Here are some highlights we’ve introduced to make Closely even better in 2012:

Agency Support

• Multiple Businesses: Create and manage profiles and campaigns for multiple client Businesses from a single Closely account.
• Multiple Team Members: Account Admins now have the ability to create Agent users to manage business profiles and promotions, allowing agency teams or partners to collaborate on client campaigns.

Enhanced Options for Businesses:

• Online-Only Business: E-commerce merchants or those without a storefront location may now upload discount codes for deal vouchers to be redeemed online.
• Bonus Days and Times: Deals can be optimized to stimulate business when you need it most by adding bonus values for redemption on particular days of the week or hours of the day.

Campaign Management:

• Improved Interface: Creating and managing campaigns is even easier with new tabbed organization for different promotion types.
• Post Scheduling and Repeating: Promotions can can now be distributed to Facebook and/or Twitter on repeating schedule to reach customers throughout the duration of the campaign. Successful campaigns can be easily revived from the Closely dashboard.
• Enhanced Analytics: Easily track and improve your campaigns with access to detailed statistics including total purchased, total viewed and sources of clicks.

Consumer Accounts:

• Consumer Account: Customers who purchase a Deal can log in from their own account to review and print their purchased voucher at any time.
• Improved Customer Voucher: Vouchers are easily printed as a PDF with a Google map to help them find the local business.
• Google+ Sharing: All Deal and Offer pages can be now shared by consumers with a click on the G+ button, joining Facebook, Twitter and Email in Closely’s social distribution.

Meet Pineapple Day Spa, an award winning spa located in Pine Bush, New York, a town of about 1,600 residents a ninety minute drive from the Big Apple. Pineapple Day Spa offers a range of services and products for wellness, beauty, and relaxation by a team of more than 15 highly trained stylists and therapists.

While the spa is located miles from the media centers of Manhattan, Pineapple Day Spa’s digital marketing presence is on par with the biggest and best salons in the country thanks to the innovative marketing services provided by its marketing agency, the gooroo group.

Pineapple Day Spa’s beautifully designed website offers booking functionality and allows customers to purchase gift certificates directly from the site. In the social media world, the spa now engages new and existing customers through an expanding network on both Facebook and Twitter, and an email list reaches subscribers with strategic updates and offers.

Economic Uncertainty

In 2011, as pre-purchased Deals were embraced by consumers across the country, Pineapple Day Spa saw potential for growing its own business. Like many smaller communities, the economic environment in Pine Bush has led to belt-tightening and reduced spending on percieved luxury items, including spa services. Allowing customers to pre-purchase services at a discount would help new customers overcome the perception of unafforability and allow them to experience the services worth coming back for — a proposition the spa found promising.

However, the major daily deal sites were not operating in smaller markets like Pine Bush, and providing deep discounts to NYC customers unlikely to make the long trip for a return visit at regular price was simply not an option for gooroo group’s strategy of creating long-term, loyal customers. Pineapple Day Spa and gooroo group needed to find an alternative to the big daily deal sites.

Discovering Closely

When gooroo group’s founder learned about Closely’s promotion application for small businesses in the fall of 2011, he was excited about the possibilities. In contrast to the blunt, broad-market options of major daily deal sites, Closely would allow the spa to run deals any time, set their own terms, and distribute the deal to the spa’s email list, social following and other locally targeted channels. The platform would serve as a tool to enhance gooroo group’s strategic marketing approach, not a one-size-fits-all distraction from the spa’s core customer base.

While the possiblities were appealing, the agency’s research showed that customers in more rural markets were far less likely to have purchased a daily deal than those in deal-saturated urban areas. Armed with this knowledge, they approached a new campaign with cautious optimism, developing a plan for a relatively conservative deal with a short duration and redemption time. Unlike the major daily deal sites, the Closely platform would allow this initial test and empower the agency to repeat or modify the approach as needed on a real-time basis.

The Deal

• The Offer: Buy the deal for $49, and get $70 worth towards any spa or salon treatment
• Discount: 30%
• Duration: 11/18/11 to 11/27/11 (redemption extended until 12/15/11)

Distribution

• Email: The gooroo group created an email marketing campaign to promote the redesigned website, including an extra incentive highlighting the Closely deal.

• Facebook: gooroo group shared the deal to the spa’s Facebook page, promoting sales and engagement from Pineapple Day Spa fans.

• Twitter: The deal was posted automatically via the Closely application on a repeating schedule carefully selected by gooroo group.

