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Brands Need to Manage Their Digital Place Identity
Harnessing the Power of Your Brand’s Most Valuable Asset
WHITE PAPER

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Brands Need to Manage Their Digital Place Identity WHITE PAPER
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Table of Contents
The Rise of Mobile 2
Lost Opportunities 3
Why Digital Place Identity Matters 3
Overcoming Common Challenges 5
Critical Crossroads 5
Local Impact: Greater Customer
Satisfaction, Information Accuracy,
and Revenues 6
Corporate Impact: Operational
and Marketing Savings 8
Strategies for Creating a
Successful Digital Place Identity 9
The rise of mobile communications and social media has profoundly changed
how people and brands connect and engage with one another, significantly
impacting the way consumers make decisions about what, when, and where
to buy. Consumers now seek out businesses online, pinpoint their location on digital
maps, and decide where to go based on what they find out about the business
through social media.
Given the diversity of social-mobile platforms, this information may reside in any
number of places. Reviews, photos, store hours, directions, contact details, and other
content associated with each business location are spread across Facebook, Google,
Foursquare, Yelp, and a growing number of other platforms.
Additionally, data about sales, competitors, and demographics can be tied to each
place of business. Together this content and data forms a unique digital identity for
each physical place of business. We call this the Digital Place Identity (DPI), and any
brand can harness it. Quite possibly it is the most valuable asset a business can own
in the new social-mobile era.
THE RISE OF MOBILE
Marketers have been waiting for the mobile opportunity to fully materialize for more
than a decade — and that time is now here. 2013 was a key turning point for mobile
adoption, the year when more than half (58%) of all adult Americans owned smart-phones.
By 2017, analysts estimate that percentage will grow to 86%.1
The pervasiveness of smartphones and other mobile devices has dramatically changed
the habits and expectations of consumers when they search for, discover, and interact
with local businesses. Currently nearly half of all adults in the U.S. access real-time,
location-based information with their devices,2 relying on this information not only to
get directions to a business, but also find links to relevant and local online content.
Consumers have eagerly embraced the mobile-social paradigm, with an estimated 30%
of social media users owning at least one account that shares their physical location
while posting content. And it is now estimated that some 15 million consumers —
representing about 42% of all social media users — engage with their favorite brands
through social media, including posting to local Facebook or Google+ pages, writing
reviews on Yelp, sharing photos shared via Instagram, and much more.
The increasing influence of mobile platforms and consumer-generated content is now
changing the way brands equip and manage their local brick-and-mortar businesses.
In short, social-mobile has raised the bar for brands when it comes to communicating
to consumers with relevance, authenticity, and clarity.
1 Pew Research Center, 2014.
2 Pew Research Center, 2014.
National Restaurant Brand Increases
Sales by 15%
This chain of more than 100 restaurants
across the U.S. launched a major effort
to optimize and synchronize its Digital
Place Identity companywide, powered
by MomentFeed’s localized marketing
platform. The effort involved fixing
inaccuracies in its local listings,
eliminating duplicate pages, and actively
curating content across social media
channels such as Facebook, Foursquare,
and Google+. As a result, the brand
experienced a 15% increase in
year-over-year sales.

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Brands Need to Manage Their Digital Place Identity WHITE PAPER
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LOST OPPORTUNITIES
A key finding of our research is that a majority of
brands are missing out on chances to benefit from
these crucial social-mobile interactions. According
to Pew Research Center (2013), although 60%
to 65% of brands are aware of engaging with
customers over social media, only a small fraction
of these companies actually track local, place-based
feedback.
Reversing this situation could open up profitable
business opportunities for brands. In fact, research
shows that companies that develop a fully integrated
digital and physical presence can attract customers
who generate 20% to 60% more value3.
Today, consumers enjoy an array of digital options when it comes to accessing information about
their favorite brands. Online aggregators like Yelp, OpenTable, and Google support a shopper’s
journey with recommendations based on consumer-generated reviews and content. These sites
now serve as indispensable tools for consumers searching for local retail outlets, restaurant
reservations, and marketing offers. And for corporate marketers, these platforms have become
a valuable way to track customer-buying patterns.
Social platforms like Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, and Google+ enable consumers to
become advocates for their favorite shops and eateries, share their experiences, or simply feel
connected to their favorite hangouts. With an estimated 80% of retail sales coming from within
a 14-minute drive of a store,4 focusing on local customers makes sense. National brands that
learn to deploy modern digital marketing capabilities to strengthen local relationships will be
strategically positioned to succeed in this new era.
WHY DIGITAL PLACE IDENTITY MATTERS
A business’s Digital Place Identity includes all the information and content that defines the
community surrounding a particular location — and it is unique for every place of business.
These identities evolve as new information becomes available and fresh content is created,
so it is imperative for companies to manage their digital place identities on an ongoing basis
to effectively represent the brand and its physical locations.
3 The Direct Marketing Association, 2010.
4 Moosylvania, 2013; http://digby.com/mobile-statistics/.
Old Spaghetti Factory Generates 30x
ROI with Local Facebook Content
This popular national restaurant chain
conducted a pilot test of local Facebook
content powered by MomentFeed’s
localized marketing platform and found
significant improvements compared to
a control group. Results included:
• 650,000 unique local customers
reached
• 7,200 net gain in transactions
vs. the control group
• 7.1% net increase in revenue
vs. the control group
• 30x ROI
“Location-based applications are
extremely interesting for brands and
retailers in that they allow those
companies to direct consumers
to outlets in their vicinity while
simultaneously providing information
about the products on offer.”
– Juniper Research
Figure 1. 86% of Brands Don’t
Track Local Feedback
86%

