HOW TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION AND GROW YOUR BRAND
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Tips on how to manage your business information and grow your brand with Shane Closser
- What DKM does is it manages all the public facts about your business and it shares it with every place that consumers you know are going.
- These intelligent search tools are starting to provide the answers. They’re scraping your websites and it’s more and more important that you’re able to manage that.
- Now I really need to think about how am I managing my presence where I’ve historically done it on a visual interface now I’m doing the voice interface.
- Step one is managing your brand right. How do people find you what are you about then you start to lean into the long tail of information that differentiates you?
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION AND GROW YOUR BRAND
HOW TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION AND GROW YOUR BRAND
Step one is managing your brand right. How do people find you what are you about then you start to lean into the long tail of information that differentiates you?
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Doug: Well welcome back listeners to another episode of real marketing real fast. Today we’re going to stretch your brain and we’re going to talk about something that we haven’t talked about in the show before and we brought an expert in to help us understand this new digital knowledge management and what that means. So Shane Closser is the head of industry and the general manager for financial services at a company called Yext. He leads all the financial services related activities including strategy product, ISV, and GTM partnerships. He is a published author and an award-winning speaker and his research has been featured by leading advisor firms like Forrester and Gartner and top software vendors like Adobe, Oracle, and Microsoft.
Over 18 years experience in the financial services in hi-tech, Shane specializes in strategic product management, digital platform architecture, and managing large transformational programs. His contributions have been integral to help organizations redefine their digital strategy to drive revenue, customer retention, and customer acquisition strategies. Before joining Yext, Shane was a global managing director for Accenture serving as their digital or global digital platform and the head of the NA marketing services. Prior to that, he built a customer experience practice from the ground up at is it Virt USA?
Shane Closser: Virtusa yeah.
Doug: Virtusa there we go I screwed that up so with that introduction welcome to Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today.
Shane Closser: Thanks Doug yeah thanks for the introduction. It was quite verbose and it makes me feel dated for all the things I’ve done over the time.
Doug: Well I like that I like to talk to people that have an experience I mean we’ve obviously worked with and have young people an organization but it’s great too, nothing beats having some experience.
Shane Closser: Yeah perfect it’s a new experience it’s the world’s changing quite drastically which brings us to today’s conversation you know what’s happening with voice and some of those other things. So I’m really excited and thanks for that the platform to be able to speak about that.
Doug: Well I’m super excited about this so why don’t we just dive in I mean I looked at obviously your background, your company what you’re doing and what’s going on and honestly I needed to have a look up to see what DKM was I thought what the heck is DKM and what does that mean so what are you share with our audience just an overview of kind of what you guys are doing and then we’ll dive into some of the topics of the technology in the marketing and how you’re using it and making your clients just buckets of money doing that.
Shane Closser: Alright perfect, I’d be glad to. Yeah, all right so let’s break down what DKM is the drill knowledge management and so historically when you’re a financial professional or just you know a professional or have a small-medium business you need to update your information in lots of different places. So you go to Google you go to Facebook you go to Yellow Pages there are hundreds of these different places that you need to update your information, yet the individual it’s hard enough for them just to manage their own digital presence on their website right so what DKM does is it manages all the public facts about your business and it shares it with every place that consumers you know are going. So it can be voiced networks so it could be like you know Amazon Alexa it could be Apple Siri it could be Microsoft Cortana it could be search engines you know Bing, Yahoo, Google it could be social sites it could be mapped directories so ultimately we’ve developed a lot of API’s to be able to put your information out there.
So at that moment of intent when you know somebody gets a referral and they’re like add Doug’s just this great guy you should use him for some digital marketing activities and then go to Google or they go to any of those other things I listed that they actually find you. This is free versus you know needing to pay money for advertising just to be able to show up but whether you show up or not it’s based on just managing your data. Your data starts to come down to things like obvious your name, title but like the kind of that kind crawl walk run of information as initially it’s you know what we call nap age so its name, address, phone number, hours and then you start getting into other kinds of things based on you know what’s important to you like the product specialties are there kind of things that you need to highlight.