• Website: The Closely widget was easily embedded on the Special Offers of the spa’s site to capture site visitors looking for the most up-to-date offer information.

Results

The Pineapple Day Spa and gooroo group could not have been more pleased with the results when they reached their goal of 15 deals sold in 9 days.  Results and return on investment were easy to track using the Closely analytics dashboard.

Some highlights:

• 5% of customer who viewed the deal page bought the deal.
• 79% of views came from the email marketing campaign or web site
• 16.5% of views came from the social networks
• 4.5% came from search engines, thanks to an increased SEO footprint
• Immediate revenue generated: $735 (with 90% going to the gooroo group and the Pineapple Day Spa directly!)

The Pineapple Day Spa was very encouraged by the positive response from its customers – old and new – and has adopted the Closely application to run regular deals tailored to the unique needs of the business and its customers. The customer response has been 100% positive, with clients thanking the business for offering deals that make it affordable to pamper themselves in tough economic times.

Meanwhile, gooroo group was able to demonstrate that the pre-purchase deal model is not just for large, metropolitan markets.

A savvy marketing agency with a real connection to the business they serve, combined with the flexibility provided by the Closely platform, can transform the online marketing possibilites for small businesses in local markets.

More Info

More more information about how Closely can help you grow your business, contact info@closely.com

The gooroo group can be reached as follows:

Ryan DeJong, Founder
gooroo group
646.580.9717
info@gooroogroup.com
www.gooroogroup.com

Return shopping behavior is undergoing a sea change, as consumers begin to modify their shopping decision making. They are being conditioned to “check for promotions” before deciding on a particular product/service purchase.  Indeed, a consumer today can jump from Spa to Spa, from Restaurant to Restaurant, or from Cleaning Service to Cleaning Service, living off the growing inventory of Deals being continually published.

As a new gen of “live promotions” migrate into the mainstream, this behavior will further accelerate to a new norm in consumer shopping decisions. Just as Review content has become central to consumers shopping, Promotions will take their place as a key factor in final business selection.  Consumers shop based on quality and price.  Reviews have become the proxy for quality, and Promotion will become the proxy for communicating price.

The Wallet Bias Imperative

A small business can no longer rely solely on the quality of product and consumer experience to ensure return visit behavior, even by their traditionally loyal customers. This puts an acute new priority on leveraging the point of live interaction with customers to build bias for future return visit shopping decisions.

One approach we take with Loyalty engagement is to employ the point of “check-out interaction” to select and reward your most interesting consumers – the ones that the business wants as repeat customers.  Wallet Bias is the goal, as we leverage pre-purchased offers to secure a position of recall and preference when the consumer is ready for their next use of their product/service. Having a $20 value voucher in the consumer’s wallet can secure a bias towards your business, delivering more effective promotion impact than a generic Happy Hour standing offer.

The Increasingly Strategic Consumer Wallet

Today, Wallet Bias is a metaphor for achieving top-of-mind recall when a consumer is ready to decide in your product/service category.  In the not-too-distant future, this wallet will become a very tangible promotion distribution target.

In the rapidly approaching world of mobile wallets, the consumer will increasingly use smartphone apps for making purchases, and these apps could grow to become central to loyalty and promotion.  We need to think of this wallet not simply as a payment tool, but as a destination for targeted distribution of promotional offers. Imagine having a set of contextual recommendations “waiting for you in your wallet”.

To see the battle forming over this new app space, look no further than the news of the day!

The best early example I saw of the potential for a new generation of wallet applications was in the GroceryIQ app (acquired by Coupons.com) – designed to help you create your grocery list, the application automatically appends coupons for the identified products – and related ones!

Project this into the future, and you see a new battlefield in which consumers may come to activate and navigate their shopping actions via this new highly targeted promotion distribution channel.  To a merchant, the opportunity to target related purchase behavior, qualified by precise identity, location and time-based context is very compelling.

At Closely, We’re Already There!

We help today’s small business begin to shift their promotion plans into this emerging behavior of consumers.  Daily Deal campaign do nothing to secure return behavior, but the underlying concept of pre-purchased offers can be directly applied.  We’ve innovated in two directions here.

One, we’ve created a “Private Promotion” product – simply, it’s a way to target and deliver a return visit deal to individual consumers. The business owner can hand select the customers they want to return, and deliver a Return Visit purchase offer at the time of service completion or check-out.  There is no better time to secure return visit bias that at the completion of a good product/service experience.