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Brands Need to Manage Their Digital Place Identity WHITE PAPER
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In the social-mobile era, it’s not uncommon for consumers to connect to a brand’s Digital
Place Identity before they even visit a physical location. These initial connections happen
when consumers search for a brand (or brand category) using social-mobile platforms and
applications. The quality and consistency of a brand’s local listing information — including
geocode data5 and page content — can have a big impact on the consumers’ ability to find,
and choose to visit, the actual brick-and-mortar storefront, office, bar, or restaurant.
When local listings are incomplete or inaccurate, it can result in suboptimal search-engine
results — and potentially less store traffic. For the best local SEO performance, brands need
to maintain their local listings on a continuous basis and keep this information fresh and in sync
across a range of social channels. In addition, brands can further enhance their organic local SEO
by pro-actively managing local page content. That means not only ensuring data accuracy and
recency, but also publishing fresh content out to local pages, “curating” the pages by monitoring
social media activity, and responding to consumer reviews and comments at the local level.
Maximizing organic reach at the local-page level is crucial because this is where consumer
engagement is most likely to be translated into foot traffic and sales. Compared to corporate-level
Facebook pages, for example, local Facebook pages reach five times more fans, achieve
eight-times higher engagement levels, and generate 40 times more overall impact.6
In a world where organic reach is declining by nearly 50% in the last year according to research
conducted by Ogilvy & Mather7, it is no longer a “nice to have” but a necessity to focus on
enriching consumer engagement at the local-page level in order to maintain reach and scale.
Figure 2. The Digital Place Identity
National Restaurant Chain Increases
Digital Reach by 375% in 3 Months
with Local Facebook Content
This famous maker of gourmet bread
and quality food products operates 31
locations across California. The company
created a local-social campaign to test
the impact of its digital place identity,
powered by MomentFeed. Results
after three months included:
• 319% increase in check-ins
• 381% increase in impressions
• 375% increase in reach
5 Geocodes are geographic coordinates (often expressed as latitude and longitude) such as street addresses, or ZIP codes
(postal codes) that can be mapped and entered into Geographic Information Systems.
6 MomentFeed, 2014.
7 Ogilvy & Mather, “Facebook Zero: Considering life after the demise of organic reach”, 2014.
“We would get calls from customers
that they were being routed to the
wrong location and were unable to
find our stores. People reported being
led to a woman’s driveway instead of
to an actual store.”
– Search Marketing Manager,
Big Box Retailer
Metadata
• Name
• Address
• Phone
• Geocode
(latitude/
longitude)
• Hours
Local Pages
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Google+
• Google Places
• Yelp
• Local landing pages
• Mobile application
Proprietary Data
• Visits
• Repeat visits
• Sales
• Basket size
Audience
• Consumers
that live around
the location
Content
• Photos
• Ratings
• Reviews
• Posts
• Place Tags
• Tweets
• Hashtags
Context
• Demographics
• Neighborhood
• Competitors
• Weather
• Events
• Traffic
i

