Yext

For business owners trying to make a dent in the online world, a confident control over branding is necessary. Regardless of the product or service you're selling, your prospective customers have hundreds of platforms they can use to seek out a provider. Yext lets you connect more intimately with over a hundred different third party platforms and puts you in control of your company's messaging. From navigation networks like Google Maps and Bing Maps to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to review platforms like Yelp and Urban Spoon, there's no lack of sources customers can use to find information on you. Yext helps you keep track of what data is available and manage it effectively and responsibly. Their directory automatically pulls the data from their pool of platforms and displays it for you in a clean and easy format. From there, you have a lot of control of what you do with this information. Their knowledge manager allows you to control geocoding, automating accurate coordinates across all navigation services, and their data cleansing allows you to set accurate information about your brand and have it automatically reformatted throughout the sources individuals might use to reach out to you. You can even set custom fields catered to the particular specifications of your business model. Yext Analytics works directly in coordination with the listings and knowledge manner to provide a wealth of information derived from the raw information available to you. While the amount of data on hand may seem impenetrable at first, the ability to create custom dashboards allows you to neatly compartmentalize the different facets of your company and create narrowly focused points of interest that you can then evaluate more easily. Once you have your data neatly organized, you can tell Yext to automatically generate reports covering the metrics that are most important to your brand's growth. You can even keep track of how customers are responding to your business. Automatic notifications and alerts can help you know whenever a new review is added on a service like Yelp, and you can respond to their concerns directly through the Yext interface. Powerful collaboration tools let larger companies share the burden across teams seamlessly. One of the cleverer aspects of Yext is how it lets you test out the strength of your business' marketing before you even consider using the service. From their site, you can simply enter the basic information on your company, and they'll generate a detailed listing of how your businesses appears via all of their supported platforms. It's a great way to learn whether or not Yext is the right platform for you and provides users with an actionable understanding of what they can expect from the software.