As part of a spotlight session at the Pitch CMO Summit 2024, Satya Prabhakar, CEO, ProManage took the audience on a journey of leveraging hyperlocal presence and tech AI to drive growth. “Digital hyperlocal discovery and engagement is the golden goose of marketing,” Prabhakar said as he started the session.

He noted that around 90% of brands today are ill-equipped because their local presence is poorly managed. “The main reason for this is that they lack the technology to be able to manage the local listings of their physical presence across the country & multiple digital platforms,” he said.

At the Pitch CMO Summit 2024, Prabhakar also pointed out that today, when it comes to discovery traffic where people are looking to buy something locally, most brands have a very narrow top funnel and a very narrow bottom-funnel, with a lot of haziness in between. “What is possible is that without spending any money on the media cost, you can widen the funnel at the top, you can widen the funnel at the bottom and structure your audience based on various interests,” he explained as he continued the ProManage pitch.

The payoffs coming out of this are brand consistency, fidelity of information, increased visibility, unified engagement and captive marketing DB.

Prabhakar also shared examples of multiple local listings of brands that were flawed. Some have an irrelevant image, some phone numbers are not updated and so on.  He then explained the four dimensions of hyperlocal digital excellence – distribution, optimisation, engagement and integration.

Delving further into how consumers discover the brand, he said, “Consumers discover you through search platforms, maps, voice, transport or even car consoles. So either you make sure your 100s and 1000s of listings are across all these platforms, or you plug into a platform like ProManage which then uses its APIs to distribute your listings across all these platforms,” he said.

It is also important, Prabhakar continued, to rank high on these platforms. “The search intent has to match, the proximity has to match, the authority needs to be high, flux and validation need to be there,” he added. When brands follow these, the local listings automatically start to rank higher and the brand will get free traffic.