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OVERCOMING COMMON CHALLENGES
To establish an effective local digital presence, brands will need to increase their social-mobile
investments and pay closer attention to customer feedback across social channels. One of the
biggest challenges is dealing with inaccurate geo-data associated with a brand’s physical sites.
These inaccuracies are often the result of using unreliable third-party-generated geocodes.
In fact, research shows that more than half of national brands are plagued with inaccurate
geocodes for at least some of their locations.8 These inaccuracies reduce the “discoverability”
of a business, increase negative word of mouth in social media, and ultimately impact revenue.
It’s incumbent on brands to ensure that social-mobile platforms accurately reflect the most basic
details about their local places of business, including their physical location, hours of business,
and phone numbers.
Another challenge is managing the proliferation of duplicate local social media pages. These are
“unofficial” pages (not claimed or managed by the brand) that are typically created by consumers
as a way to fill in informational holes when brand-supported content is unavailable.
Duplicate pages are increasingly common on social media. It is estimated that 40% of national
brands have unauthorized duplicates of their locations on Facebook and Foursquare.9 All too
often these derivative sites provide incorrect or outdated information about business location,
hours of operation, and the like. Moreover they can tarnish brands with unappealing images,
low-resolution logos, or poor photos of an unkempt storefront.
Finally, brands struggle to mobilize sufficient resources to manage content on the hundreds or
even thousands of digital identities across national and global markets. Not infrequently the
burden of maintaining a consistent and attractive social media presence can stretch marketing
departments to their limit.
CRITICAL CROSSROADS
How well marketers confront the challenges and opportunities of the social-mobile era will
make a big difference in their future success. With almost 60% of Facebook’s first-quarter
2014 advertising revenue coming from mobile platforms — up from just 30% in the year-earlier
period — it is clear that the pace of mobile interactions is accelerating quickly.
To make the most of their social-mobile relationships with customers, brands will need to take
a more proactive approach to managing the Digital Place Identity of each of their business
locations. Our research found that brands who implemented a modern Digital Place Identity
solution were able to dramatically increase customer engagement, enhance consumer percep-
8 Based on a 2013 MomentFeed study of 100,000 leading U.S. brand locations.
9 Research by MomentFeed, 2013.
Digital Place Identity (DPI)
Makes a Difference
• First impressions count.
Consumers interact with your
DPI before visiting your brick-and-
mortar location.
• People want to contribute.
DPI facilitates a new channel
to solicit your best customers
to build your brand.
• Everybody belongs to a
community. DPI ensures your
digital community presents a
personalized experience for new
and prospective customers.
• Relevance and authenticity is
the new standard. DPI sets the
foundation for consistent and
compelling content that will
encourage return visits.

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tions of their brand, and drive sales at branch locations. The brands we studied leveraged
solutions from MomentFeed that allowed them to manage and optimize their local digital
identities at scale.
To get a better understanding of how businesses create and manage their Digital Place
Identities, we interviewed management from several leading brands, including prominent
big-box retailers and national restaurant chains that had partnered with MomentFeed.
We looked at how these brands optimized their Digital Place Identities to generate significant
business results, and examined how they automated DPI processes to improve the financial
returns on their localized marketing programs..
Our principal finding is this: Brands that had invested in the people, processes, and technologies
to create, optimize, and actively manage this new marketing asset are realizing significant and
measurable business benefits. Among the most valuable of these benefits are:
• Higher levels of customer engagement and satisfaction that drive greater sales
• Improved relationships between the corporation and its individual local places of business
• Significant operating efficiencies, including productivity savings and automation-driven
cost reductions
In the following sections, we dig deeper into these impacts, first at the local-business level and
secondly at the corporate level.
LOCAL IMPACT: GREATER CUSTOMER SATISFACTION, INFORMATION ACCURACY,
AND REVENUES
For the local businesses we studied (primarily restaurants and retailers), creating accurate
and compelling Digital Place Identities consistently produced positive, measurable results
(See Figure 3 — Local Impacts). The most significant outcomes were:
• Increased accuracy of the information being disseminated about the establishment
• Better customer experiences at the neighborhood establishment
• Improved financial performance
After implementing more accurate digital geocoding by leveraging MomentFeed’s PinSync
solution, for example, these businesses saw a sharp increase in the number of customers relying
on self-service directions (such as smartphone mapping apps) to visit their location. These same
businesses reported fewer customers getting lost and calling in for directions.
Businesses also benefited from implementing more active management and curating of their
local pages with MomentFeed’s LocalVoice solution. Customers consistently gave higher marks
to local establishments with accurate and appealing social media presences. Not surprisingly,
businesses that actively managed and optimized their Digital Place Identity saw customers
spreading the word about their establishments more often, and more widely, across networks
like Facebook and Foursquare.
MomentFeed’s Platform:
• PinSync — Optimizes the
management of location data
across platforms and locations.
• LocalVoice — Provides CRM,
publishing and campaign
management tools to drive
customer engagement across
platforms and locations.
• Business Intelligence —
Measures the impact of your local
marketing programs to optimize
future activities.

