In a world of omnichannel search, a business’s social media spaces are places where consumers can find what brands have to offer at a local level. As consumers search across a larger palette of devices and channels such as social, a brand needs to view its social spaces as battlegrounds for prompted search.
When a business launches a new product, or, say, the latest Harry Potter adaptation hits the market, retailers are often challenged to update their location pages in a timely manner to show the availability of the product for consumers who rely on local search to find what they want nearby.
The company unleashed a slew of features with iOS 10, such as the ability to transcribe phone messages automatically. Three features in particular give businesses a glimpse at how the customer journey continues to increase in velocity.
The mandate for brands is simple: manage data attributes as a crucial element of your location marketing strategy. But it’s not enough to create attributes. You need to constantly monitor the ever-changing nature of your business and your customers and be ready to act on your attributes as needed.
For businesses that operate multiple store fronts, store locators are critical revenue-generating assets. But too often, the locators are treated like a forgotten tool sitting on the shelf, collecting dust and rust. Instead, they need to make the discovery process and conversion to offline visits as easy and personal as Amazon does.
Managing location data across hundreds and thousands of locations requires dedicated resources to scale the data and change it. Just as importantly, a business must treat location data as a competitive asset, organized and managed like inventory.
Google continues to remind businesses that location data is the foundation of their brands. The question is whether your business is taking advantage of the opportunities Google is creating to use location data to build your brand.
Duplicate information — or information that is exactly like something else — isn’t the problem. The problem is publishing inconsistent data (or publishing two different listings) that are referencing the same location.
The idea behind contextual marketing makes a lot of sense. But in practice, contextual marketing is getting pretty hairy, especially for location-based marketing. That’s because context is getting more complicated
Data amplifiers distribute and publish your data to a broader audience than you could ever do on your own — what I call the “network effect.” Your brand becomes more visible because your business data becomes more open and accessible to the influencers who are in a position to help customers find your business.
Many brands make the mistake of viewing location data as nothing more than plumbing for their local listings — or a component of a listing management strategy. But location data management is much bigger than listing management and data syndication.
Knowing your hours of operation is one of the first searches that customers undertake as they navigate their options when they look for things to do and places to go. Being available to potential customers means managing your store hours as a dynamic and scale-able data asset.
Apple has established a new standard for conducting “nearby” searches, thanks to an enhancement to the Apple Spotlight search functionality. This moves the consumer down the path to purchase in a few significant ways, including proactive local search content and results that change by time of day.
Microsoft recently announced that Bing turned its first profit since being launched in 2009. The company continues to extend its reach, grow its share of the search market, and add features that make it a stronger commerce tool. The question businesses should be asking is not whether Bing will catch up to Google, but whether they view Bing as a critical publisher to improve the reach of their location data.