During a recent LSA webinar, Charles Laughlin of the LSA’s Tech Adoption Index and Tehsin Daya of Uberall discussed the trends driving local, digital marketing. Based on Charles’ white paper “2019 State of Location Marketing,” the webinar focused on the rising impact of voice, video and syndication.
Location marketing by definition is the collection of tactics designed to help consumers find, evaluate and transact with businesses based on their location. It encompasses:
- Listings
- Presence
- Ratings and reviews
- Visual Content
- Voice
According to the presenters, location marketing will be a dominate force in 2019 due to a number of factors. These include the overwhelming presence of smartphones, the rise in popularity of “near me” searches, empowered consumers, the increasing importance of online reviews and voice coming to its own.
Charles then went through the location marketing checklist, which includes the things that local businesses or agencies that work with local businesses need to do to make sure that the business is optimized for location marketing. These components include, listings syndication, listings accuracy, soliciting and managing reviews, visual content optimization and voice optimization.
Tehsin then dove into the findings of Uberall’s recent Voice Search Readiness report, which analyzed the voice search readiness (VSR) of 73,000 businesses in the Boston Metro area, ranging from SMBs to large enterprises, taking into account:
- Percentage weight for directories – based on which directories are most important for feeding voice search platforms
- Percentage weight for business information – based on the listing information that is most important to have accurate
Some notable findings included:
- The bulk of VSR comes from Google and Google Maps, Yelp and Bing
- 1 in 5 businesses have a voice search readiness (VSR) score of 5% or under
- The average VSR score was 44.12%
- SMBs are more likely to go at it alone, but are least likely to be optimized (24.6%)
To download the report, visit https://m.uberall.com/uberall-report-voice-search-readiness-us-2019.
You can view the recording of the webinar below:
For more info about LSA’s webinar series, visit: https://bit.ly/LSAwebinars.
