How customer experiences are redefining local marketing online and offline.

Top brands set themselves apart by crafting seamless and positive customer experiences as soon as a customer finds one of your locations – online or in-person.

Those exceptional local experiences, which we define as the intersection between local marketing and customer experiences, are imperative to build positive brand perceptions, delight customers, and encourage brand advocates. These experiences are a comprehensive journey that begins when a consumer searches for your brand and extends post-sale when they advocate for your brand.

If your marketing and customer experience teams operate independently, you’re not maximizing your business’ potential. Seamless integration, communication and collaboration between marketing and customer experience teams propel meaningful local experiences. Here’s an example of what this might look like in practice.

Crafting a best-in-class local experience

Let’s look at a quick-service restaurant brand with over 400 locations across the United States. To create positive local experiences, the brand leverages multiple tactics:

• Optimizing each location’s Google Business Profile and other online listings.
• Adding relevant, localized content to each location’s store-specific landing page.
• Actively monitoring reviews in aggregate and at the store level.
• Responding to reviews – positive and negative.
• Deploying surveys to gain valuable feedback.
• Analyzing sentiment in reviews, surveys, email campaigns and more to identify common themes for opportunities for improvement or to recognize stores that are excelling.
• Continuous frontline training to ensure top-notch service at every store.

In turn, this quick-service restaurant brand has become synonymous with superior service and is well-recognized as a customer-centric business. However, none of the aforementioned endeavors could have come to fruition without its marketing and customer experience programs intertwining.

For example, if the marketing team fails to update their online local listings when a location moves its address, customers will be frustrated when they show up to the wrong address. In fact, a recent study conducted by Rio SEO found 20% of local consumers are unlikely to visit a business with incorrect listing information such as address, hours and contact information. This negative customer experience may lead to a negative online review.

Negative reviews impact customer experience teams who are mining for this type of feedback and would then need to communicate to the marketing team that the listing needs to be updated. Similar experiences could be avoided in the future with quick, efficient communication between teams that results in staying in sync.

Empowering cross-department collaboration through top-notch technology

Taking on local marketing and customer experience endeavors manually is an arduous feat. Historically, a business would need to seek two different vendors to help simplify and manage both these efforts at scale.

Rio SEO and Forsta, a global leader in CX, employee experience (EX) and market research, have combined to power the first end-to-end customer experience solution, known as the Local Experience Platform. This platform enables brands to engage consumers throughout the entire customer journey, from discovery to purchase through to brand reputation and advocacy.

Visit rioseo.com/platform to learn more about the Local Experience platform and see it in action.