Two, we’ve refined the promotion instrument to create smart everyday promotion programs.  We’ve provided a simple way to incent the best behavior (time/day patterns, for example, as seen below).

From a Best Practices viewpoint, we recommend designing return promotions to establish Wallet Bias.  The intent is not to replicate a Daily Deal, but simply to create a position that hooks the customer into a bias towards choosing you when they are ready to transact again. Lower price point return visit promotions can hook the desired return purchase behavior, and bonus time structures can give the business the confidence to use this as an everyday marketing tool.

Finding your place to top-of-mind recall and decision bias of your best customers (and the related social referral opportunities) is becoming central to a well deigned Business Promotion strategy.  Loyalty increasingly needs to be triggered, and it’s a new world where decision processes and tools are in motion.

If you’re not aiming here, you’ll simply be missing your customers.

We created an evolved Deal model, in which you set different values within one deal based on the preferred demand patterns of an individual business.  Our imaginations soared.  You could make it a sophisticated match between the times, days and seasons in which you really need new business activity – a true instrument of yield management. We have even designed a “live push” component, so that a business could reach out to customers and further entice them with instant additional incentive.

As things go with small businesses, simplicity trumps flexible but complex options, and new concepts demand a walk-before-you-run entry point. Our user research and design iterations have led us to simplify all this into one very understandable product feature, which we’re launching today.

Our Product News

We’re introducing the Bonus Value Deal. This label captures the 80-20 rule for entry point use cases. Businesses see real appeal in a simple 2-layered deal design that delivers a clear incentive for their customers to use their deals at designated Bonus Times.  And, when consumers use the deal during peak periods they are still rewarded, but not at the margin challenged levels most often forced onto them by Daily Deal providers.

This product feature continues to progress our theme of refining deals into everyday promotion tools that the business can use more universally than the brute-force norm of deep universal discounting.  To the consumer, it’s simple is execution, as highlighted below.

And to the business we have simplified creation with an optional add-on dialog as a business deal is designed.

This simple design is gaining great traction with business users who love the fundamental concept of Daily Deals, but hate the heavy-handed business model of first generation providers.

Of course, we will continue to leverage our original IP to expand the uses of variable value across a range of consumer activity patterns and live incentive publishing.  But we’re getting the yield management ball rolling with this freshly proven technique that businesses love!

Connecting Best Customers and Social Networks

Our product mission is to help small businesses stimulate demand in bold new ways via real-time and social media. Promotions can be published anytime, and can be distributed smartly in targeted ways to improve business performance.

We’ve extended social marketing well beyond the obvious methods with Facebook and Twitter.  These “social gestures” signal familiarity and receptivity, and form a great new approach to creating your own audience.  However, this model fails to capture the value of a known customer, especially when it can be coupled with known purchase behavior.

Cranking Up the ROI Deal Campaigns

Closely recently launched Social Select, designed to drive the right return visit behavior from your best visitors and customers.  Social Select addresses the single biggest complaint of merchants with Daily Deals – the poor performance in return visit behavior of a deal’s trial customers.  Daily Deals deliver leads and walk away.

I’m pleased to report that merchants love the combo of Social Select and Daily Deals!  Coupling the two into an integrated model of campaign + conversion drives an increased ROI and converts a burst of leads into a social marketing asset.

What Makes a Best Customer?

As merchants began to use Social Select, it’s been fascinating to see an increasing creativity in deal design.  We’ve seen Deals targeting large spending, group behavior, time of day and day of the week – all great examples of Best Customer behavior characteristics.  While the industry has obsessively focused on frequency-based loyalty marketing, we’ve been learning that many, many other characteristics drive who, when  and how a business wants to drive demand. A carpet cleaner has a different definition from a wine store, which is different from a bistro.

We’re bringing this learning into our newest tool – the Best Customer List.  The first thing Merchants asked for was a way to capture the email addresses, so they can “put them on their list”.  We countered with some great “imagine if” discussions, and pretty soon our product began to form.

While email marketing is a proven model, it has never really lived up to its potential for a variety of reasons.  We know that our model of social commerce, where we combine transactions, time/day, social reach and business generated consumer content, forms a much richer model of everyday social commerce.

A Few Highlights

In the screen shot below, you’ll see a few things that begin to separate the Best Customer model from a simple approach of capturing a consumer’s email or social media contact.  I’ll highlight five things that we’re most intrigued with.