Doug: Well that’s really cool so your platform manages all that content then?
Shane Closser: Yeah and you know for individuals and something you know why we would love you use the platform you know I just want to call out something for the viewers, it’s something that you could do today. You don’t need technology to do this you can go to each one of those sites and figure out what’s important for you and update your information, but as you start to build more of an online presence using technology will just save you time and it will also help you start to optimize that presence. That’s really what DKM does.
Doug: There you go I appreciate the introduction like I said I looked it up because I didn’t really know what it was so I’m always excited to learn new things.
Shane Closser: You know it’s changing I mean I think what’s fascinating right now Doug is you know right now the web is the center of our brand like so we create a website and that website has some pictures and has some information about this and what we’re starting to see is while it’s still important as we start to look forward, other channels are becoming more dominant. So for instance via Wikipedia, everybody knows Wikipedia you could go look up you know some like flying squirrel and see all the different types of flying squirrel out there.
Now what was interesting is Google came out with answers around that so it started taking the definition of a flying squirrel from Wikipedia and now you can see that sourced in Google, of course, quotes Wikipedia as a source but just by doing that, 25 percent of the traffic dropped to Wikipedia when that happened and so that’s what these intelligent search tools are doing is they’re starting to provide the answers, they’re scraping your websites and it’s more and more important that you’re able to manage that, creates you know then they customer experience because now I don’t have to go to navigate multiple different websites and I can just go to these intelligent services and start to find exactly what I’m looking for and then take the next step call, somebody, get driving directions, etc.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION AND GROW YOUR BRAND
HOW TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION AND GROW YOUR BRAND
Step one is managing your brand right. How do people find you what are you about then you start to lean into the long tail of information that differentiates you?
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Doug: That’s pretty cool. Now what you know when you and I started chatting before we started recording today one of the things that really caught my ear was when you said hey Alexa find you know in your case be fine Shane at Yext and Alexa would go hunt you down and track you down and I don’t currently do anything in the voice space, but I’ve heard a number of people talking about it and using it and I looked at your website and it kind of backed up what I’ve been reading about as well in terms of consumers using that now as the first point of entry to find services, find companies, or find individuals. Do you want to share you know what you see happening in terms of how voice searches is today and where it’s going to go?
Shane Closser: Yeah definitely so let me share with you some interesting stats from some research that we’ve done. So one is based on comScore and Gartner, they said that voice by 2020 will be 50% of all search. We’ve also seen that for instance, Ford as of last year started putting Alexa and all their new cars and we saw Lennar I think it was announced March this year is the biggest home builder so they’re starting to put Alexa and these connected or smart speakers into homes now and so you know you have this connected car connected home but people are you know they’re going to navigate to the easiest channel, like whatever is more convenient for me is something I’ll adopt. So we’re seeing a huge adoption of voice regardless of all these statistics.
I think you know one in three households has a smart speaker today and right now it’s you know Apple, Amazon, and Google, and Microsoft that are kind of really going at that space hard and a lot of people have been focused on just kind of SEO search engine optimization ranking but now they really need to think about how am I managing my presence where I’ve historically done it on a visual interface now I’m doing the voice interface. So and that’s ultimately one of the things that Yext does is you know we’ve announced just a few weeks ago our partnership with Amazon Alexa and we’ve already had a lot of these with Google or Microsoft etc. to really you know make sure that our clients are going to be prepared for that journey which is why that was such an important kind of integration and partnership for us.
Doug: So well okay so now you’ve scared me I pride myself on you know spending at least an hour to an hour and a half a day looking at new technologies and where the world’s moving and you said a number so listeners if you didn’t hear 2020, so we’re talking a couple years actually not even a couple of years it’s the third quarter of ‘18 so we’re talking you know less than a year and a half that 50% of all search would be conducted by voice.
