Tag Archives: Yext

Small Business Week + Yahoo! Localworks

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Happy Small Business Week, everyone!  To all of our customers who are building their businesses from the ground up, we appreciate the ability to work with you as you share your information, content, and business moments.

As you know, at Yext, our goal is to get perfect location information into every hand. Today we wanted to highlight a new tool from Yahoo! Small Business that is helping businesses do just that: Yahoo! Localworks.

 Yahoo! Localworks is a tool from Yahoo! Small Business that gives small businesses the ability to increase visibility to new and current customers and stand out from the competition on more than 40 top search engines, apps, and mapping services.

Onward!

Mobile + Location: Where Will the People Go?

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Working to get perfect location information into every hand is never as relevant as it is when we talk about mobile.  The more customers use their devices, the more places they can go, and the more need they have to find new locations.

One of the most popular activities on mobile devices is search, especially local search. When you are out with your phone, you are likely to look up a place you are headed – for directions, for a phone number, for information about whether you can buy what you need.  In fact,

  • 50% of all local searches performed on mobile device
  • 7 of 10 mobile searches = action within one hour
  • 9 of 10 mobile searches = purchase or visit

What We Are Seeing From Businesses – As mobile and local decision making get more closely tied, how are businesses reacting?  At Yext, we see three best practices from our customers:

  1. Ensuring mobile location hygiene to capture the intent of local search – Mobile is not only the place where a customer searches for somewhere she already knows; accurate location information is also the way to connect to more general local searches.  When businesses come up on mobile screens at the right time – on a map, in an app, or in a search engine – it might convert into the sale, or room booking, or dinner option.
  2. Enabling local discovery with fresh content – For many local businesses, mobile is the key to being discovered, the key to finding new customers.  On mobile and in local, people are often looking for specific information around a location near where they are – for a seasonal food item, for what’s happening on Tuesday, for what’s on sale.  In the store, sales teams can use their devices to update their location information – from open hours to events – in real-time to keep listings fresh and relevant.
  3. Differentiating with content creation – The killer feature of the smart phone is, of course, the camera, and the impact for business is that all employees can become local content creators.  With the right permissioning for brand protection, adding photos and videos to business listings is often the easiest way to create immediately richer, engaging experiences right when customers are looking.

What We’re Doing About It – At Yext, we are working to make mobile easy to manage for businesses in two ways:

  • First, we want to make it easy to reach customers with the best location information using our Network.  On mobile browsers, we connect our through 45+ publishers of maps, apps, and local search experiences and within apps environments, we work with 20+ applications, from HopStop to Foursquare.
  • Then, we want to make it easy to update and post new information – with our Android and iPhone apps.  Our apps allow you to:
    • Review your mobile listings
    • Update your Featured Messages as deals and products change day to day
    • Take new photos and videos as local content and automatically upload to your profile

We have built our network and our tools to help our customers grow their businesses through local search and local discovery.  By doubling down on mobile, we further our mission: to put perfect location information in every hand.

Find more information about Yext Mobile here.

Reinventing the business listing, with PowerListings+

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Yext is the company you trust for showing your customers where your business is located.  And when customers look to local listings when going from researching online to purchasing offline, they care not only where businesses are, but why they should choose one business over another.

For example, if you’re looking for a rare book, you want to know not only the address of the used book store, but also if they have the edition in stock, as well as the price.

That’s why today’s local search is broken: everything is only designed to give you answers about where a business is. But to make a decision about what to buy, customers need answers to “What’s inside”?, “Who works there?”, and “When should they go?”

When we looked at the existing local search ecosystem, we knew we could create something better. We knew that people need and want rich, local content and that it has to be accurate.  We also know that businesses want to provide this content, but they can’t.

Today, Yext reinvents the business listing by adding rich content than answers the who, what and when of your business with PowerListings+.

PowerListings+ content lists differentiate business listings and search results to go beyond the where and show customers why they should visit:

      • Products/Services – The ultimate product display
      • Bios – Showcase who makes up your business
      • Menus – Add flavor to your local listings
      • Calendar – Improve your community RSVPs

We’ve always wanted to advance the world’s local discovery.  For our business customers, our publishing partners and ultimately end users who need answers to their questions.

In the past two years, we’ve provided our 50 publishing partners with over 2 million updates for more than 100,000 business locations, providing people with results on tens of millions of local searches.

Today’s reinvention of the business listing further enables our mission: To put perfect location information in every hand.

Find more information about PowerListings+ here or contact us!

An Explanation of the Business Listing Problem

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People often find themselves coming to Yext after discovering that their business information is wrongly displayed on numerous sites across the internet. For some owners, even sites and directories where they had attempted to correct the information themselves were still showing up as incorrect.

