Until next time!

Yext gear for attendees

Our CEO, Howard Lerman

Event organizers and Yext CTO, Sean MacIsaac

The post CMU Meetup at Yext appeared first on The Yext Blog.

As you know, at Yext, our goal is to get perfect location information into every hand. Today we wanted to highlight a new tool from Yahoo! Small Business that is helping businesses do just that: Yahoo! Localworks.

 Yahoo! Localworks is a tool from Yahoo! Small Business that gives small businesses the ability to increase visibility to new and current customers and stand out from the competition on more than 40 top search engines, apps, and mapping services.

Onward!

The post Small Business Week + Yahoo! Localworks appeared first on The Yext Blog.

The webinar introduces the program and outlines key areas and features including the new branded listings scan, which allows Certified Partners to change the colors, logos, and contact information associated with the business listings scan.  The enhanced listings scan can also now be emailed or printed directly from the results page so that our Certified Partners can forward or share the results with prospects.

The Certified Partner program is an expansion of Yext’s reseller program, bringing training, support, tools, and new rates to Certified Partners.  There is a brief certification process that each partner must complete in order to get certified.  Yext has a team of trainers and an online curriculum to ensure that every partner becomes a Yext Certified Partner.

The 15-minute webinar also outlines how to get Yext Certified.  You can also apply online here.

Thanks for listening!

The post Yext Launches New Certified Partner Program appeared first on The Yext Blog.

We all know people are going mobile – doing more on their mobile devices, finding information on the go – which means they can go more places. And, as a business owner, you are no different. So we designed our mobile apps to make doing your job easier.

Keeping your location information fresh drives engagement on your listings – in fact, listings with updated pictures receive 247% more clicks.

The new Yext Android app has nearly identical features to the iPhone app, and with them you can:

• Apply custom filters to your photos

• Create text posts

• Share photos and add them to your photo album

• Save your photos to your PowerListings gallery, to appear on your listings including Yahoo!, MapQuest, and Foursquare

Your customers want to see what separates your business from the competition, and our team of Yextoids made that easier for you. Download the app in the Google Play Store and check out our website for more information.

The post Now Supporting Android appeared first on The Yext Blog.

To help you reach your customers, no matter how they search, we are always looking for new places to share your information. And today we are excited to announce three new publishers as part of the PowerListings Network: YaSabe, PennySaver, and Pocketly!

• YaSabe is America’s largest and fastest growing local search destination for businesses, coupons and jobs that cater to Hispanic consumers.

  • Google says 8% of its US search is in Spanish, and Latinos outspend non-Latinos on many local services and products, and now Yext customers can access this community with YaSabe.

  • YaSabe has connected millions of users to online listings, cultural content and community-sourced information and is growing quickly – traffic increased 800% last year. Now, YaSabe has nearly 1M unique monthly visitors.

  • YaSabe is mobile focused, with 50% of its usage coming from mobile devices. It even recently announced a partnership with Viva Movil to make YaSabe even easier to get and use on mobile devices.

• PennySaver is the oldest and largest direct mail publication in the US and a pioneer in weekly shopping guides supporting local businesses. Today, PennySaver allows users to find deals on products and services, print coupons and search national classified ads on the web.

• Pocketly is the on-the-go money-saving app that uses geolocation to find coupons and offers, stores, services and entertainment near the user. Available for both iOS and Android, Pocketly gives users the ability to search through a list of relevant stores and offers near a user’s current location.

These new publishers are complementary to customers with the Complete Package. To see how your business appears, simply log into your account. For more information on how to get started, please contact support.

The post Expanding the PowerListings Network with Three New Publishers appeared first on The Yext Blog.

Bing is one of the largest and most used sources of information online with more than 165 million unique visitors every month. It sets itself apart by the massive number of people searching every day and the quality of its results, on the web and on mobile.

Starting today, you can sync your basic business details (including name, address, and phone number) automatically. And we’re offering this important PowerListing free of charge with an existing complete subscription.

Log into your Yext account today to see your listing on Bing. For help or more information contact customer support.

So now, Bing it on!

The post Bing It On appeared first on The Yext Blog.

For those unfamiliar with Internet Week, it’s “a week-long festival celebrating Internet business and culture and will attract more than 45,000 Internet professionals, working across all sectors, attending 250+ events produced by IWNY and 150+ citywide event partners.”

There’s programming for everyone from designers, marketers, and engineers to those who just want to learn more about tech in NYC.

