Local Listings Get a Real-Time Update from Brandify

Brandify has released an updated location-based digital marketing solution that combines the power of tech with the authority of the human brain.

The enhanced listings and syndication platform, Brandify 360, which debuts today, offers instant geocoded data distribution to ensure consistency of location placement — with location name, address, hours and photos — to 18 publishers including Google, Foursquare, Facebook, Bing, Manta, MerchantCircle, and Judy’s Book.

Brandify’s VP of business development Nip Zalavadia says the new platform has the ability to access and analyze huge amounts of data, but also uses real people to address details that often fall through the cracks of automated software solutions.

“It takes a human eye to recognize that these two listings are in the exact same location, even though the addresses are phrased differently,” Zalavadia says. “There is an automated process in place, but we don’t rely on it to catch all the inconsistencies.”

For multi-location businesses according to Zalavadia, the biggest challenge in hyperlocal is a combination of things.

“The accuracy and cleanliness of data is one thing,” he says. “It’s then also maintaining that data over time. One benefit of our solution is that listing information is going to be persistent. We partner with data aggregators to make sure that data is accurate over time. We don’t expect brands to go clean up the listings for over 200 different locations. This allows us to amplify their listing information across the web, and also allows us to solve the persistency problem. If someone signs up today, a year or two years later, because of how the program is structured, they don’t have to worry about their listings reverting back to old data.”

By proactively searching for inconsistencies such as duplicate listings, Brandify is impacting business listings at the core. Zalavadia noted an example that many brands have to deal with around this time of year: holiday hours.

“When your location has special holiday hours, you’re maintaining two sets of hours,” he says. “Once the holidays are over you then have to revert back to the traditional hours. Now, a brand manager or a marketing manager doesn’t have to worry about whether the updates are there or not. They can rest assured that holiday hours are affected in real time, and they can focus more on strategy and how can they improve their customers’ experiences, rather than be held down in the weeds of updating a listing on Google or Facebook.”

Instead of automating the listings management process by suppressing duplicated listings, data cleansing is performed by Brandify’s Social Data Matching technology to ensure listing data accuracy before syndicating and claiming locations. With nearly 20 years in the industry, Brandify has almost doubled in size from 40 employees to 70 in the past four years.

“Our clients find that every dollar invested in our holistic organic search optimization drives far more traffic to their locations with better attribution than the same amount in paid search advertising,” says Manish Patel, Brandify CEO, in a statement.

April Nowicki is a contributor at Street Fight.