As you can see from David Mihm’s depiction of The Local Search Ecosystem below this confusion is rightfully deserved.

local search ecosystem

The main source of confusion comes from the fact that there are so many different sources a directory or local search engine can get data from. There are a number of data aggregators who receive data from a number of different sources on the internet. They then do their best to clean the data and figure out the reason for any discrepancies between different sources. In general, this becomes a long and time consuming process, with data rarely coming from the business owners themselves.

Sometimes, business owners who run their FREE business listing report and see errors think that Yext is responsible for these errors. This is NOT the case. Yext will never alter the data of a business who is not a PowerListings customer. These errors are a result of local directories and search engines obtaining their data from a number of sources, none of which are the business owner themself.

Yext PowerListings solves this problem by putting the business owner in full control. Once a business owner claims their business listings through PowerListings they have COMPLETE control over their listings. After a business owner begins using Yext PowerListings the Yext Network partner’s only source of information becomes the business owner via the Yext PowerListings. The local search ecosystem goes from the complicated mess above to this simple illustration below with Yext as the hub of your local information.

yext local information hub

The next question becomes, what happens if a business owner decides to stop using PowerListings? If this happens, which we hope it doesn’t, then Yext simply releases control of the listings. The local directories and search engines return to getting their data from data aggregators and other sources on the net, and it becomes incredibly difficult for business owners to maintain complete control of their business information across the Internet.

Now that we’ve clarified the business listing problem, if you’d like to see how your business appears across the internet you can do so here for free!

How To Set Up Your Google Plus Local Business Page

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As a small business owner you most likely had a Google Places page to help customers find your business. Recently Google has decided to replace Google Places with the new Google+ Local pages. In order to simplify the switch from Google Places to Google+ Local we’ve come up with this step by step guide to setting up your business page.

The first thing you need to do is log into your Google+ account, or if you don’t have one, create one by going to plus.google.com. Once you’ve logged in, hover over “more” in the lower left and click pages. Google Plus

Then click “create new page” select the local business or place category and enter your primary business phone number.

Create New Page

Then click locate. Google will automatically search for your business based on the phone number. If it finds a business listing you can select it and edit your information, agree to the terms, then click create. If your business is not found click “add your business to Google.”

Select Business

Then include your basic business information like your business name, number and address, scroll down, accept the terms, then click create.

Enter Info

Princeton University Gets Hit by the Listing Problem

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At Yext HQ there is a friendly competition amongst the employees regarding which employee alma mater will be best represented. Right now, I believe that MIT and Princeton are tied at 6 a piece with Carnegie Mellon nipping at our heels.

As a Tiger myself, I’m proud to represent my school, not shy to wear a bright orange polo or drink my coffee from a Princeton coffee mug. So when a co-worker of mine pointed out the recent Google results page for the search term “Princeton University” I was angered by what I saw.

Google Places Princeton University

Prominently displayed in the Google results was the description of Princeton University as “Full of Shit University.” This is yet another example of why business owners and institutions need to be in control of their data instead of relying on data aggregators or crowd sourced information. If Princeton had complete control over their local information, you better believe this would have never happened.

princeton university google

Maybe this year when asked to donate to Princeton I’ll offer them a PowerListing instead of money.

Yext Secures $27M in Funding from Leading Technology Investors

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New investment to be used to expand platform that instantly syncs business listings

New York – June 12, 2012—Yext, the company that syncs business listings on 50+ publishers, today announced a $27 million Series E investment led by Marker, a new fund launched by Rick Scanlon, the founder of Crescent Point Capital Group, and Thomas Pompidou, a partner there.  Also participating in the round are CrunchFund and existing Yext investors, Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and WGI Group.  The capital will be used to expand the Yext platform.

“Today is a watershed moment for both Yext and anyone who’s ever found wrong information about a business online,” said Howard Lerman, Yext co-founder & CEO.  “By enabling businesses to instantly update their listings, end users find up-to-date info on our partner sites. We are delighted to welcome our new partner Marker as we expand our platform to synchronize the world’s local information everywhere.”

Yext has experienced explosive growth over the past year, now powering local information for 50,000 businesses on 50 sites.  Since September, Yext has powered 950,000 distinct location updates, saving millions of outdated local search results from appearing.

“Yext is solving a huge problem with the potential to serve over 20,000,000 businesses in the US alone.  The company has a market-leading product, a proven management team, and sits in the intersection of local advertising and Software-as-a-service (Saas), two of the largest and fastest growing markets in the technology industry,” said Richard Scanlon of Marker. ”We’re very excited to support their rapid expansion.”

“In just a short amount of time, Yext has established itself as one of the fastest growing companies in the New York Tech scene and has proven to be the category leader.” said Michael Walrath, of WGI Group and Yext chairman. “This investment validates a huge bet to transform the company.”

4 Innovative Strategies for Easier, Cheaper Localized Marketing

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By Ashley Furness, guest blogger and market analyst for research firm Software Advice.

Localized marketing is one of the most effective methods for making your brand relevant to the customer. Unfortunately, it’s also among the most difficult, expensive and time consuming.