Shane Closser: Yeah that’s by comScore and by Gartner. Now what we’re seeing like we’ve done a lot of research on this and here’s kind of what I would break it down, as you know I think Foresters come out with like the hype cycle and so what you start to see us as these things there’s a lot of hype around them initially and then it doesn’t translate to what your expectation was of that product. So everybody goes by is one of these smart speakers, we’re at the hype cycle and you plug it in and you try to do all these things and you’re like didn’t really give me the answer that I was looking for. So now we’re in this what we would call trough of disillusionment, so our expectations are really low but this is really where you start to see these big market gains because a lot of the innovation now starts stepping in and enhancing these smart speakers to provide more value.
You start to see real market share and start to happen and so we saw this with chat like I was talking about chatbot and now chatbots are coming out of that trough of disillusionment and they’ve come to kind of this plateau enlightenment. It’s funny how there are all these different names for things. But that’s when you really start to see people start to pick this up and really use it for important transactions like you know what’s my bake balance, where’s the nearest store, who’s the best financial adviser near me that speaks Mandarin and that focuses and family planning, people are thinking about all those issues right now and they’re starting to kind of think through what’s called a knowledge graph which is how they’re organizing all their facts about their business to be able to answer those questions intelligently across their website, across chatbots and across voice and these intelligence services that I’ve heard you talk about.
So that’s kind of the area of opportunity that you know everybody should really start to think about is like step one is manage your brand right. How do people find you what are you about then you start to lean into the long tail of information that differentiates you maybe it’s languages you speak, maybe it’s certifications, maybe it’s different markets that you focus on, and then you start to then ask a lot of those content questions like yeah I’ll stick with financial services because that’s where I spend a lot of my time, it’s asking you know should I buy something, what are the available choices? You want to just be the authority on all of those different parts of the content so you know you create the content that you want to be able to make sure that you can kind of intelligently put it together and kind of this knowledge graph mechanism which is another capability that Yext provides.
Doug: Well one of the things that I thought was interesting looking at your background and why I was excited to talk to you and share with our listeners is because of the work that you do in the financial services. I often would hear people in my business or my clients say well you don’t understand you know my business is so unique or by you know I know a whole bunch of people that are in the financial services in terms of consultants, business, and financial planners is that you fall under the scrutiny of a whole bunch of different regulations that you know two of the big ones being FINRA and the SCC and so you know that gives me confidence that this would work for anybody. I mean if you can get if you can have the blessing of FINRA and the SCC it’s not going to be difficult to advertise your restaurant or your marketing business or your card or fill in the blank with this technology and make sure that you’re going to be compliant.
Shane Closser: Yeah compliance is a very fun topic there’s multiple different components of that but you know it’s just a kind of up level of conversation it’s one of the things that we see is people imagine people are struggling to create content especially when it needs to go through lots of rules and regulations and supervision but those same problems exist for every single industry because there’s so much involved with creating content. I read an interesting statistic you know by Accenture that they published and it was 80% of all the things that marketers are doing are going to waste. Now it doesn’t mean that of the 20% of things that are being delivered that aren’t going to waste that’s still driving at least a third of the business, it’s still one of the best bets that you could possibly make. It just means that marketers have more things they need to care about right, more channels, content that they need to create it’s not intelligently linked together.
There are missed opportunities and I think the biggest thing is why you see such a push for technology these days is because it can start so that marketers be marketers versus like immersed in email and project management and tasks because they’re trying to keep track of all these things that are moving that need to go out on certain dates and people that need approvals for. So the ability to leverage a platform to automate a lot of that for have the workflow to have reports to be data-driven, those are the kind of like the leaders that we’re seeing right now that are really starting to take market share. But what’s really interesting one would assume that they’re spending more, that’s not the case it’s just they’re being more efficient and effective with how they’re spending those marketing dollars and driving growth.
