Survey was released last week, and Location3 Director of Owned and Earned Matt Lacuesta was chosen to be part of the panel that included 22 local SEO experts. The panel shared their thoughts and analysis on the effects of citations on local businesses.

Here are a few key findings, according to BrightLocal:

• 90% of experts believe accurate citations are important to local search ranking
• 59% think citations are less important than they were 12 months ago
• The most important factors in citation sites are: 1. Industry relevance, 2. Local relevance, 3. Domain authority
• Local SEO experts recommend niche and industry directories above other structured citations
• Phone numbers, city, ZIP, and URL need to be exact matches, while suite number is less important

For more analysis, check out the full report from BrightLocal.