Monthly Industry Roundup: July 2019

Location3 News:  Location3 has been officially certified as a Preferred Facebook Marketing Partner. Preferred status gives the Location3 team additional resources, training, and support from the Facebook team above the standard FMP for Agencies Account status.

Benefits to Location3’s clients include:

• Prioritized issue resolution from Facebook’s customer support team
• Technical support related to Facebook’s API used to pull data into LOCALACT
• Solutions Engineering consultations as Location3 develops custom API integrations for our franchise and multi-unit location campaigns
• Creative consultations from Facebook’s Creative Shop for creative planning and optimization recommendations

With the additional support, resources, and training, we look forward to bringing the newest Facebook innovations into practice for Location3’s clients. To learn more about Location3’s Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger offerings, contact us today.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN FRANCHISE DIGITAL MARKETING?

Localogy: Aligning Expectations Key to Client-Agency Success

As partners of the Local Search Association, we had the opportunity to attend Localogy, an event focused on bringing together local business marketers and the agencies that serve them. Here are a few of Location3 VP of Agency Relations Tom Lynch’s takeaways from the event.

Local Marketing Automation and Expected Costs

One of the main themes of the event was the misaligned expectations of  business owners and agencies/platforms. This disconnect often starts before a business owner ever speaks with a platform or agency.

Many business owners are hearing pitches that promise all of their local marketing will be “covered” for a flat monthly fee, and this “coverage” and low price are possible because of marketing automation. These types of promises should be met with skepticism.

The disconnect between these promises and reality is often coming from a misrepresentation or misunderstanding of “automation”. Dalia Asterbadi broke down this misunderstanding in her presentation, “AI’s Impact on the B2B Customer Journey“. To paraphrase Asterbadi:

Automation, or AI, is a means for improving decision-making and removing bias to dramatically improve KPI values. But those decisions must be made by humans, and KPIs must be created and evaluated over time.

That is to say that local marketing automation isn’t a magic bullet for small business owners. It’s a tool for all involved to fine-tune a business’s local marketing strategy.

If agencies and platforms can share this understanding with small businesses and franchise owners, they can align the understanding of local marketing “automation” with a more accurate expectations of the associated costs.

For more takeaways, including how to improve the onboarding process, read the full post here.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN PAID SOCIAL?

Facebook Extends Search Ads Test

Facebook is extending a test of search ad placements to a larger group of advertisers, per Amy Gesenhues of Marketing Land. For the past six months, the test has given a select group of automotive and retail advertisers the ability to place ads in Facebook’s search results.

Facebook has yet to confirm a broader roll-out, but repeated its initial statement, saying, “We continue to test placing ads in Facebook search results and are evaluating whether these ads are beneficial for people and businesses before deciding whether to roll them out more broadly.”

This is a development that we’ve been predicting for almost two years. And while the Facebook search landscape has shifted in the time since, we’ve been analyzing how a search ad environment within the social network could play out for our clients.

For now, the expansion of the test is a win for businesses and advertisers. Facebook’s recent ad revenue numbers reveal a powerful advertising channel, and any new advertising avenues on the popular network presents massive opportunity. It’s important to note that Facebook isn’t known for its commercial shopping capabilities, and it could take time for users to adapt to the functionality.

The expansion of the test is a signal that the participating businesses have seen a degree of success with the new ad opportunities. And it’s reasonable to expect that the broad swath of Facebook users will value a more complete online experience that doesn’t require them to leave the Facebook environment. As Facebook continues to tinker with the product, we expect it to eventually be a major player in the search market.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN PAID SEARCH?

Expanding Your Keyword List

Location3 Paid Search specialist Shalini Reddy recently shared a few simple ideas for curating an effective and efficient keyword list for your next paid search campaign. Here are a few tips:

• Avoid one-word terms. These tend to be too broad and can attract irrelevant traffic.
• Expand on one-word terms. Let’s take “coffee shop” as an example. I started typing coffee shop in Google, and the autocomplete feature suggested: coffee shop near me, coffee shops open near me, coffee shops open late… you get the idea.
• Google also provides you with related searches at the bottom of the result page. This is another great way to get more ideas. Using the same “coffee shop” example, some of the related searches were “list of coffee shops”, “coffee shop game”, “coffee shop movie”, and “coffee shop design”.
• Use negative keyword lists. These lists allow you to avoid showing up for searches that aren’t relevant to your business. For the coffee-shop example, you could add movie, game and design as negative keywords. Those terms aren’t relevant to your business.

For more insight, including mistakes to avoid, read the full post here