Doug: So can you give me an example then just because I’m not familiar at this space I’m not sure where our listeners are so listeners I’d be happy to see your comments on the post when this is published how many of you are using voice or intend to, could you give me an example of how somebody may use that you mentioned the financial services for example so like would I be able to say hey Alexa is Fidelity Mutual fund a good buy, am I going to get an answer back?
Shane Closser: Yeah and you know everybody go right now to a browser and just you know just type you know find the nearest Starbucks you could type near me and or you know whatever store that you want to find and you know you will see like does it show up and if it shows up does it have a picture I’m going to call that a knowledge card today so a picture of the store, it’ll say office hours and it’s like all branded. That’s called a structured answer. So you’re seeing you’re seeing this in every single online publisher right now because they’re preparing for this big voice wave. When that one structured answer will be provided over a voice interface, a smart speaker, but it’s happening now in these visual interfaces, search engines, and new maps and directories and you know connected apps so it’s happening today and you can see real-life examples of that.
All you’re doing is you’re managing your information so you’re claiming those listings and saying I’m the authority versus letting them figure out the extras themselves and you’re pushing the information into them the way that you want it to be presented. Maybe your logo your right headshot versus your one from some Facebook profile many years ago where you’re socializing with friends. So those are the things that happen or you have multiple duplicate accounts that show up but you should only have one. There a mess out there that needs to be cleaned up a lot of times so I would encourage people to kind of start with their you know the first-party website, then start to think about online services and then you start to move into chat and voice as that next step.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION AND GROW YOUR BRAND
HOW TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION AND GROW YOUR BRAND
Step one is managing your brand right. How do people find you what are you about then you start to lean into the long tail of information that differentiates you?
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Doug: Yeah I’ve seen about using the chatbots and we’ve looked at that we haven’t gone there yet I think it’s still kind of early days and the people that are using it or kind of I think they’re still using it as a broadcast mechanism and not really engaging. I just want to dig a little bit deeper so you set a structured answer and claiming your spot so can you explain to me and to our listeners you know what does that mean? So if you’re not you know if you assume you’ve got your branding set up and your website set up and you’ve got your social media set up and the photos are current the links are current and your bio is accurately described, your products and services and that you offer what do you mean by claiming your spot using a structured answer?
Shane Closser: Yeah so I guess if you are just to go and do that Starbucks near me or even coffee near me, what you’ll start to see is you’ll see you should see a map and then it’ll have a map and it’ll say A, B, and C and it’ll show the three closest Starbucks near you and they’ll show the distance as far as away from you and then you’ll be able to sort those things based on like what’s open now, ratings, etc., so when I say claim your listing you are going to Google and you’re saying you know I represent Starbucks or you know I represent Shane Closser and I’m a consultant out there or just some professional so I’m claiming my identity in these listings. Then I’m putting the information that I want in there so I’m putting the right address and then the right phone numbers and you could go then to Yahoo then you could go to Microsoft and then you go to other places and you can do that same thing over and over again.
That’s really kind of you’re starting to claim your identity in these areas so as people use them to find you because they’ve been referred by a friend or you’re doing some marketing or you’re building your local brand in that industry, that you show up. Then the structured answer is what you saw within that you know search engine the result where you saw the map. So if you, for instance, hit like Richard Soh like Santa Clara California you he’s a he’s an insurance agent and you will see not a list of results, but you’ll see one results show up at the top and we’ll say farmers insurance – Richard Soh, and it’ll show his ratings and reviews like those are critical, those are another component that people should really start thinking about how they’re managing you know the reviews that are being said about them online and how they respond to those reviews and how do they solicit reviews.
Because it’s becoming more and more important as people search for I want to find the best of whatever industry you’re in. then there’s driving directions and there are hours and there’s a lot of other information that you can manage but that’s kind of the structured answer. You could go say that same thing on a smart device Alexa, Siri, and you know it’ll start to show up.