This is one of the biggest events for technology with events all over the city, and Yext has signed on as a sponsor to help you navigate Internet Week. For the past few months we’ve been working closely with the Internet Week team to develop some great and useful resources for the week all powered by location information:

• The Official IWNY iOS App

  • This is your guide to the week with important information about talks, panels and most importantly – when and where they are

• Interactive Map

  • Internet Week wouldn’t be complete without the coolest technology – so there is an interactive touch-screen map of all the events around the city for the week, including listings with all the detail you need

• 2013 Print Poster

  • Design distinguishes NYC technology from the rest of the world, so the IWNY print poster has become a favorite. This year we worked with the team to create a map like you’ve never seen before. After all, where you are matters.

To see Yext in action stop by the IWNY HQ for talks from our executives:

• Monday 20th: 11:20am-11:50am – Media+Marketing+Technology+Data Collision featuring Yext EVP Sales & Services, Wendi Sturgis

• Wednesday 22nd: 10:35am-10:55am - Keynote on the Location Ecosystem by Yext CEO & Co-founder, Howard Lerman

And sign up for OpenCo to visit our new office and hear a presentation about our company and our vision for the future.

Finally, the reason we’re so excited for Internet Week is because it’s a chance to celebrate the important technology in the city. Our company wouldn’t be the same anywhere else and we are proud to be part of the community. Yext is Made in NY - see for yourself.

There’s a lot going on this week all around the city for Internet Week and we’re looking forward to helping you navigate it.

The post Navigating Internet Week appeared first on The Yext Blog.

We’ve added a number of new features in the past few months that have made our software more powerful and easy to use. So, we knew we needed to create a mobile companion app that would be as useful and simple for our customers, for when they aren’t in front of the computer.

We set an aggresive timeline and goal because, at Yext we love nothing more than challenges.

Customer Feedback

We started with design-research by speaking with our customers to learn about the things that matter to them, often face-to-face via video.

What are their current behaviors? How do they publish their location information today? What tools do they use? How do they perceive and use Yext?

We learned that our customers are incredibly mobile – they are on the go and they use mobile technology. They take pride in their work and are looking for ways to share their business stories with their customers. A business, just like our personal lives, has high and low moments. Interestingly, what’s actually shared on social networks includes only the highs.

It became clear to us that expanding Yext’s mobile app capabilities to capture those moments of success and share them on social networks would address our clients’ needs. That combined with our PowerListings Network of nearly 50 publishers offers a unique solution.

Business and Pleasure

Great apps are not only about function though. The actual design was inspired by Maslow’s pyramid of needs, from Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter (a great read on its own), who explains that today’s software needs to be more than just functional, reliable and usable. It also needs to be pleasurable.

Yes, at Yext, we believe that business should be mixed with pleasure. Our customers are not just “users”. They are people.

Design for Emotion – In this adaptation of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, the top part of the pyramid that many applications are missing, however it’s what contributes a great deal to customer engagement.

Concealing Complexity

We also know that our business owners are—not surprisingly—very busy people. So any app we design needs to be very straightforward and simple. Just a tap and you’re done. But that “tap” needs to be powerful.

The GM and CEO of Vine, Dom Hofmann, put it well at the latest NYC Mobile Apps Meetup. He said, “great apps need not avoid complexity, they need to conceal it.”

With this in mind, we got our hands dirty. Collaboration is key at Yext, and the team participated in a “Design Studio”. For a couple of hours, we all left our computers and performed rapid visual brainstorming in our Fun Room. We had a great group of people from different departments of the company all working together: visual and UX design, marketing, customer support, developers, QA, and product.

After 190 sketches, we reached a rough consensus of the main information architecture and screens. Designers and developers continued to collaborate as the team iterated the design and the actual code. We used the whiteboard extensively as the place to discuss and wireframe any user-facing element of the app. And at the end of this process, we had a fully functional and designed app, but it didn’t seem quite finished…

Adding Fun

There was one small yet important detail missing: fun. We wanted to add a discovery element to our app, one that would be appealing and engaging, but wouldn’t hide or interfere with functionality.

In the first set of wireframes, we had a standard iOS button on the screen with a plus sign inside. It was a placeholder annotated “Sexy Plus Button”. That button would open a menu to select the type of information they wanted to share: a photo, a thought, a Featured Message, and more. We wanted to make this interaction delightful and fun, but also clear. If business owners aren’t sure how to use our app, they might close it and never open it again.

The main action button as it looked in one of the initial low fidelity wireframes.

So we used Keynote to prototype some of the possible animations, along with our trusty whiteboard. Eventually, we found an animated design that worked. It’s simple, elegant yet cool, sexy and fun.

Evolution of screens from whiteboard prototyping to a full, polished Yext App.

We are very excited about the launch of the new Yext app and are looking forward to roll out more exciting new features. Click here to download and stay tuned for more!

The post The Design Behind Our Mobile App appeared first on The Yext Blog.

Capturing and sharing those experiences is the best way to engage your customers. In fact, listings with updated pictures receive 247% more clicks.

