Marston’s Doubles Site Search Volume and Optimizes for Conversions with Yext

Marston's has been running restaurants and brewing beer for over 180 years. Today, its rich heritage lives on across a patchwork of venues that includes traditional taprooms, family restaurants, and fashionable downtown bars. The brand has a long legacy of delivering an exceptional guest experience, and this fundamental commitment to its customers continues to define every aspect of Marston's business strategy.

As Marston's grew, it became increasingly difficult to manage business information and customer feedback for it's 1,000 brick and mortar locations. The business needed a scalable solution for improving its digital footprint, and Marston's recognized that they required a holistic approach if the brand wanted to live up to its values and provide an enhanced experience at every stage of the online customer journey.

The business ultimately chose Yext to execute a comprehensive digital transformation through its marketing solutions framework. As a first step, Marston's built out a robust CMS — a brain-like database that stores all of a business's most important information. Once their CMS was populated with restaurant data, Marston's used Yext Location Listings to ensure accuracy and boost discoverability across 200+ networks like Google, Bing, Facebook, and Yelp.

Marston's can now easily and simultaneously make location-specific updates to business hours, address data, and more. In 2020 alone, Marston's made over 170,000 updates to location listings. "Before Yext, we'd update things manually, but it just wasn't possible to keep on top of all of our locations," says Emma Place, Senior Digital Marketing Manager. "Now, thanks to [Yext Content], all of our information is readily available and consolidated in a central source of truth. We've already seen how much this can drive foot traffic and improve experiences for our guests."

To increase conversions and gain valuable customer insight, Marston's elected to implement Yext Site Search. Customers ask natural language questions and receive direct, structured answers straight from the Marston's CMS. "We've been completely blown away by our experience with Yext Site Search," says Becky Hargreaves, Digital Marketing Manager. "It's been so interesting to see the questions being asked, and monitoring common queries allows us to better shape our content strategy going forward. It's fantastic to give guests the information they want in a simple, quick, and effective way."

As a final piece of the marketing solutions framework, Marston's adopted the Yext Reputation Management solution to monitor and respond to user feedback at scale. "Reviews are really important to us because they offer an easy way to access vital information," says Hargreaves. "Listening to and acting on customer feedback is an essential part of our customer service strategy."

Since May 2018, Marston's has monitored over 400,000 reviews with Yext. In the same amount of time, Marston's has increased its monthly average star rating nearly half a star, from 3.9 to 4.3.

"From an insights perspective, Yext has given us the ability to uncover granular details from reviews. We've been able to really look deeply into various areas of the business to identify common themes and areas for improvement," says Place. "We can see firsthand what guest expectations are and how that compares to the experience we're delivering."

Since launching Yext Site Search in October 2020, search volume on Marston's website has surged 260% and clickthrough rate in search results has increased by 330%. Between April and May 2021, 96% of searches were answered directly with structured data from the Marston's CMS. For popular queries, such as those related to menu items or reservations, this number rose to 99% and clickthrough rate in search results climbed to over 60%.

"Yext solutions now feed into our main business strategy and KPIs," says Place. "Yext's marketing solutions have given us access to information we wouldn't have had otherwise, and we're much more data-driven as a result. It's a testament to the complementary nature of Yext search solutions and the ease with which you can navigate their platform."