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Improving information accuracy (such as geocodes, phone numbers, hours of operation)
combined with eliminating poor or inconsistent brand images also helped to elevate the
business’s reputation, as evidenced by an increase in positive social media chatter — and
a decrease in negative comments. Perhaps most significantly, those businesses investing
in an enhanced Digital Place Identity reported a measurable increase in foot traffic and a
consequent lift in sales.
Following are two examples of how local businesses were impacted after improving their
digital place identities with MomentFeed’s platform:
• Restaurant Chain Cleans Up Digital Identity. After discovering that up to half of its local
franchises struggled with inaccurate data on their social media pages, a well-known national
restaurant brand implemented MomentFeed’s PinSync solution. Inaccuracies of all types
(location data, contact information, etc.) disappeared immediately. At the same time, the
restaurant chain efficiently phased out hundreds of unapproved duplicate pages. “We had
complaints from franchisees,” said the company’s social media and marketing manager.
“Customers would say ‘I tried to find you, and can’t find you’ or ‘your hours and phone
numbers are wrong.’ That all went away once we implemented a program to improve
our digital identity.”
• Engagement Takes Off at DPI-Enabled Restaurant. Another national restaurant brand
noticed improvements shortly after deploying MomentFeed’s localized marketing platform.
Most significantly, the company saw a huge boost in the level of engagement with customers
on social media. This was due in large measure to MomentFeed’s platform, which ensured
all local pages were claimed, enabling customers to publish photos to the local restaurant’s
Facebook page with ease. The combination of locally published brand content and authentic
customer photos contributed to a 71% increase in engagement (including “likes,” posts,
and photos) in just three months.
Figure 3. The ROI of Optimizing a Brand’s Digital Place Identity
National Restaurant Brand Takes
a Bite Out of Inaccuracies
A national restaurant brand partnered
with MomentFeed to institute a
digital identity program that would
continuously correct store addresses
and phone numbers and facilitate
management and monitoring of local
pages. MomentFeed also helped the
brand promote, automate, and monitor
the engagement process on its local
pages. Results included:
• Increased sales by 15% after
implementing the program
• Increased Facebook local
engagement by 79%
• Eliminated location data errors found
at 35% to 50% of its chain stores
• Reduced duplicate pages across
social platforms by up to 235%
Customer
Experience
LOCAL IMPACTS
Percentage of customers using self-service
location directions
Digital presence customer satisfaction metric
Increased customer engagement in digital specs
Digital
Presence
Improved ratio of company-sponsored to
non-sponsored pages
Physical
Presence
Percentage increase in foot traffic
Revenue lift
CORPORATE IMPACTS
Location data management efficiency
Digital marketing and social content efficiency
Marketing spend efficiency
Reduced online ads expense
Increased sales
Increased likes, +1s and engagement across
social media
Improved satisfaction ratings
Improved discoverability leading to more fans
Operational
Savings
Marketing
Savings
Key Performance
Indicators
Percentage of local data accuracy
Improved ratio of positive to negative word of mouth

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CORPORATE IMPACT: OPERATIONAL AND MARKETING SAVINGS
Brands also saw a range of benefits at the corporate level from adopting MomentFeed’s
localized marketing platform. Benefits included both operational savings and marketing savings
(See Figure 3 – Corporate Impacts).
Corporate marketing departments can be easily overwhelmed by the task of managing the online
presence of hundreds to thousands of local branches and franchises. Plus, ensuring accurate
digital place identities for every outlet can be an expensive undertaking. It is no surprise, then,
that many brands postpone implementing this critical capability, and often fail to keep their local
identities current over time.
The companies we studied successfully cleared this hurdle by adopting MomentFeed’s Digital
Place Identity platform. These localized marketing solutions enabled companies to create and
proactively manage hundreds of local digital identities with a relatively small team of marketing
managers (often less than 3-5 employees in the companies studied).
In addition, by driving more traffic to its stores with the help of enhanced local digital identities,
these companies said they expect to be able to moderate spending on online advertising.
Benefits to corporate marketing operations are illustrated in the following examples from
our research.
• Retailer Minimizes Geocode Maintenance. After adopting MomentFeed’s localized
marketing platform, a nationally recognized big box retailer significantly reduced the
manual work involved in maintaining local-store geocodes by about 30%. This gave
employees extra time to focus on creating new digital marketing programs. In addition,
the retailer was able to reduce the time needed to develop and publish local digital
content by 50%.
• $300K Advertising Savings. Another national retailer estimated that the boost in
engagement and revenue from creating a better Digital Place Identity allowed it to scale
back on Facebook advertising, saving about $300,000 per year. Other retailers reported
similar savings from avoiding costly purchases of social media advertising to drive traffic.
Although precise financial impacts can be hard to measure, the leading retailers we studied cited
rapid payback and returns of five to seven times their original investment in a Digital Place
Identity platform. Returns were estimated by measuring the incremental growth in store sales
after launching digital identity programs, and comparing the increase to DPI investment costs.
Big Box Retailer Generates Fans,
Followers, and Marketing Magic
A big box retailer developed several
goals for its digital identity program
before launch. Partnering with
MomentFeed, the company was able
to surpass its own lofty ambitions.
Goals included:
• Improve its local search-engine
optimization (SEO) relevance
• Clean up and better manage local
content
• Simplify the management of social
content for non-tech users
• Measure the impact of the digital
identity
• Demonstrate the value of internally
driven traffic versus online ad traffic
Results included:
• Increased Facebook impressions
by 334%
• Increased Facebook fans by 60%
in only three months
• Increased Facebook followers by
3.5 million
• Increased marketing productivity
by 30% to 50%
• Improved SEO rankings by 10%

