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As more and more consumers get glued to their smartphones, marketers are finding novel ways to get a share of their attention and wallet. “Digital First” is the marketing war cry of brands to catch hold of these “Digital First” consumers. While brands have moved aggressively to build their digital presence using social media, ecommerce, mobile apps at a brand level, their physical stores are still far from claiming their rightful place in the digital world.
Most of the customer journeys today start from digital seeking answers to “what” and “where”. Your storefront is where you want these customer journeys to end. Do you have the right path to guide the customer along this journey? How can you create a level playing field for your physical stores in this digital first journey?
A well managed digital presence for your retail stores is the key to answer these questions and unlock these opportunities. A well managed digital presence includes a verified & sanitized Google My Business Listings, store pages for each location, location pages on Facebook & location data consistency across the entire digital ecosystem. These are the building blocks for a digital first approach to your retail marketing.
Having Google My Business listings can really help the visibility of your brand’s physical locations. Search is the strongest indicator of customer’s intent, so it’s important for your business locations to get discovered by these potential customers.
However, in order to ensure that your Google My Business listing is performing at an optimum level, it is imperative for you to ensure that the information on your Google My Business Listings page including Name, Address, Map Marker, Phone Number, Website, Business Hours and so on, is verified, detailed and as accurate as possible.
Each of your retail locations is unique. Building unique location level digital presence is a must if you want to truly leverage the power of hyperlocal marketing and omnichannel customer experience. With unique location level pages, you can showcase product availability at location level, get customers to interact with your stores through chat or voice and move the customers seamlessly from online engagement to offline transactions. Building a network of store pages with a user friendly store locator, helps your customers directly find a way to your products and services. Not only these individual location pages serve as a great customer touchpoint but also improve the search visibility of your stores when customers search “near me”.
acebook and Instagram are today the largest social networks where most brands have built a prominent presence. While brands invest a lot of money behind building content & managing their brand presence on social media. The same is not true for their retail locations. As part of building digital presence for your retail locations, you should add location pages and a store locator to your Facebook brand page. You can manage content on all these location pages centrally to make sure a consistent brand image is maintained.
These location level pages help consumers to check in or tag the right location while posting on facebook or instagram.
While building your digital presence you need to make sure that there is a single source of truth for your location’s data on the digital ecosystem. While this makes sure that customers always encounter the right information about your store across search, maps, social media, voice assistants, store locators and directories it also helps build a better ranking in “near me” search results.
Digital Transformation Marketing Stack for Physical Retail Enterprises.