1. Customer Ratings & Tags.  The point of deal redemption creates a great opportunity for the business to record simple contextual information about a customer.  A simple rating, perhaps selecting from 2-3 descriptive tags (such as party size, family vs. friends, etc.), can be a simple click action recorded when the transaction is fresh.
2. Time and Date.  We obsess about helping merchants stimulate demand when it’s most valued.  Knowing day and time patterns allows you to focus a promotion on these dimensions of Best Customers.
3. Social Scoring.  We’re beginning to evaluate all of the great new third party API’s to append social reach scoring, to drive maximum impact, and to target social oriented offers.
4. Smart Filters & Groups.  It’s one thing to create a flexible list; it’s another to make it super-simple for targeted promotions.  A set of “Smart Filters” give you unique group views of your customers in one click.  Groups are custom collections of customers for private deal distribution.
5. Integrated Groups and Promotion Distribution. At any time a business can push a customized Social Select deal to a list of individuals.  Want to drive early week traffic?  Create a group of 2 and 3-star customers who have completed a transaction more than 30 days ago, on Sunday-Wednesday, and deliver your saved “Off Peak” promotion.  Measure, rinse, repeat!

So, as it should be, this is just the start.  We’d love to engage with partners that see the value we’re creating, and want to combine forces for powerful customer solutions. We’re here to be a high impact companion product that completes that circle with social marketing agencies, deal publishers, merchant service applications and local media publishers.

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.

But, alas, these are temporary labels for products that need to be thought of (and designed) as the tools to reinvent how businesses engage with and through their customers, visitors and nearby prospective customers. In this presentation, we (tongue in check) refer to the shift towards “Self-administered Variable Value Live Social Promotion Units“. But hey, that’s essentially what we’ve constructed, and then sliced neatly into simple digestible everyday social marketing uses with better branding

Oh, and as for the “self-administered” part?  We build our tech to give every business total control over their promotions, but we’re also deeply committed to the “agency/multi-location layer”.  We ascribe to the assisted living model of local marketing – the value will be realized when smart marketing services are applied, on behalf of the business.

We hope you enjoy – and hey, if you like it, do pass it along!

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.

Cranking up the VVelocity

As we usually do, we try to map our new product concepts across two dimensions before we dive in and code! One, how would this be applied across dozens of different business types, and two, how can the real-time design of Closely’s platform add impact.  As usual, we realize how restrictive and limiting it is to be stuck in “margaritaville” (our term for products designed solely around restaurant & bar use cases)!

So, in designing this, we’re making Variable Value a living, breathing concept.  To an individual business, day of the week may not be the best element that defines when it gets the best return on redemption of a Daily Deal.  It could be based on time of day, it could be based on number of people your bring with you, it could even be based on the weather with a “Live Bonus Alert” or a check-in frequency API trigger!

Living Breathing Coupons, Oh My!

Hopefully you get the picture.  We’re building a platform that lets the Variable Value concept be implemented with variables that are adaptable – to be as unique and as live as the business wants.  The small business market is made up of thousands of different types of businesses with hundreds of different demand-supply triggers.  For some, a snow day means packed full price lift lines [read, turn those deals OFF!], while for others it’s the perfect time to crank up a live bonus alert to your best customers, voucher holders and passers-by, and put some life back into the cash register with free Irish coffees to go with that Voucher idling in your wallet!

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.

The Notion of a Private Deal

I’ve often referred to Daily Deals as a blunt instrument.  Mass-marketing of deep discounts is simply not a good long-term model, yet the pre-paid social commerce model is ingenious and very valuable. From the ground up, we built our platform to allow a business to publish live in any quantity/price/terms at any time, and we gave the business control via a Live Dashboard and mobile Remote Control.  But we hadn’t sufficiently tackled customer targeting.  Nobody had.

With Private Deals, we empower a business to deliver a purchase-ready deal to an individual customer for their next visit.  We extend this with live social sharing and rewards tools, to further help the business leverage these selected customers for quality personal referral customers.  Deals love to be shared, and time-limited exclusive offers are more naturally shared than mass-market instruments.

It’s powerful to be able to drive thousands of new trial customers to your doorsteps, but if only a trickle come back, where’s the ROI?  We’ve responded to this problem with an instrument to select your best customers and new visitors, entice them back, and spread the deal love via live personal campaigns.  This can be an awesome companion tool to improve the value from a scaled Daily Deal campaign.

Private Deals are designed as an engine/API because we intend for many media and device forms emerge from this core concept.