What to Share

For businesses, it’s clear that creative, ‘behind the scenes’ photos perform better than formal marketing pictures.  To reach and engage your customers, capture and share those business experiences. Take a photo of the new dish, product display, or seasonal sale.

You should share them where you customers are looking: social media and business listings. Adding them to your digital profiles makes your business look more appealing and active, so customers feel connected and compelled to choose you.

Your profiles will look more complete with photos and rich information, so they actually become your mobile presence.

Changing your website and optimizing for mobile is hard, but updating your profiles – where your customers are already looking – is a simpler and more effective solution for your mobile presence. And the photos of your business moments are the key to your mobile strategy.

Redesigned Yext iPhone App

We knew we wanted to create a companion app as useful as the web product – because business doesn’t always happen in front of a computer screen. So we started from scratch and completely redesigned our iPhone app to make it easy to capture and share business experiences.

We ended up making the first of its kind business app for capturing and sharing content with customers. With it, businesses can:

• Easily to capture photos of your business moments

• Apply custom filters to make your photos look professional

• Create text posts

• Share your photos and add them to your photo albums

• Optionally share the photos across your PowerListings Galleries

• Set their profile picture and cover photo for your Facebook Page

The new iPhone app is available for download on the App Store here and is included in your PowerListings subscription. Once you have activated Yext Sync for Facebook, you can begin capturing and sharing the experience that define your business from the palm of your hand.

For more information, contact us at service@yext.com.

The post Capture Business Moments With Our New iPhone App appeared first on The Yext Blog.

Facebook Is Huge in Local

When we started thinking about what we wanted to do next, we asked ourselves, where do we spend the most time?

The first answer is, of course, physical places. But the second is digital destinations – like Facebook.  And then layer those two… the digital versions of those physical places.  At Yext, we love to check-in, to comment, to post photos, etc. from our favorite spots.

Today, Facebook is one of the largest sources of local information online. With more than a billion users worldwide, it’s capturing about 13% of all local search (which is a lot!) as people check into locations, see where their friends visited, and look up their favorite spots for deals and information.

Local search is also closely tied to mobile usage. As 25% of time across all mobile devices is spent on Facebook, it’s an ideal place to find people when they are on the go. And with its new products, Nearby and Graph Search, Facebook is getting more local every day.

So it’s essential that your business takes control of your presence and get into local search on Facebook. And we’re making it easy with Yext Sync for Facebook.

Yext Sync for Facebook Gets You in Local Search

Facebook populates its local search results with location Pages from businesses as well as  user-generated Pages. So even if you haven’t built Pages for your locations, chances are, they exist and are appearing in search results, but not accurately representing your business.

Our software makes it easy to take control by creating and organizing location Pages for your business.

With Yext Facebook Sync you can:

• Instantly update your location information on Facebook from your Yext account
  • Choose what fields to sync from your Yext account, so that you can decide if there are sections you want to manage separately (and word differently) in Facebook
• Add your category, business descriptions, hours and more to your Facebook Page
  • Your customers come to your Page to learn more about you, so show them what makes your business different
• Share up-to-date photos of your business
  • The digital representation of your business should change as quickly as your physical business does
• Add your Content Lists (your Products and Services, Events, Bios or Menus) as custom tabs
  • Customize your location Page with your PowerListings+ Content Lists so your customers have information at their fingertips about why to choose your business – and your Page stands out with custom content
• Post reviews from across the web on your Facebook Page
  • Make your great reviews go further by sharing them as posts with two easy clicks on your Facebook Page. There’s no reason the review on Yahoo! should stay on Yahoo! – share it with all your customers to help them make purchasing decisions
• Create and share your business moments with our new iPhone app
  • Your business is made of moments – from the first time a customer stops into your business, to the smile of a job well done. Capturing and sharing those authentic business moments is the key to engagement online and on social
  • Our new Facebook-first iPhone app makes it easy to capture those business moments with our custom camera and filter no matter where you are and share them with your customers on Facebook or any of your PowerListings 
• Monitor your Likes, Check-ins, and more on your Facebook Page in Yext
  • We know you care about more than just Likes on your Facebook Page, so our technology includes ‘Were Here’ and “Talking About’ in the Reporting section of our platform to help you optimize
  • If you have more than one Page, you can monitor metrics from them all in one place – including Likes across all your location Pages

Pages that include updated information and fresh content receive higher levels of engagement, which will ultimately determine search result ranking, so get started now for an early mover advantage with Yext Sync for Facebook.

Sync for Facebook is included at no extra change and it takes minutes to get set up. Learn more about Yext Sync for Facebook here and contact your Account Manager.

The post Introducing, Yext Sync for Facebook appeared first on The Yext Blog.