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Marketing

How an app and a website no longer make a brand

September 20, 2017 | 5 min read

For nearly 25 years, your brand universe has been centered around your website. Today there’s a new race to command more visibility for your brand’s people, places, and products across the internet so you can attract more customers.

Website + App = Your Brand… Right?

Since the start of the internet, your website has been your face for the world. Updated every 18 months or so, your brand’s website has been your source of truth. Then came the smartphone. Your brand shifted its focus to creating an app, which ultimately became a companion to your website — both places you controlled fully, to the benefit of your brand (and bottom line).

We’ve entered a complex stage for businesses in today’s era of intelligent services. Map search, mobile-friendly results, voice search, visual search, and more are changing the landscape quickly and eclipsing a brand’s website as the center of digital brand activity. In fact, according to a recent Yext study, brands receive 2.7 times more traffic across these third-party services than their on own website.

However, consumer attention is a finite resource, and you need to capture it when and where consumers are searching. With 2020 fast approaching, it’s time to look beyond your website and app, and give your brand the visibility and opportunity it deserves by becoming The Everywhere Brand.

What Is The Everywhere Brand?

The Everywhere Brand is a brand whose digital knowledge — the factual assets and attributes about a company’s brand, people, products, events, and locations — exists consistently and accurately in many online locations, not just on a corporate website and app.

A brand’s digital knowledge includes its address, hours of operation, phone number, photos, credentials, locations, and office hours. Even more granularly, digital knowledge can include the availability, price, location, and ingredients of specific products as well as the date, time, location, and content of brand events.

Your digital knowledge lives across hundreds of intelligent services including Google, Apple, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, Instagram, Snapchat, MapQuest, Waze, Siri, Cortana, and Amazon Alexa. These are the places your customers seek instant information in the moments that matter. And it’s up to you to ensure the information that appears about your company in each service is on-brand, accurate, and up-to-date.

How Do I Build The Everywhere Brand?

Friend, marketing guru, and all-around good guy Jay Baer and I just co-authored an ebook on this very subject. You’ll learn about these seven key traits that you must develop in order to be an Everywhere Brand:

  1. Customer-Centric
  2. Active
  3. Organized
  4. Real-Time
  5. Granular
  6. Responsive
  7. Innovative

These traits are imperative to becoming an Everywhere Brand and will teach you the importance of having accurate data everywhere consumers search. You will also learn how to experience exactly what consumers see about your brand across every device, and discover how to fix bad data problems with a combination of people, process, and technology.

Enter the Digital Knowledge Manager

It’s become clear that marketing needs a new role — one capable of reaching across various internal groups within your company. You need a role capable of arbitrating internal sources of customer-facing digital facts about your brand, people, products, and locations. You need a role capable of managing all the digital assets a company has (or has yet to build) in a way that extracts the most value from each and every element. You must have someone who can properly align your programs, processes, and people to ensure the information about your business is accurate on every device, service, and platform consumers use today. You need a Digital Knowledge Manager.

Start to see your brand from every angle. Fix your inaccurate information. Bring the right people to the table. Deliver information about your brand in real time. Don’t be afraid to get detailed. Work on those star ratings. Be an innovative risk-taker. These are the true characteristics of The Everywhere Brand.

So what are you waiting for? There’s no time like the present to become The Everywhere Brand. Grab the free ebook today and let me know what you think on Twitter (@jkrohrs).

Jeff Rohrs, Chief Marketing Officer, Yext.

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