Tari Haro is chief marketing officer of SIM Partners
By Tari Haro Managing your local listings is no longer just about controlling your brand. It is about creating customers by owning the next moment of search with location data. Being findable, while still important, is table stakes when it comes to winning with mobile consumers. To accelerate the velocity of the customer journey, multi-location enterprise brands should make their location data actionable. Movement on moment Making your data actionable means combining data and content to own the next moment – or the action that occurs after a consumer finds you. An example of a next moment is a consumer downloading a mobile wallet offer or a patient booking an appointment with a doctor using a scheduling widget on a physician profile page. Next moments are big. As difficult as it is to become visible in a search result – the near-me micro-moment – it is more challenging, but more rewarding to create content and experiences that convert consumers into customers. To own next moments, brands need to deliver compelling content and experiences built on a foundation of location data. Brands can create contextual content in many ways, such as a well-crafted offer for 20 percent off a purchase at a local retailer when a shopper is near or inside a store, or a notification from a restaurant about a special event. Accurate location data ensures that a consumer has a seamless experience finding the business. A contextually relevant offer accelerates the journey from search to purchase. When you use a local marketing automation platform to scale contextually relevant content and location data across multiple locations, you scale the benefits, too. Food for thought A mobile wallet offer multiplied across hundreds and thousands of locations can engage customers at scale, not simply in one place. When location data is combined with customer data such as demographic profiles as well as other contextual data including weather conditions, the results can be further amplified. Making your location data actionable also means collaborating with the partners in your ecosystem to do the work on the back end that is needed for consumers to take a desired action, whether ordering food from your restaurant or walking into your store. For instance, a restaurant should form a relationship with GrubHub, the online food ordering service, and ensure that its information is accurately listed to encourage nearby customers to order its food. Local search data resides in an ecosystem of publishers, partners, and distributors beyond your local listings. ESPECIALLY AS mobile devices proliferate, we believe that owning the next moment of search is essential for brands to compete at the local level. As Google recently discussed in I Want-to-Go Moments: From Search to Store, consumers armed with mobile devices have at their fingertips the means to search for brands, compare them, and make purchase decisions faster than ever. Tari Haro is chief marketing officer of SIM Partners, Chicago. Reach her at tharo@simpartners.com.