Human Factors: Embracing the Duality

It often feels like small businesses and consumers live in two different time zones in technology adoption. We’ve learned a thing or three with our Live Marketing platform, and we’ve drilled down on a comfortable human analog for this innovation. Exclusive customer rewards are tried and proven tools of many trades. Our demand print approach with Social Select plays to this comfort zone, bringing simplicity and approachability to small businesses.

All the while, we know the pull of consumers towards live social and mobile technologies is compelling – any we’ve designed to this too.  Once the consumer gets a Social Select Offer Card, all the action moves back online where it leverages social, mobile and commerce ecosystems.

There’s plenty of patent-pending fancy tech IP involved in a scalable application for on-demand printing with a live publishing and continual redemption back office, but there’s also a host of very tactile design side issues.  This is the kind of stuff often lost on web companies. Businesses are putting their image forward, and they respond in very personal ways to how they interact with customers.

We’ve applied our Live Marketing platform, bridged it to a scalable, simplified model of offline delivery, which then jumps the consumer right back to the future and the real-time social web for commerce and social engagement.  Very retro, don’t you think?

Social Select Network: The Wisdom of the Merchants

While friends and followers provide important frameworks for conversational interaction with their market, they form a very weak foundation for social marketing and demand pull.  Frankly, they confuse the heck out of most small businesses.

Social Select is designed to drive a parallel foundation – where businesses select and reward their best customers – and those best customers help their favorite businesses bring their best next customer.  It’s a simple concept – a living social record of your best customers, and a connected picture of the prospective customers they have selected to buy your products and services.

The wisdom of the crowds centers on consumer-based group patterns. Social Select inverts this, designed to capture the wisdom of the merchants, tagging and valuing the customers that cross their doorsteps every day.

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?

Exploring Rational Discount Price Situations

Too often the criticism about Daily Deal marketing centers on the sweeping generalizations that discount marketing = evil. Yet, discount price strategies have existed for decades as pervasive and effective marketing elements across business categories.  Well-branded top restaurants often make heavy use of happy hours, seasonal specials are commonplace for optimizing supply and demand in many industries, and so on.

Outlined below are a number of situations in which consumers commonly are presented with price discounts and view the behavior as rational and welcome situations that do not undermine the business’ ability to return to their list price, undamaged.

1. New Business Start-up

A new business has the classic dynamics of creating demand when a trusted position doesn’t exist in their market.  Price incentives commonly offset this risk and stimulate product trial. For new businesses aiming to establish a market foothold, price discounting is a widely used primary marketing tactic.

2. Seasonality

Businesses have long used the logic of discount pricing to reward customers for purchasing products and services “off-season”.  The technique is widely used in service based businesses where inventory carries a relatively fixed cost, and even discounted prices can contribute positive cash flow during lean times. This can create a logical win-win in the eyes of consumers and business owners.

3. Over-supply & Off-peak Situations

Many business categories continually or sporadically struggle with the challenges of matching perishable inventory with demand. In perishable inventory businesses, peaks and valleys pricing techniques can be smart in both directions – discounting to stimulate demand and premium pricing to maximize revenue in periods of over-supply.  As the web moves more real-time, increasingly optimized price and promotion techniques forms an intriguing foundation for yield management.

4. Preferred Customer Reward

Rewarding loyal and best customers or attracting premium customers is often coupled with trial and discount terms.  While frequency does not necessarily equate to “best customer economics”, it’s often used to define a reward, alongside targeting people with above average purchase profiles.  Discount incentives are in constant use as reward and for trial incentive to preferred customers.

5. Volume Discounting & Collective Buying

The central premise behind the origins of a “group deal” is that the collective buying power presents a unique opportunity to stimulate demand at a lower cost of acquisition and/or improved cost efficiency.  Consumers are very used to volume-based pricing, and generally assume that participation in event or group purchase activities presents the business and a new crop of consumers trying their product or service.

6. In Exchange for Advocacy or Referrals

Social networking is fast becoming a compelling tool for taking the analog word-of-mouth and generating a compelling model of referral marketing. Many businesses, from roofing repair to house painting to insurance have rewarded consumers for spreading the word to their friends and neighbors.  While this raises the concern over “paid reviews”, it is naive to assume that businesses will not want to leverage this potential online.

7. When “Times are Tough”

The success of Daily Deals is viewed, in part, to be a function of timing – the economy has challenged the survival of many small businesses. In periods like this, there is a valid argument that discount pricing will be viewed by consumers as a unique point in time. Some have even argued that businesses can improve their brand affinity by recognizing the consumer’s plight, and rewarding them with a way to enjoy products that they have been forced to curtail.

