Small business economic activity represents about 44% of U.S. gross domestic product. This critical business segment has suffered disproportionately from COVID-19’s toll on the economy. Now, as we are in the all-important holiday quarter, what’s the current outlook for small businesses (SMBs)?

Many pundits and vendors serving the SMB market have been promoting and promising “resilience” for months. A new report from Yelp offers some support for this. But other data argue that challenges for SMBs and, by extension, their marketing providers will persist and may even intensify in the months ahead.

Yelp’s just-released Economic Average Report (or YEA) focuses on new business openings and reopenings during Q3 in the restaurant and food vertical. The report says that in Q3 new restaurant and food-business openings compared favorably to 2019 (“pre-pandemic levels”), despite the especially difficult circumstances of 2020.

That’s quite encouraging and argues a recovery is underway.

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MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for B2B marketing automation software platforms. This report includes profiles of 13 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons, pricing information, and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

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Snapchat users can now use their Snap cameras to find nutrition information of one million packaged food products and more than 12 million types of wine labels. Nutrition Scanner and Wine Scanner are powered by Yuka and Vivino, respectively, the newest partners of Snap’s AR developer platform Scan. Other partnerships allow users to look up products on Amazon, identify songs, dog breeds, plants, solve math equations and more. 

Why we care. The new tools — and Scan generally — are aimed at increasing user engagement with the app by adding utility to its camera. Visual search isn’t unique to Snapchat of course — Google, Bing and Pinterest all have lens technology — but Scan is unique in its partnership approach. 

Join us online December 8-9 for expert-led search marketing training, featuring just-announced keynote speaker Areej AbuAli, SEO Manager at Zoopla!

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The desire to bring together a far-flung team suddenly thrust into working from home led Integrate founder and CEO Jeremy Bloom to initiate weekly virtual town-hall meetings featuring special guests with a wide range of experiences. Beginning in March, Integrate staffers heard from the likes of high-tech CEOs, highly-competitive athletes, a professional rock climber, a Minneapolis-based police officer, a neurosurgeon and even Bloom’s sister, whose life was captured in the movie, Molly’s Game.

In this interview, we’ll hear from Bloom about the surprising insights gleaned from these town hall meetings, and how they can be applied to better cope with the “new normal.” 

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Many marketers may believe the use of drones is only good for aerial shots of buildings, venues, lots and other large spaces, but Rommie Mojahed, Director of Retail Leasing and Sales Investment for Arizona’s SVN Desert Commercial Advisors, believes marketers are selling the technology short as part of ongoing campaign strategies. 

“Especially now with COVID, I really hope to see the use of drone technology for marketing go far past the commercial real estate industry, because marketers are really missing out on a valuable tactic with high ROI,” he said. “If you are a marketer that depends on foot traffic in any way, shape or form, you need to be using drone technology — right now.” 

While the commercial real estate industry has built a foundation on use of drones in business, several industries are catching up in using drone technology and aerial images for marketing. Not surprisingly, architecture and engineering firms, as well as landscaping and agriculture companies have become regular users of aerial images in their marketing.

Another benefit of drone technology is its ability to capture data from foot traffic. Industries that could take advantage of this include retail, transportation, grocery, automobile, entertainment venues, public parks and municipal venues, and residential real estate. The private aviation industry has also been a quick adapter of aerial imagery marketing to showcase their fleet of aircraft.

Drone images can be used to identify foot traffic themes like peak rate and overnight activity, as well as the percentage of business versus social foot traffic. 

“Aerial images and drone videos can be a marketer’s best friend,” said Mojahed. “Building campaigns around who actually can be physically marketed to can be just as important as who is online.” 

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