Yext CMO Jeff Rohrs on Moneyball for Marketing Podcast: Contextual Marketing in the Era of Mobility

Last week, Crimson Marketing's Moneyball for Marketing podcast featured Yext CMO Jeff Rohrs discussing how brands are using big data and marketing technology to help their businesses thrive. Location plays a fundamental role in our increasingly mobile, hyper-connected world, and Yext's Location Management platform harnesses that power to create unprecedented opportunities for brand marketers to engage local consumers.

You can listen to the full podcast on Crimson Marketing's website to learn:

• Why "mobile" means so much more than just smartphones for digital marketers
• Why offline is the new online
• How beacon technology creates unprecedented opportunity for meaningful brand engagement
• Why location data is the underpinning of all of this

"Mobile" Means More than Just an iPhone: It's a Consumer Perspective

As an individual consumer, when you hear "mobile," you immediately think of your smartphone or tablet device. But for marketers, "mobile" is more of a perspective on the developing behavior of consumers and how they interact with brands.

"It's about mobility in all its forms. I think sometimes we tend to think of mobile as just being the device, but 'mobile' is the fact that people are on the move, and they now are increasingly going to demand more context when and where they are out in the real world."

Offline is the New Online

"All of the technology that we have been deploying to provide personalized services over the last 20 years' website development, we are now beginning to think about how to deploy those same developments in the real world because consumers have hyper-connectivity with these smartphones in their pockets. The next decade is going to be about connecting people in the real world to contextually relevant information, which is why I like to say that offline is the new online."

Beacons Create Opportunity for More Meaningful Local Engagement

And when it comes to providing smartphone users with contextually relevant information, Bluetooth beacon technology has created a host of new ways for brands to interact with local consumers in a much more meaningful way. Yext launched a new beacon-enabled product, Xone, at the end of 2015 to help marketers capitalize on this lucrative opportunity, and engage high-intent customers who visit their store locations, both in-store and post-visit.

"93 percent of transactions in the US still happen at a physical location, but the problem is that an extremely low percentage – maybe 2 to 5 percent – of people walking through the stores' front door have their branded app downloaded on their phone. So brands are going to have to find other external, cross-channel and multi-faceted means of engagement.

And that's where this will get, there will be some complexity to this but our DNA is really about location. We come back in everything that we do product wise to leveraging location in ways that are meaningful again to both brand and consumer. And that's why we're pretty excited because if you then think even further into the future frankly we're there right?"

Location is the Underpinning of Digital and Mobile Marketing

"What this era of mobility has ushered in is this issue of fragmentation we need to address. And this trend is only going to accelerate because more and more players are coming into the market looking to add that contextual layer of additional information at the moment. Once you get location right, now you can begin to think about creating moments of engagement when people are in-store and then create ways to engage them afterwards. And that's where some of the location technologies I think in the future are going to get really interesting."

Click here to listen to the full recording on Crimson Marketing's website.