Every day, retailers are faced with the challenge of ensuring brand consistency across the expanding digital landscape; brands need to manage an abundance of data. High street brands Schuh, Hunkemöller and Evans Cycles have recently chosen to work with Yext, the leader in Digital Knowledge Management.
Yext provides a platform for businesses to centralise and structure their store information and brand knowledge, to publish this accurately and consistently across the touchpoints which consumers use to discover local products and services. Improving consumer discoverability drives footfall to local stores and significant revenue opportunities.
The customer journey is changing. Consumers now browse for store and brand information across numerous channels, such as Google, Facebook, Apple Maps, GPS navigation systems, and voice assistants, rather than searching directly for information on a business’ website.
Schuh, the branded shoe stockist, with 118 stores in the UK and Ireland, has tasked Yext with controlling its local Facebook presence and increasing its visibility in organic search.
The brand knowledge published to Facebook will in turn affect Schuh’s search results in Google, as well as their entire digital presence across the digital universe.
In addition, Yext Analytics will provide Schuh with greater insight into its brand presence across the digital ecosystem, helping them to shape their retail strategy and drive product campaigns through other important channels.
Clair Masson, Schuh’s Head of Ecommerce, said: “The way our brand is presented across the web influences so many customer purchasing decisions, and with an increasing number of store locations and an ever advancing digital landscape, streamlining the management of this process is essential. Yext provides us with a single and solid platform, which allows us to publish crucial knowledge on local opening hours and customer reviews. This in turn helps protect our brand integrity across the web. Since March 2018, Yext has made over 49,000 updates to our business data, to ensure high quality and consistent digital knowledge across the ecosystem to boost customer engagement. Following implementation, we have seen an incremental increase in Google Customer Actions by an impressive 35%.
Evans Cycles, the specialist bike retailer, has selected Yext to deploy a scalable solution to manage their local store listings and pages. No longer do they need to manage the multitude of information manually. Evans Cycles can now run a centralised system of record to manage store information, allowing the company to regain control and publish accurate and consistent knowledge across the digital ecosystem, boosting their local online discoverability and driving consumers to their door.
For Hunkemöller, one of the largest international lingerie specialists with 830 locations across 25 countries, Yext will support their goal to double their physical footprint in 3 years, in providing a scalable solution to manage their brand assets. With a powerful brand image, and an abundance of rich content, Hunkemöller were keen to leverage this at the local level.
As part of this new relationship, Yext will provide centralised management of Hunkemöller’s first and third-party reviews, with the added ability to evaluate through sentiment analysis and benchmarking. Additional features, such as Yext’s Intelligent Search Tracker and Competitive Intelligence will enable Hunkemöller to measure their brand’s share of intelligent search – how and when they appear in search results, and to automate the discovery of competitors and their performance.
Jon Buss, Managing Director UK and Northern Europe, Yext comments: “Retailers are horrified when they realise their data is inaccurate and inconsistent across digital touchpoints. Taking control of this is essential, so that the right experience is delivered to consumers searching for information. The wrong information can backfire on brands. The result is unhappy customers and a loss of sales. We’re delighted to be continuing our growth in the retail sector by solving these challenges.”
These new relationships within the retail sector mark significant growth for Yext in the UK. For the quarter ended 31st July 2018, Yext added nearly 80 new enterprise logos, in its global expansion to support brands and retailers across numerous verticals.
About Yext
Yext (NYSE: YEXT) is the leading Digital Knowledge Management (DKM) platform. Yext’s mission is to give companies control over their brand experiences across the digital universe of maps, apps, search engines, voice assistants, and other intelligent services that drive consumer discovery, decision, and action. Today, thousands of businesses use the Yext Knowledge Engine™ to manage their digital knowledge in order to boost brand engagement, drive foot traffic, and increase sales.
Yext has been named a Best Place to Work by Fortune and Great Places to Work® as well as a Best Workplace for Women. Yext is headquartered in New York City with offices in Berlin, Chicago, Dallas, Geneva, London, Paris, Tyson’s Corner, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Tokyo. For more information, visit http://www.yext.co.uk/.