Tune in or log on these days and it seems like all you hear about is the faltering economy, runaway inflation and the pending, inevitable recession. Without question, these concerns are valid and we see the impact on many of our clients.
However, we are fortunate to also have clients who are moving forward with expansion plans. This includes both opening new locations as well as integrating acquisitions.
When opening new locations, it is important and advantageous to have your Digital Business Information (DBI) synch with your brick-and-mortar opening.
With this in mind, we thought we’d indulge in a bit of recession-fear counterprogramming today and share our DBI checklist for expansion.
Getting Started
In effect, we are creating a Digital Grand Opening to mirror your physical location grand opening. As word gets out of your new location(s), it is important to ensure that online users can find and easily access relevant information.
The key to this effort is creating, claiming and populating your online profiles across the major search engines, online directories, social media sites, review sites and nav/mapping apps.
By doing so, you will ensure that accurate information about the new location is available where most online users are looking for you. In addition, establishing these new profiles will help build the foundation for your ongoing SEO efforts.
What Digital Business Information (DBI) Will You Need?
We realize that often when a new location opens (or even does a soft opening), not all of the DBI is fully available or permanent. That being said, here is a list of items we request from our clients for their new locations. We recommend gathering as much of this information as possible.
- Name
- Address
- Phone #
- URL
- Hours (including soft opening or temporary hours)
- Business Description (750 characters max)
- Logo and Photos (interior, exterior, team, products, showrooms)
- Call to Action or Featured Message
- Products and/or Services offered
- Conditions treated (healthcare professionals)
- Brands offered
Optimally, we like to have this information ready approximately two weeks prior to the physical grand opening so that we have ample time to build out and review assets.
First Steps
Opening a new location can be a hectic and exciting time. Myriad details large and small need to come together to successfully open the doors on that first day.
Because there is so much happening, we take a tiered approach to deploying DBI. Our initial goal is to launch a cross section of online listings that go live concurrent with the physical grand opening.
The first step we recommend is to build a solid foundation by creating online profiles on the top tier platforms. These include Google Business Profile, Facebook, and Yelp.
Utilize all of the information you collected from the list above to develop complete and accurate profile pages. If possible, incorporate some quality photos and video. Your new location will never look as pristine as it does on opening day! Also, take photos of the Grand Opening itself as that will make for great future content. Obviously, these profiles will be a work in progress and continue to evolve with the new location.
In setting up these initial profiles, you will want to take tracking into consideration. For each of these profiles, we work with our clients to establish utm parameters for the destination website or landing page. This allows for individual profile reporting in Google Analytics.
Phase 2 – Expanded Profile Distribution
Our next step is to expand DBI reach by creating additional profiles and syndicating them across the vast ecosystem of search engines, online directories, social media sites and nav/mapping apps.
This is most efficiently accomplished by using an online listing platform such as Yext. By inputting your DBI into an online listings platform, you can generate profiles across hundreds of sites including Yahoo, Bing, Apple Maps, MapQuest, yp.com and more.
Another benefit of utilizing a Listing Management platform is that you can then synch the profiles you previously built in GBP, FB and Yelp to allow for future updating and reporting from a single source.
Pro Tip: Check Map Pins
Once these additional profiles are established, we recommend checking pin placement on the Nav/Mapping apps such as MapQuest and Apple Maps. Remember, since your location is new many consumers will be using these apps to find you. It is essential to ensure your location is depicted correctly. In our experience, we do find errors in the initial placements that need to be corrected.
Watch For Dupes
It comes as a surprise to our clients but we often see duplicate listings being created prior to the Grand Opening! This happens for a variety of reasons including listing aggregators scraping the web for data and using it to update their databases.
It is important as a new entity to make sure to audit for these rogue listings. Obviously, we want all DBI a user sees to be company verified and all web traffic routed to the correct urls.
Fortunately, most Listing Management platforms do offer duplicate suppression capabilities. However, certain sites fall outside of this and need to be monitored individually. These include Google Business Profile, Apple Maps and Yelp among others. At DSG, we monitor these sites bi-weekly for any dupes and correct as necessary.
Summary:
We hope you find our Digital Grand Opening checklist helpful. The steps outlined in this blog show our process for synching your DBI with your physical location’s grand opening.
If you have any questions or need any help with managing your Digital Business Information, please contact us here.