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Brands Need to Manage Their Digital Place Identity WHITE PAPER
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STRATEGIES FOR CREATING A SUCCESSFUL DIGITAL PLACE IDENTITY
In order to meet the increasing demands of customers, brands need to upgrade and modernize
their local digital presence. As we mentioned above, developing a sound Digital Place Identity
capability requires mobilizing three categories of resources: people, process, and technology.
• People. Retailers today run on lean margins, which means that “staffing up” is rarely an
option. Consequently, retailers should take a close look at Digital Place Identity solutions as
a way to modernize their local social-mobile presence without ramping up staff. Relieved of
manual chores — such as keeping geocodes and other data up to date — employees can
focus on value-added tasks such as creating compelling local content and building other
capabilities to drive local foot traffic and sales.
• Process. Effective coordination between the corporate office and local branches is critical
for business success. By allowing for greater collaboration between corporate and local
managers, localized marketing programs can amplify the brand as a whole and deliver a
more compelling customer experience at the local level. These solutions also ensure the
regular cleansing of outdated and inaccurate content along with unauthorized duplicate
social media pages, including “faux social sites” meant to harm a brand. Automated
processes also correct for geocode “drift,” keeping a store’s latitude-longitude information
accurate over time.
• Technology. MomentFeed’s localized marketing platform was shown to promote effective
communication between corporate brands and local stores. These solutions can automate
the data-cleansing and content-publishing process for corporate and local managers and
make it easier to interact with their customers, especially via posts, ads, and photos over
mobile platforms. Finally, by leveraging MomentFeed’s business intelligence solution,
retailers can measure the operational and marketing success of their digital identity
program using relevant metrics.
In summary, we believe brands now have a major opportunity for amplifying and enriching their
brand at the local level while controlling costs at the corporate level. By adopting MomentFeed’s
Digital Place Identity tools and technologies, brands were able to cost-effectively respond to
consumers’ growing social-mobile sophistication, ensuring that the information about their local
businesses is accurate and compelling. As the traditional dynamics of the retail industry shift,
national brands can strengthen their image and customer relationships by building strong,
localized digital identities that tell the consumer what they need to know, when they need to
know it.
“We had complaints from franchisees
[prior to investing in a digital identity
program] such as ‘I tried to find you,
and can’t find you,’ or ‘your hours and
phone numbers are wrong.’ That has
all gone away once we implemented
our program.”
– Social Media and Marketing Manager,
Major Restaurant Brand

10.
Sponsored by:
Copyright © 2014 Mainstay.
Mainstay
www.mainstaycompany.com
764 Valderrama Ct.
Castle Rock, CO 80108
p. 650.638.0575
f. 800.638.0526
ABOUT MOMENTFEED
MomentFeed connects brands and consumers at
the local level. Brands such as 7-Eleven, JCPenney, and The Home Depot utilize MomentFeed’s digital marketing platform to capture local audiences,
engage with consumers in authentic and locally relevant ways, and measure performance down to
the point of sale. MomentFeed is the leading solution for brand managers to engage local communities on
a national scale for the purpose of driving business results. MomentFeed was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Santa Monica, California. For more information, visit http://www.momentfeed.com.
ABOUT MAINSTAY
Research and analysis for this study was conducted
by Mainstay, an independent consulting firm that has performed over 500 studies for leading information technology providers including Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, Lexmark, HP, EMC, and NetApp.
This case study was based on interviews with companies currently using MomentFeed’s Digital
Place Identity solution. Information contained in
the publication has been obtained from sources
considered reliable, but is not warranted by Mainstay.