Doug: Yeah I did that while you’re talking so I just typed in insurance agent near me and I looked to see how many came up and how far and like you said so there were the structure to answer here’s the here’s who we are you know I’ve got you to know by average ratings 4.8 stars and it goes through all those details so I’ve seen that when I’m using my smartphone digitally or I’m looking at Yelp for a restaurant review. So how do you construct that answer for voice?
Shane Closser: So a lot of times with voice it’ll be you know so Google has what’s called their own version of a knowledge graph and so you know within 2012 they started creating this concept of a knowledge graph. Within last year they, for instance, they came out and we started supporting financial professionals and locations and you know those financial professionals there are certain types right it could be a mortgage loan officer a financial adviser or insurance agent, I could be located in a branch, you know there could be ATMs associated with a branch like there’s all of these things that need to be connected and related and a lot of times they have different contact numbers, different phone numbers, different pictures.
So it’s an evolving space that you see but by claiming your information or you know by using DKM platform like Yext you can then provide that data to them in the right format so that they can consume that and you can start to show up. Now with voice, I do want to call out to different things. So there’s a voice skill and then there’s voice discovery. Voice discovery is really the use case I’m talking about. Voice skill is something different where you kind of have to go to each of the publishers and you set up a bunch of rules and you develop that skill. And that’s for things like I want to check my account balance or I want to you know to process something. There’s a little bit more work involved in that that’s more transactional and service related. I’m really speaking to the discovery and the marketing side.
Doug: Okay yeah that makes sense I would hope there’s a little bit more required for me to say hey you know to check my bank balance, pay my credit card, and do this or that have happy to know that there are a few more steps involved than what I may do as a marketer to claim my spot
Shane Closser: Yes exactly, exactly.
Doug: So with just so I understand it’s going to repeat back to you what I think I heard so using a service like Yext to manage this data would allow me or leverage me or reduce the amount of time was required to get this data formatted and distributed in a proper manner to all the platforms is that kind of what you’re saying?
Shane Closser: Yeah and so you know what Yext provides is you know A, you can go and sign up for an account yourself today all right as an individual or a small to medium business you go to the site and you can just register you know get all set up and now what it allows you do is then you would go in and you’d update your information and you could turn on features that you want right.
So if I want a web page because I don’t have a web page I could have that kind of web page about myself, if I want to turn on reviews and I want to do review monitoring and I wanted to review response, I could turn that module on, you know if I want to understand competitive insights so I want to see great how am I racking and stacking against competitors in this zip code like within so many square miles of myself you know for these keywords that we’re all fighting for like and understand what kind of reviews are they getting versus am I getting. Those data-driven capabilities that feature that you can start to turn on with you know digital knowledge management system.
Doug: So how long does it take for someone to go in and get set up to get this up and running?
Shane Closser: I mean literally you can log in update your information and you know start publishing it very quickly. It’s not you know a lot of times when we think about building websites you know everybody’s thinking months. This stuff works very very quickly especially for listings use case which is you know updating my information pushing it out to all these different places.
Doug: Wow so there we go that stretched my brain a bit today holy smokes it’s really exciting I just loved to see where things are going. I watched a video and I think I referenced this person before Gary Vee I watched a video of him saying hey if you’re not using voice he says you’re behind and he shot a video and there they were out at a bar having some drinks and did exactly what you said. They picked up the phone and said hey Alexa find me or not Alexa but Siri find me the best Italian restaurant. This is real this is live and coming soon apparently within a year and a half, half our traffic will come from that.
Shane Closser: Yeah and what’s funny is even those restaurants like we have three big business segments and we’re powering a lot of those restaurants and menus that you hear about reviews about the restaurant. So it’s happening in every different industry is my point. Then it’s becoming a more and more important thing again 73% of high intent traffic that is looking to do something with you is you know at these intelligent services and so it’s really important to be able to manage that and start to focus on your brand and your presence online.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION AND GROW YOUR BRAND
HOW TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION AND GROW YOUR BRAND
Step one is managing your brand right. How do people find you what are you about then you start to lean into the long tail of information that differentiates you?