But leaving it up to franchise owners and resellers jeopardizes brand consistency and is nearly impossible to track. Thankfully, technology developers in recent years have released new tools that make the practice easier, less expensive and more automated. Below are four strategies every national brand marketer should know.

Manage Local Search Listings

Yext PowerListings lets companies control their local search listings across 35 search platforms including Yahoo!, Yelp and Foursquare. The technology makes sure the correct address, website and phone numbers are listed. Marketers can also add images and timely promotions to those listings. These portals track how many times a listing showed up, where, and whether it was clicked.

“Every business wants to make sure they are everywhere consumers are searching,” says Yext Sales and Services Vice President Wendi Sturgis. Her company has run diagnostics on more than 200 companies’ local search results. At least 50 percent of those listings were wrong or missing. “That’s a huge missed opportunity,” she says.

With Yext, marketers can add custom promotions, descriptions and photos to search listings based on the location. These appear adjacent to the name of the company and address on the local search results page and are specific to that location. This saves marketers from needing to individually contact and negotiate with each search platform. Users can also instantly make changes to listings using a account dashboard.

Provide Customizable Marketing Assets to Local Affiliates

Digital asset management systems have long been used to make branded materials available to local marketers. But they aren’t specific to a location, nor do they track the promotion’s execution. New localized marketing automation platforms overcome this challenge by streamlining fulfillment and providing materials that are customizable. The technology delivers national-quality marketing assets to local marketers who can add in their own addresses, logos, social media buttons and other localized content. These assets include microsites, email templates, direct mail ads, in-store materials, online displays, social media messages, radio spots, outdoor displays and more. Users also receive timely, aggregated results from local marketing efforts. These can identify in-market trends and improve overall national campaign efforts.

Encourage and Use Customer-Created Content

Personal stories and recommendations are extremely powerful in today’s review-obsessed world. Thankfully, companies such as Compendium allow brands to creatively encourage, curate and promote customer-created stories. Patrons are invited to contribute their story in-person, through email marketing or “tell us about your experience” forms, among other avenues. Customers write about their experiences and submit photos specific to that location. They are then served tools to instantly share those posts with their own social networks. The prevents marketers from having to write unique content for every location. Additionally that content is atomically more likely to be shared and trusted by the writers social network.

Leverage On-Location Displays and Shopping Apps

Companies such as Adcentricity operate a network of in-store television screens, location-based shopping apps, in-window displays, digital projectors, radio partners and interactive gaming stations. Marketers can target segments by choosing geographically relevant settings. For example, if a company wanted to target young people, it might choose screens in trendy downtown bars. The technology can also auto-personalizes the message for the store, day or time.

There are undoubtedly other technologies that make localized marketing easier–and still more that address challenges not mentioned here (Google Adwords, Yelp! and Facebook). What solutions have you come across? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

10 Surprising Mobile Statistics For Local Business Owners

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There is no doubt that smartphones and other mobile devices are becoming an integral part of our every day life. Smartphones can be extremely helpful for looking up directions, researching purchases or just looking for a place to eat. With mobile usage on the rise it’s important that local business owners understand how they can take advantage of the change in customer behavior. Here are 10 interesting statistics showing why local businesses need to pay attention to mobile.

mobile advertising

1. 70% of smartphone users use their device when shopping in-store.

2. Only 33% of advertisers have a mobile optimized website.

3. There are 5 billion mobile users, 5x bigger than teh PC-based market.

mobile advertising

4. 61% of local searches result in purchases.

5. 50% of smartphone shoppers use a GPS/mapping app to find a retail location

6. 79% of mobile owners have used their device for shopping related activities

7. 62% of smartphone owners have used their device to check prices.

8. 71% of smartphone users have searched after seeing an ad.

9. It took 4 years for the internet to reach 50 millions users. It only took the iPhone 2.

10. There are 4x as many smartphone users as PC owners

For more interesting mobile usage statistics check out our full infographic here.

Yext Night Out: TechCrunch Mini Meetup NYC

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Last night we were lucky enough to be a part of TechCrunch’s inaugural Mini Meetup NYC.  The drinks were flowing, the tunes were blasting and New York’s finest were out in full force. We were lucky enough to be sponsors of the great event which took place at Bar13 last night from 6-10.

Along with ourselves there were some other great companies sponsoring the event including Traducto, WhatRunsWhere, Parlor, MyGenie, Return on Change (RoC), PeoplePerHour, andTouchTunes Interactive Networks, and thanks to MyPizza.com there was more pizza than I have ever seen in one place at one time. Anyone who stopped by the Yext table had the chance to walk away with a Yext Rubix Cube, which was a big hit.

I think the highlight of the night was the excellent rendition of Backstreet Boys, I Want it that Way. I’m not sure exactly who performed it since I was across the room, but kudos to whichever tech lovers were able to hit all the high notes in that one.

If you missed this meetup, hopefully we’ll see you at the next one. Here are some great pics from the night: