NEW YORK, Oct. 11, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Yext, Inc. (NYSE:
YEXT), the leader in Digital Knowledge Management, announced the
launch of Yext for Food today to help restaurants better
attract and serve diners. Yext for Food enables restaurants,
bars, and cafes to appear in search results, not only for general
searches like restaurant name or cuisine type, but also for
specific menu items and attributes. For example, with Yext for
Food, a Mexican restaurant can appear when a nearby diner
performs the search, "tacos near me."
"Diners are searching for specific food items and details about
restaurants, and that's fundamentally changing the game for
restaurants all around the world," said Marc Ferrentino, Chief Strategy Officer of Yext.
"We built Yext for Food to put restaurants in control in
this highly competitive climate, so they can be found when diners
search for a menu item like 'chicken parmesan', or for an attribute
like 'outdoor seating.'"
Restaurant visits are declining year over year in
the United States, and restaurants
worldwide are adapting to online ordering and changing consumer
behavior. The digitization of this traditional brick-and-mortar
industry creates new opportunities for restaurants to be
discoverable for specific menu items when hungry diners search
online. In fact, a Yext blind study found that 83% of consumers
read a restaurant menu online before deciding where to eat, and
restaurants that stand out with rich details about their locations
and menu items attract more business--in fact, over 76% of diners
are more likely to choose a restaurant with in-depth attribute
information available, like price range, dress code, and meals
served. And with over 67% of diners considering 3 or more options
before deciding where to eat, the search landscape for restaurants
is extremely competitive.
Starting today, restaurants using Yext can:
- Publish menu details across the digital ecosystem.
Restaurants can control and feed in their menu data to Google,
Yelp, Facebook, Bing, Foursquare, AllMenus, delivery.com,
MenuPages, and more, making them discoverable for the specific
dishes they serve in more places and across more types of searches
that diners perform.
- Sync more information from the Yext Knowledge Manager
to new food search platforms. Postmates, Zomato, delivery.com,
MenuPix, and Slice are now part of the Yext PowerListings® Network,
allowing restaurants to control their information across more
resources that consumers use to decide where to eat.
- Manage new types of restaurant details. Restaurants can
now label themselves with attributes like price range, meals
served, attire, happy hour specials, and more in the Yext
Knowledge Engine, and publish those details throughout
intelligent search.
Kickstarting the launch of Yext for Food, Yext has hired
veteran food service technology expert Lee
Zucker as Head of Industry for Food Service. Zucker was
previously Vice President of Sales and Restaurant Partnerships at
food tech startup Slice, and Director of Enterprise Sales at
SinglePlatform.
"Restaurants are fundamentally different from any other industry
for two reasons: volume and immediacy. People eat three meals a
day, which translates to food being the most-searched-for business
category, and they tend to search within minutes of wanting to
actually visit or order from a restaurant," said Zucker. "I'm proud
to join Yext to provide restaurants with the tools to adapt to and
compete for digital-native diners, and today's announcement is just
the beginning."
"Yext for Food is about empowering restaurants to be
there; to be front and center when hungry customers know what they
want to eat, but not where to get it," added Ferrentino. "For the
first time, food service businesses will be able to control menus
and other crucial restaurant information all across the internet
from one place--The Yext Knowledge Engine--so they can spend
more time doing what they do best: serving great food."
For more information on Yext for Food, please visit
Yext.com/industries/food-services.
About Yext
Yext is pioneering a new category called Digital Knowledge
Management, which gives businesses control of all of the public
facts that they want consumers to know across the intelligent
ecosystem. The Yext Knowledge Engine™ lets companies manage their
digital knowledge in the cloud and sync it to over 100 services in
the PowerListings® Network. Yext Listings, Pages, and Reviews
enable businesses around the globe to facilitate face-to-face and
digital interactions that boost brand awareness, drive foot
traffic, and increase sales.
View original content with
multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/yext-launches-yext-for-food-to-make-menus-visible-across-intelligent-search-300534490.html
SOURCE Yext, Inc.