Beyond the Blunt Instrument

There is a very valid concern that the current generation of Daily Deals present brand and price risk challenges. Used as the primary mechanism for demand generation and/or poorly targeted and designed discount promotion is simply poor marketing practice.  However, it’s short-sighted to be totally dismissive of techniques that have demonstrated decades of proven value in the marketing arsenal for stimulating demand and generating business growth at the right time.

Looking back in a year or two, current generation Daily Deals may very well look like brute-force instruments.  However, they also signal the entry of an exciting generation of smart, targeted techniques that leverage two unmistakable trends – social marketing and real-time interaction.  These shifts will empower businesses to adapt to a range of challenges in demand-supply management. Price-based promotion will remain a critical – even increasingly strategic – tool in this new arsenal.

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.

Tags as a Live Marketing Linchpin

Closely’s approach to live marketing combines publishing to social networks with expanded distribution (organic + syndicated).  The current separation of social and search is transitional; we focus on giving a business control over what, where and when promotional offers are placed in front of consumers. Social networks provide great ways to connect with your followers and their friends, but offers are emerging as very powerful ways to capture the actions of searching consumers.

Tags are one element of this live distribution, connecting offers to mobile and web-based qualified consumer leads that most often are not directly in your social network.

As you see in the sample image, Closely Offer Tags provide for distribution of multiple live offers, deals or events, aimed at directory-centered media such as YP and mobile/map search.  Publishing an offer is integrated with live distribution to Twitter, Facebook, website and email publishing, providing a single point of creation, distribution and tracking.  Advanced scheduling features allows a business to have their offers and activities continually refreshed using a promotion calendar.

Tags: SEM-centered vs. Live Promotion Centered

There is a compelling argument that Tags should be positioned as an evolutionary product for SEM.  In the world of search and map results, it’s difficult for a business listing to stand out.  Positioned into this picture, it’s a convenient up-sell to let a business add a tag line or an offer that helps it stand out competitively.

Closely looks at the focus of Tags from a different lens. Our vision is that Tags should play out on a path to be a critical connecting point between live content and local search experience.

The Pull and Push of Live Small Business Content

Today, consumer business search centers on three decision sources – location, reference content (features, brands, hours, etc.), and review content.  The most important new development in local search is the pull of a fourth element: live content and social context about a business.

The Daily Deal marketplace explosion has demonstrated how effective Deals can be to drive consumer purchase behavior. Promotional Offers (Daily Deals + Location-based live offers) are rapidly emerging as the next key content dimension in search-driven shopping – consumers are pulling for promotional content and businesses are beginning to push to stimulate demand.

The exciting news is that live content from local businesses is rapidly forming;  Twitter and Facebook posting is increasingly commonplace.  In various discussions with partners in this ecosystem over the past year, Closely has been excited to see the need for a more structured approach to live content about a local business being recognized.

Our standards-focused initiatives [more on this another time], has proposed to separate live local business content into three organizing groups that we refer to as Promotions (Offers, Deals, etc.), News & Events, and Chatter; to demonstrate this concept, we’ve mocked up a live profile/details page which partitions the business’ twitter stream to promote better consumer local shopping utility.

Bridging Live Social Marketing and Search is Very Strategic to Local Media

For most local media channels, quickly finding a path to involvement in social marketing for local businesses is perhaps the most strategic challenge to your business.  To that viewpoint, Closely has chosen to center its attention on tightly aligning the concepts of Tags and Live Social Marketing.

There are very few ways in which search-centered local media companies can credibly package social and search into simple and powerful packages.  Tags feels like one of the compelling connecting point.

Tags and Local Social Media

The worlds of Daily Deals, Mobile Offers and Live Content are in a whirling formation of transition. We view Tags as one of the more interesting ways to align the worlds, and create a predictable consumer experience of viewing the offers, activities, and chatter of/about a particular business.

Announcements such as the Yext Tag network model are encouraging in that they bring the Tag product category to the forefront. The real challenge will be for employing the product to its full potential – as a way for consumers to get the live content they are looking for, and as a way for local businesses to smartly leverage this as a live publishing channel, integrated with their social marketing opportunity.

It’s a smart time to connect the dots between social marketing and Tags. Viewing Tags as a simple SEM add-on can limit the opportunity to carve out a relevant role in the social media landscape.