AdAge : Hey, Groupon Clones, What's Your Marketing Strategy?

Having already achieved levels of success, Groupon and LivingSocial rely heavily on user discovery, communication, and online advertising to push their brands and names further into the market. In the battle of nomenclature, Groupon may have already won. What's the best way to describe your new daily deal, one deal a day, or social shopping site? For many, the words that convey the most meaning are, "Like Groupon." So if you're a Groupon clone, what is your online marketing strategy?

Getting there organically
While LivingSocial and Groupon get a lot of attention for the amount they spend on online advertising, a carefully executed organic search strategy could help young or small daily deal sites acquire traffic within their target markets.

Groupon has 32,000+ pages indexed in Google, and LivingSocial has more than 40,000. For Groupon, more than 100 of those pages are the main entry for a city, like www.groupon.com/los-angeles. However, very little customization has been performed on the city level to rank these pages for location-focused searches. 

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