How the Post of Slovenia built a "Near me" brand experience 

Slovenia is a digitally progressive country and the company's customers expect digital and flexible services. According to Tadej Bokan, Digital marketing Manager at Pošta Slovenije, the company “wants to adapt to the digital behaviour of the customers”. Thus, Pošta Slovenije aspires to be prominent with the relevant location information in the platforms that their customers actually use. Rather than trying to push the customers to those sites and platforms that are most convenient for Pošta Slovenije. Being in control over its locations in various search and map platforms is therefore a necessity for Pošta Slovenije. This enables them to adapt to customer trends and ensures that they are visible where their customers are.

Copyright: Pošta Slovenije

A franchise-like business model

The management of the 500 company locations became more complicated when the postal service points were outsourced to private actors. Since 2012 more and more of the company's postal service points are run by entrepreneurs. The switch to a franchise-style business model brought a major increase of changes in opening hours, address etc.

The process of switching Local Marketing tool

One might believe that it is a complicated and expensive process to switch from one local marketing tool to another. Regardless of what your current provider might tell you, every company owns their own location data. This means that even though a company uses a local marketing tool, they are still in charge of all the information being posted, such as location info, opening hours and social media posts. Therefore, it is possible to set up your account with PinMeTo while still using your former provider. A company does not have to be without a tool for a single day, when switching from one provider to another. If you are interested in switching to PinMeTo, you can learn about the process from our guide on how to migrate to PinMeTo local marketing automation tool.

Pošta Slovenije were still using their former provider when they decided that they wanted to contract PinMeTo instead. The company’s account was set up overlapping with the old provider, making the transition to PinMeTo smooth.

We timed our change to PinMeTo almost perfectly, because we were in talks with PinMeTo when our contract had not expired yet. So I am pretty sure that our customers did not experience any fallacies.

Tadej Bokan, Digital Marketing Manager at Pošta Slovenije

 

Out of Pošta Slovenije’s 497 locations only two locations had to be updated manually in connection to the onboarding with PinMeTo. Besides the two locations that had to be updated manually, Pošta Slovenije had a flawless onboarding with PinMeTo according to Tadej Bokan at Pošta Slovenije. 

One of the first things that PinMeTo did for Pošta Slovenije was to set up and implement a naming structure for the company's around 500 locations. This was done in order to ensure that all locations were named in the way that makes most sense to the customers. The name of each location should clarify:

1. Conventional location naming
2. The company
3. City/village.

When the names had been updated to the PinMeTo listings tool, an email was sent to Google. Informing Google that the latest update contained much more relevant location data.

PinMeTo’s customer success team has many years of experience in working with location data management. The team guides our customers on how to use PinMeTo in order to boost local experience and visibility in search engines and on social platforms. Besides assisting PinMeTo’s customers with general updates and improvements, the team members also have a birds-eye approach to each customer. Knowing when it can be strategic to take actions outside of the ordinary plan, like contacting Google after a major improvement of the location data. In the case of Pošta Slovenije, this mix of structured management and agile actions made sure that Google soon understood the scale of the update.

 

Points of improvement

PinMeTo is constantly working on improving the tools and making sure that the user interface is on point. In order to be the best alternative on the market, we are always listening to and trying to adapt to suggestions and ideas from our customers. Tadej Bokan described one minor issue that Pošta Slovenijes would like to improve, which is fully automatic conflict handling, which today needs manual approval before overwriting/ignoring conflicts.

This is not PinMeTo’s fault really. This is connected to how Google and Apple handle data Management. So that we don't have full automation through the API. We have to confirm the data changes. But not having to update information manually is a big step up and reduces the chance of human error.

- Tadej Bokan

"This is a question that we have explored thoroughly both for our own sake as well as for several of our customers because we understand why this is sometimes desired.

Using PinMeTo with the help of an API connection will remove a very large chunk of manual tasks but it will not make it a complete hands off solution. One might think that it would be possible to overwrite all data on the networks such as Google, Facebook, Apple Maps and Bing with internal data via the API. Without going into legalese there are contractual reasons that make it impossible to make it fully automatic. In short the networks value human oversight of the data.

While I personally can imagine the benefits from our customers perspective I can also see the networks point of view. The networks want to preserve and improve the data quality and having users (human oversight) check both incoming end user suggestions and planned data changes (such as Special open hours for the holidays) make sense.

That said, in the Customer Success department at PinMeTo we have ways of helping our customers with this. Drop us a line if you want to dig into how this can be optimized both for quality and minimizing the work needed."

 

Branded search increased by +23 % within a year with PinMeTo.

The result means that Pošta Slovenije location visibility has increased almost +25 % for searches including the company name. 

Copyright: Pošta Slovenije

Why are Branded Searches important to Pošta Slovenije?

Branded search is the measurement of every time a company’s locations are visible connected to searches for the company name. For any multi-location company it is essential to be visible for these searches. The buying journey is impaired if a customer searching for “Pošta Slovenije'' in Google Maps is not shown any nearby post offices. A +23 % improvement of branded searches within one year indicates an improved “near me” brand experience. Making it easier for Pošta Slovenije’s customers to find the company.