At Sales Renewal, we work with a number of clients who have a national presence and others who are strictly interested in the local market. Each requires a different set of online marketing strategies, services, and tools.

Local business can be tough to promote, as they need to stand out from the crowd in order to gain traction with their online presence. And there are so many listings options to keep track of. For this reason, we use Yext to manage much of our local efforts, as it provides single-entry access to over 45 listings, along with an easy-to-use, consolidated interface for updating and promoting the business across all the listings.

Earlier this month, I (reluctantly) agreed to attend a seminar that Yext was holding to demonstrate a new feature called Content Lists. Despite my reluctance, it turned out to be great. The premise behind Content Lists is that Yext customers can make their business listings stand out by taking advantage of any “extras” available – not only answering the basic “where”, but also the who, what and when of their business.

After the seminar, I immediately launched in to gathering the information, falling into four different categories, that I needed for our local clients and updating their listings. Here are just a few examples of what we can now do for our clients:

Products/Services – I was able to create a portfolio of a local business sign company’s work, showcasing some of the company’s specialties, which will now be displayed. What better way to show the quality of work they do than with photos of their products?
Bios – We can now display full bios of the dentists and other staff for our dental office clients – very useful since it will help them stand out when people do a search for dentists in their area.

Menus – Yum! Now we can tempt customers with (virtual) samples of your delicious fare!

Calendar – When our florist clients hold floral arranging workshops, I’m able to set up a “clickable” event to bring prospects directly to the sign up page on the businesses’ respective websites.

Now, almost all the “new” information I used for the enhanced local listings is also included on our clients’ websites, so it was very simple to gather. And we expect the benefits to be exponential – being able to also display the bios, portfolio, and calendar events in their local listings is sure to increase visibility and traffic, and it adds value to prospects and current customers. Stay tuned for the results!