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Doug: So what are the three or what you said there are three or four big segments that you really have a deep understanding of?
Shane Closser: Yeah so we I mean we work with you know virtually every single industry out there but are three big segments our financial services, health care, and then food and. So food it’s you’re managing a lot of menus and you know healthcare doctors and clinics and being able to find them in locations, then you kind of heard me talk about you know financial services and the different industries within that. But you know topical clients, small medium business, independent, you know professionals out there, attorneys, realtors, etc. are all kind of using the platform and it was really fascinating is I’m seeing them all come together. So in financial services now a lot of the branches are starting to have cafes and they’re starting to manage events.
Like events is something else I should have mentioned that you know Yext manages and we just release that a few weeks ago to kind of manage events out there but you know you’re having local events that you want to publicize, you have menus now in branches with these cafes and you have people that aren’t necessarily financial professionals but that are more of like financial ambassadors which are like people in the community so what you’re seeing is this kind of revival of a lot of these historical entities and locations and businesses to be more lifestyle oriented. So yeah it’s very fascinating kind of trend that we’re starting to see is it all blends together.
Doug: So does that mean when I get off the plane if I fly East and I get off the plane a Montreal and instead of asking my cab driver hey what’s happening or my Uber driver what’s happening in the city this week and in most cases they don’t know like I could just say hey what’s happening in the city for sports because I want to take in a sporting event hey the Habs are playing can I just to StubHub and order tickets kind you all this through voice?
Shane Closser: Yeah we can do that right now through a lot I mean you just go to Google I’m like what are the events and you’ll see all those events and Yext is able to come up you know publish to those various different event network so it could be a Facebook it could be a Google could be Eventbrite, but yes the same thing with voice. What’s interesting around voice is they’re starting to just rapidly mature so all the same things that were able to do via the web you start to see being able to do via voice now.
Doug: That’s cool so you guys so using your platform looks after kind of everything so it’s going to look after what I need for voice, is going to look after what I need for you know what we consider a traditional Google search?
Shane Closser: Yep absolutely.
Doug: So being that you guys are in this what I would call pretty leading-edge at least from you know what I would say my standpoint I would often go to events with the Direct Marketing Association and different events like that and I would find that a lot of the technologies and people we meet are probably you know it’s a couple years before I would see it transition down into small business. So given that you guys are just kind of charging along and leading the pack here, what are you most excited about in the next six to twelve months?
Shane Closser: Yeah I think you know what we’re starting to see is just more intelligence coming to the picture. So how are we using data to inform our strategies, seeing a lot more automation because people need to care about more things but you know they’re not having more resources to do that? I think those are some of the big opportunities in front of us and obviously keeping an eye on voice you know and chat is still really big like I personally have ordered pizza on using Domino’s Facebook chat messenger and it’s awesome like it’s so quick. Just kind of seeing this channel shift is another thing that we should start to prepare for is you know people want answers quickly they don’t want to wait on calls they want to have things conform to them and so you know it’s just consumerism that really what we see now.
Doug: Yeah and as a marketer a funding more difficult I mean it’s funny we had the gym we go to they were had a have they had a power outage in the area because they’re doing a lot of construction there and I got a note over Instagram. I’m thinking when did Instagram direct messenger become a way to communicate to tell me that we needed to move, but anyhow you’re right so people use what they’ve got and what they’re comfortable with and how they’re connected to you so make sure the information that’s out there is correct.
Shane Closser: Yeah perfect everywhere.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION AND GROW YOUR BRAND
HOW TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION AND GROW YOUR BRAND
Step one is managing your brand right. How do people find you what are you about then you start to lean into the long tail of information that differentiates you?
