Mediaboss Marketing

Advice Interactive, aninternet marketing company based out of Texas and California, has merged with local search SAAS company, Universal Business Listing (UBL).

Heres an interview with the CEO of UBL, Doyal Bryantabout the context of the merger, his competitors, and his opinions on how he thinks big brands are doing in local search right now.

Location marketing is now a booming environment as businesses realize they can get tremendous impact and value by optimizing the way their listings appear on sites like Google, Bing, Apple, etc. What this means is that agencies and marketing services companies are all looking to add this service as a core activity. So to meet this demand, which is now global, companies like ours that provide these complex presence management services, have to haven scale. This is for developments of technology, reporting tools, market reach and more. This field is ripe for a few players to dominate the sector, or be left to be small regional players.

And this is Location Marketings moment these business listings now dominate relevant search results, and particularly on mobile that has now surpassed the PC for local-interest search. So any business that has a physical location is very aware of the way they now appear not just on directories, but mobile apps and social pages. It is much easier to understand the value compared to advertising or even website development.

We also saw a great fit between UBLs global reach, extensive new real-time API syndication capabilities, and Advices advanced optimization systems and reporting platform.

An example is our Global contract with Apple to distribute business data. Only a few companies have a direct agreement that has been announced by Apple. Advice works off of direct site submission and data aggregators where UBL brings direct and global API from key local search, mapping, navigation, and mobile.

UBL is very busy building with almost all of our engineering resources building Global local ecosystems for syndication of business profiles in over 10 countries, and this combination with Advice allow us to continue to focus on that very large investment which we think create a much more valuable company. You will see announcements about a couple of these over the next few weeks.

Of course, our primary competitor is Yext, but there is also MozLocal and GoDaddys solution (Locu), both of which ONLY submit to data aggregators (InfoGroup, Localeze, Axiom, and Factual). There are several other smaller players in the space, but many of them use our white-labeled solution rather than build their own. In this way, our many of our competitors are our customers.

First, they are coming very late to the game. They have already missed the first two to threeyears of Googles revamp of the results page, which highlights local results placing them at the top of the page. While Brands have focused their marketing dollars on mass advertising, their local visibility has suffered due to bad data or no data.

Next, by NOT taking control of their data, Brands often allow rogue local marketing teams to take local into their own hands, which leads to inconsistent brand messages between HQ and each location. This can seriously injure a Brand and confuse local clientele as to the authenticity of the business and its relationship to the brand.

Read more:
Dallas Agency Advice Interactive Merges with Universal Business Listing by @mattsouthern