Brief:

• Location marketing company Uberall partnered with neighborhood social network Nextdoor to boost the visibility of local businesses among nearby consumers. As a result, businesses with a profile page in Nextdoor will be visible when consumers search for products and services "near me," per a press release.
• Businesses with an Uberall Listings account will see Nextdoor in Uberall's network of partner platforms. They can create a free Nextdoor "business page" profile and use Uberall to update the information in real time while also synchronizing it with their other online profiles.
• The announcement follows Uberall's acquisition of location data management company SweetIQ from newspaper publisher Gannett. As part of the deal, Gannett and its digital marketing unit ReachLocal hired Uberall to provide services that include helping readers find businesses with "near me" searches.

Insight:

Uberall and Nextdoor aim to help local businesses improve their visibility among nearby consumers, which has become especially important for those struggling with plunging sales and diminished foot traffic during the pandemic. Uberall touts Nextdoor as an important marketing platform because it requires users to have a verified address, making it more difficult to post fake listings or anonymous customer recommendations. Those characteristics help to build trust among consumers and businesses.

By integrating their platforms, Uberall and Nextdoor can help businesses raise their visibility whenever mobile users are scouting out nearby stores, restaurants, theaters, salons, mechanics, dry cleaners or other services. Uberall lets businesses update their online information among a variety of platforms, improving the likelihood that they'll be discovered in apps like Nextdoor. As consumers become more comfortable with visiting a broader range of businesses and authorities ease lockdowns, those "near me" searches are likely to gain greater significance for marketers.

Seventy percent of consumers look at several review sites before choosing a business, according to a survey by search engine optimization (SEO) platform BrightLocal that also found that 90% of consumers use the internet to find local businesses. Business recommendations are a key source of conversations on Nextdoor, with many of its asking for advice from neighbors who are considered more reliable than anonymous sources on the internet, according to Uberall.

Nextdoor aims to build consumer confidence, with 70% of its members saying they trust word-of-mouth recommendations from neighbors more than anything else, per a study cited by Uberall. About two-thirds (67%) of Nextdoor's users share business recommendations on the site, while 76% of said they were influenced by a business recommendation from a neighbor. Uberall recommends that agencies and technology companies that work with smaller businesses devote more efforts to Nextdoor to improve discoverability in search results.