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Doug: I don’t know perfect but I’m trying you know perfect would be ideal I’ve given into the let’s take some imperfect action so I would say to the listeners get started do the best you can and refine it over time.
Shane Closser: Yeah I always like saying don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good.
Doug: Yeah that’s funny so I went to a borrow a line from one of my favorite authors Tim Ferriss and I’ve read a number of his books and one of the questions that he asks when he was writing his last book is what is some of the bad advice you hear in this space today?
Shane Closser: Yeah I think the bad advice would be there’s anybody that says they know what’s going on with a voice and authoritative or they’ve got like the silver bullet or like hey I have these like five listings like it’s all about you know one publisher over another like I would be very very wary of that because if you’re following the engineer is in any of these places like they’re making thousands of changes each year to keep up with this market. No one knows what’s going to happen and so all you can do is hedge your bets and just make sure that you have coverage across all these places. Like for financial services who thought Yelp would have become so six months ago I would have never I would have I would have argued all day long that Yelp would not be important to financial services and today like reviews are paramount, like it’s driving a lot of the kind of organic traffic in these sites and so it’s just really interesting.
You can’t predict it but you can just kind of prepare for things. You know obviously I would just say start to develop and think about that knowledge graph, you know how are you managing those things about yourself because you need to be the authority on your brand. Google will never do that as they will always be horizontally all these other publishers what would you be very good at discovering and solving like high-level horizontal issues, but you know people you just really start thinking about providing those deep answers within their specific verticals and being experts and getting that information out there. So those are the things I would leave you with.
Doug: Well I’m encouraged to hear you talking about Yelp. I never would have thought of financial services and I mentioned Yelp and I sometimes wince a bit because I’m wondering who’s going to go you use Yelp, but that’s kind of my go-to when I’m traveling to go to the concierge and say these are the places I want you to get me into but financial service it makes sense.
But you know like you said you know I think the other thing that our listeners need to think about is you know look at your analytics you can look at your analytics in your data and you can see what’s driving your business and what’s driving your traffic where people are coming from and in the work that we’ve done in financial services as an example, we get a better qualified more time on-site higher conversion client or prospect from Yahoo than we do from Google. I just think it’s because of you know I’m just we’re just speculating that it’s because of the Yahoo Finance has built up this inherent value so can we get as much traffic from Yahoo as Google now but we get a better visitor but we still advertise as you said on both and MSN right.
Shane Closser: Yeah exactly yeah it’s again there’s no silver bullet you just can spread out your odds, look at the analytics which is the data-driven marketer that is the one truism that will last decades. You know this is this has been great Doug and I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and you know please feel free to have people go to my LinkedIn and or they can go to Yext.com and find out more about information there’s a blog there with you know lots of different research papers and facts that people can read up on about all this and you know kind of how to papers too.
Doug: Well excellent I really appreciate your time I really like the insight that you shared and I think hopefully we stretched some people’s thinking a little bit to look a little bit beyond what they’re doing. So the best place to reach you would be at your website Yext.com?
Shane Closser: Yeah.
Doug: And then you said LinkedIn’s your is your favorite go-to for social?
Shane Closser: Yeah I post a lot of the things on my LinkedIn profile too, so Shane Closser at Linkedin.com.
Doug: Excellent you’re also on Twitter as well or at least Yext is on the Twitter as well, follow them. So I want to say thanks so much for taking time out of your day and investing in our audience by sharing some of your knowledge.
Shane Closser: Thank you Doug,
Doug: Thanks for tuning in listeners as usual sure we transcribe the notes will have all the contact information for Shane and for Yext. I know I’m super excited and I’m going to take a deep dive into this and see you know what we can learn and how we can implement this for a client. So until our next episode, I look forward to serving you.
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HOW TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION AND GROW YOUR BRAND
Step one is managing your brand right. How do people find you what are you about then you start to lean into the long tail of information that differentiates you?
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