Lastmile Wins “Best Local Search Marketing Initiative – SEO” Award

Search Engine Land and its sister publications, MarTech Today and Marketing Land cover all aspects of digital marketing, advertising technology and the martech landscape.  A longtime resource for unbiased perspectives and industry insights, they also produce the Search Engine Land Awards to celebrate individuals, agencies, internal marketing teams and technology companies within the digital marketing community who have demonstrated excellence in executing organic and paid search marketing campaigns and research initiatives.  This year, Lastmile is pleased to announce that our hard work partnering with Sprint, a leading wireless telecommunications provider recently acquired by T-Mobile, has won the coveted Best Local Search Marketing Initiative – SEO Award for 2020.

Background

In today’s market, consumers want the convenience and 24-hour availability of online channels, but the personalization, support, and reassurance that comes from a face-to-face visit in their local retail store. This is especially true in telecommunications— although many shoppers begin the search for new devices online, over 75% of them make their actual purchases in stores.

Sprint partnered with Lastmile Retail to act on this realization and prioritize its customers’ needs by connecting the worlds of retail and e-commerce. This called for an omni-channel marketing strategy that solved the problem with minimal IT investment while meeting budget parameters.

The Challenge

With over 4500+ stores across the United States which offered phones, accessories, and customer services, Sprint lacked an effective true local marketing program. The carrier couldn’t offer an effective way for consumers to see its inventory or to easily view their purchasing and pickup options as the current Yext Pages were simply that: Pages.  Rather, Sprint needed to make their local organic search results more competitive, improve their local advertising without significantly increasing their budget, transition to a next generation store locator and improve their local presence management across both branded and dealer locations.

Capabilities Deployed

The key to this new positioning would be based on utilizing Sprint’s location-specific advantages and availability of inventory held at every store.  Lastmile’s direct API integration with Sprint’s inventory back-end and BuyNearby Location Platform allowed consumers searching on engines, major directories or coming off the store locator find available products (i.e. iPhone 11) and services near them for the first time.  Even better, Lastmile enables “high-intent” shoppers then take action through a myriad of engaging features such as Buy Now, Buy Online and Pickup in store (BOPUS) and in-store Appointment Booking outside of other basic capabilities such as Call Tracking, Chat and Directions / Mapping.

Powering this capability that transforms basic pages into full transactional microsites is Lastmile’s patent-pending SEO solution.  This enterprise-grade localization engine and Digital Storefront offerings are optimized for SEO, local reporting & local advertising out of the box.  Custom branding and UX with responsive UI, matched to brand guidelines and integrated onto a Sprint sub-domain further enabled a unique and engaging experience and the results showed.

Results

While the results are proprietary, the following can be shared as Lastmile generated:

• Digital Storefront lead generation rates of 25%+
• A few hundred thousand desired actions including appointment booking, calls to local stores, direction requests and e-commerce referrals, amongst other key actions
• Over 50% growth in organic SEO traffic over course of the year, especially after moving all presence management services from Yext to Lastmile
• Annualized ROI of over 900+% (measured from total gross local revenue)

Summary

Partnering with Lastmile enabled Sprint to leverage our patent-pending tech and marketing services to drive more local sales by pairing shoppers with real-time inventory and promotions through seamless online-to-offline (O2O) capabilities that help clients transact now.  Powered by SEO-based technology and services, clients of all sizes (i.e., 20 locations to 20,000 internationally) can finally own the local path to purchase and the results show not just that this approach works but is needed more than ever now in a Covid economy where in-store inventory isn’t readily available to online buyers shopping nearby those locations.

Learn more and power local sales today!