Local SEO: Can We Drive ROI to Brick-and-Mortar Stores?

One of the more challenging facets of digital marketing is converting your intuitive digital ideas to promotions that would work on the ground—that is there would be an actual influx of business in your physical store. However, things you thought of in the digital sphere seldom work in the physical world or if it does, then the mechanics would be convoluted.

Despite this, it would be wonderful to have a tool that tracks return on investment for digital initiatives that actually translated to traffic in the physical store.

Yext + Uber

This is precisely what tech company Yext did with its partnership with Uber. The two companies teamed up to revolutionize business as we know it today. Yext, as a location data and presence management services provider, puts its clients into pertinent listings that would come up when there is an inbound marketing query for a business. On the other hand, Uber, as a transportation option, would literally drive the customers to the business.

When browsing the company’s listing, the “Get a Ride with Uber” button would be accessible to clients, which would enable them to get a ride to the business right then and there. This means that potential customers browsing a company’s listing can immediately have the option to book an Uber that would drive them to the store’s physical destination. It also has a useful function wherein customers are driven at a specific drop-off location (i.e., the entrance), and they wouldn’t have to bother with wrong pins or arriving at a nearby location.

Also, the business can send customers messages and promotions while the client is en route to the store such as discount coupons or unique offerings that are only available through the Uber partnership. There are also in-app purchases which make the experience more individualized.

Through this service, Yext and Uber show it would be possible to monitor actual ROI that stemmed from digital efforts to the physical store. Not only would the business be able to monitor how much foot traffic came from the partnership (i.e., how many customers rode Uber vehicles to the store’s entrance), they would also be able to closely monitor which products and services this customer would purchase. In the end, it is a win-win scenario, one that literally drove the customer to the store, and for the business to get a reliable client database.

This, therefore, raises the efficacy of investing in local SEO to organically track ROI. By partnering with a local listing platform such as Yext, businesses could gauge the performance of a campaign, and if we would have more credible data to bank on for further optimizing a local listing.

Still, digital to in-store-visit acquisition is still in the early stages, as we need more time to gauge how customers would react to being offered a ride to a store when they are merely browsing and considering their options. We can agree that it is a unique proposition that can just make a difference in the world of local SEO.