The Guide to Digital Presence Management

Today we're introducing our new whitepaper, "The Guide to Digital Presence Management," which explains in detail what local digital presence management is, why businesses should care, and best practices for creating a strong digital presence for business locations that effectively drives both online and offline store traffic.

This paper is intended to be a resource full of data, facts and examples. For this report we conducted a survey of 100 digital marketing professionals with results that clearly demonstrate the pervasiveness of inaccurate business listing information, and prove how big of an issue this is for both businesses and the consumers searching for them.

Download the full whitepaper here. See below for an excerpt from the full report.

What is Local Digital Presence Management?

With the explosion of mobile and fragmentation of the local search environment, managing the digital presence for businesses' local store locations has become more complicated, and also more important, than ever. Unfortunately many businesses do not fully understand the scope of what digital presence is and the negative effect a weak presence can have on customer experience and, therefore, their bottom line.

At its most basic level, a business' local digital presence is comprised of the places where information exists about that business location online, including directory listings, social profiles, store pages, and their own website. The content that appears across these different digital sources is largely the same, and includes:

• Name, Address, Phone (NAP)
• Hours of operation
• Products and services
• Specials and deals
• Reviews

The main goal of managing this presence information effectively is to ensure that the most critical business information is always complete, up-to-date, and easily discoverable for searching customers in order to drive offline sales in brick-and-mortar locations.

The challenge here is that the infinite nature of the Internet and sheer number of local search sites and apps where this data lives has led to a fragmented local search ecosystem with increasingly scattered information. This has left businesses scrambling to find a scalable and effective way to maintain the quality and discoverability of their listings. This fragmentation is also a major problem for the consumers who are finding – or in many cases not finding – a disparate variety of details about their local stores and services spread over an ever-increasing number of digital sources. Local digital presence management is a unified, comprehensive and scalable approach to overcoming the challenges of the fragmented local search market.

Download the whitepaper here for a detailed explanation of the importance of digital presence management and best practices for ensuring your business' presence is as optimized and effective as possible.