Closely Blog

Sharing Our Where 2.0 Presentation

April 21, 2011 • perryevans • 3 comments

We gave a talk yesterday (copied below) at Where 2.0, one of our favorite events every year.  It’s the O’Reilly gathering of the smartest geeks and business visionaries of the location technology world.

Our topic was “Adapting Daily Deals to Live LBS.” In some respects this title felt a little backwards, in other ways it’s a perfect reflection of the industry momentum.  We began Closely grounded in the vision that live media is the killer foundation for advancing social marketing.  The combo strikes at the heart of our mission to empower businesses to stimulate demand when and where they need it the most.  Along the way, the incredible bursting success of Daily Deals has upstaged the LBS industry with revenue momentum and value growth – perfectly reinforced two days ago by GroupOn’s acquisition of one of pioneering LBS tech players, Pelago.

Continued…

In Daily Deals, LBS, Live Social Marketing • Tagged ,

Up Next: Putting More VVRoom Into Your Deals!

April 18, 2011 • perryevans • 2 comments

VVRoom, VVRoom… okay, what we’re talkin’ about here is “Variable Value”, and how we aim to help you create more “room” to take maximum advantage of Daily Deals.

The concept is simple, and it’s part of our theme of refining this blunt instrument called Daily Deals, to make real-time social commerce a killer power tool for everyday marketing.

One Small Step for Yield Management

We’ve been developing this for some time, because we want the concept to have maximum flexibility.  One simple example is to offer a single Daily Deal that provides multiple values based on the day of the week.  So a business can offer a deal that is $75 for $120 but has a “bonus value” that makes it worth $150 if used on Tuesdays. The benefit is obvious, it tips the consumer behavior towards desired redemption patterns – to get the most ROI from the deal.

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In Daily Deals, Live Social Marketing, Local Social Promotions, Product • Tagged ,

Behind the Scenes of Social Select: Selective Social Commerce

March 22, 2011 • perryevans • No comments

We’re very excited to introduce you to Social Select.  Our new product tackles some of the core problems with daily deals and social marketing – it’s also the culmination of months of development on our Live Marketing platform, driven by several iterations with businesses and agency partners.

To learn more about the service, please go here.

I want to highlight a few key “behind the scenes” things that may not be obvious on the surface of a deceptively simple new product concept.  Social Select is created with four key building blocks.

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In Daily Deals, Live Social Marketing, Local Social Promotions, Product • Tagged , , , ,

Price Incentive Marketing: Finding the Right Time & Place

February 22, 2011 • perryevans • No comments

Criticism over Daily Deals often centers on the brand damage that can result from a widely advertised deep discount promotion.  Indeed, in the most recent survey, 59% of small businesses have not and will not do a Daily Deal.  There’s a clear strain between Daily Deal’s incredible pull with no risk lead generation and the risk to margins and brand image of discount promotion.

A critical underlying question is:

Are there situations in which a discount price does not harm the business’ ability to “return to list price”, because the consumer perceives that the situation surrounding the discount is rational and unique/temporary?

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In Daily Deals, Local Social Promotions • Tagged , ,

Tags and Live Marketing: Search Integration Linchpin

January 3, 2011 • perryevans • 1 comment

It was interesting to read TechCrunch’s breaking discovery of the new YP industry initiative by Yext, which it characterizes as the local media competitors to Google organizing an “Anti-Google Alliance” product, a description repeated by the WSJ.  TC describes Yext Tags as a product that will “let small businesses highlight their names with a little tag and customizable message across about a dozen local listings sites”.

Yext Product Image

Greg Sterling also weighs in, more fully capturing the ad network model of Yext Tags. It was no small feat to pull off a distribution network with reach estimated to easily top 100 million unique visitors via the industry’s top local search websites.  Google’s claim of a 2X ROI on Search Marketing spend with its Tags product certainly reinforces the potential for Tags to improve the return on SEM spend.

The pricing for this new product is $99/month/SMB, to be sold directly and via channel partners.  This still contrasts as more expensive and unproven vs. the Google Tags penetration priced product. As a new unproven product the Yext Tag price point and trial terms seem like a tough sell, but of course that can readily change.

Looking at Tags More Closely

Tags represent one element of Closely’s media distribution products, making this an opportune time to share our viewpoint on how we see Tags fitting into the Social, Deal and Search ecosystems.

To us, Tags represent a brand new product category and model still very much in early formation. We think it can be one of the key linchpins connecting social, mobile and search through live publishing.

Continued…

In Live Social Marketing, Product • Tagged , , ,