Lori Stillman:
Yeah, it was really born outta some work that we started a couple of years ago and we were focused on last mile, which if you think about at the end of the pandemic, everybody was trying to stand up last mile capabilities as we saw traffic down and trying to bring the store to the doorstep. And in the midst of all of that, we were doing some research through our Convenience Voices platform. And this number stood out to us of the number of shoppers who were physically in a store, but going somewhere else to get their needs met elsewhere. And so it just started us down this path of are we focusing on the wrong end of the opportunity and we have more opportunities to build with our existing customer base while they’re in the store versus trying to take the store to the doorstep.
And while both are great opportunities in the midst of doing all of that, it dawned on us that the convenience store offer has evolved to the point that shoppers today might not know all of the solutions that we now provide for them. And so we started looking at, when I’m looking for solutions that might be beyond the traditional gas or cokes or cigarettes, how am I looking for those opportunities and how are the stores showing up? So we literally pulled out an iPhone and we started saying, Hey Siri, where’s the nearest ice machine? Propane tank exchange? Coffee? And we were dumbfounded that in every one of those searches, convenience stores were not showing up in the results that were being returned. And that really is what bore out this opportunity.

Jeff Lenard:
The video was a lot of fun because it’s just you and a colleague filming and you’re standing right in front of iced coffee asking about iced coffee. You’re standing right in front of propane. So it’s not like, well the algorithm didn’t quite know where you were. You were literally in a beer cave asking where the beer was and they’re pointing you a mile down the street.

Lori Stillman:
Exactly. It was dumbfounding and I’m sure if you saw the video, you could see the expression on my face. I’m literally elbow on an ATM being told to go to a bank five miles away, standing in the middle of a car wash and being directed to five different car washes. Probably the most mind boggling one was when I was looking at propane tank exchange, which we think is a great opportunity in this industry, drives a lot of incremental trips, the first result was wanting me to drive 45 miles to a propane distribution center. It just shows that the offer hasn’t been connected to how customers are now searching, and perhaps even more importantly, discovering what opportunities exist for them to meet their needs in today’s retail landscape.

Chrissy Blasinsky:
So in going through all of this, why do you think that is? Why are convenience stores kind of like these ghosts on the corner when we know that there’s 148,000-plus in the United States alone? Why are we not showing up?

Lori Stillman:
Well, it starts with your Google business account. And if you haven’t taken ownership of every single location where you have a site, and you’ve gone to Google and you’ve claimed that page and you’ve identified yourself as a convenience store retailer or gas station or pizza, however you want to be primarily identified to your customer base, then you’re really just hoping that all of the other comments that people might have made about your business somehow gets you to the top of that Google three pack and search results. And the reality is that doesn’t happen. So if we haven’t evolved how we are marketing ourselves, not just in the physical space, but taking ownership of those digital assets, which now also direct people to where we are and what we have to offer, then we’re missing those opportunities to win that shopper.
We started by looking at some Google analytics just on search results in general that really showed us what were the keywords most often being searched for. What we found was things like gas or pizza or ice or beer, they were ten times if not more higher than people saying, Where’s the nearest convenience store? Where’s the nearer gas station station? And as we looked at that, what we found is often our industry identifies based on the physical location, the corner we’re on, the brand of gas that we sell, and what customers are looking for are outcomes to immediate problems that they have. I’m out of beer, I need more so my search is for beer. I might not be doing a branded search for the specific place that I often go to to buy that beer I’m looking for, I need beer right now where I need pizza, or I need a hunting license or a lottery ticket or what have you.
And so the consumer search is much more results driven. Whereas how we’ve identified ourselves when we take the action to identify ourselves is very centric and often is headquarter centric, meaning there’s a number of times you’ll do a search and you get landed to the website. So I find a store, I go to the web, it gives me an option in Google business to go to the website for that retailer. And it takes me to their corporate landing page, which pretty much makes me start right back at the beginning. Now I gotta find the locations tab. Now I gotta remember the zip code or the address of the place where I’m searching. And if it’s not my immediate neighborhood, then that hasn’t helped me and I’ve probably wasted four or five clicks along the way, which results in frustration rather than probably a trip to the store.

Jeff Lenard:
And when you go back t, the landing page and it’s after 5:00 PM it says closed right now … the two search items that jump to the top are the phrase ‘near me’ and ‘open.’ You gotta have those two if somebody’s gonna continue any further.

Lori Stillman:
It’s really about accurate data, right? So you can have the listing, you can have a Facebook page, but when search results find you, your store address isn’t accurate or the cross streets that you’re on or your phone number or God forbid, your hours of operation have changed. And let’s face it, many retailers have had to change store operating hours just because of what’s happened post pandemic with labor situation, et cetera. So if that information isn’t accurate and that customer has actually taken action and driven to the address only to get there and find the store closed, wow. Even probably more damage than not showing up in the first place.

Chrissy Blasinsky:
So that’s a big undertaking for someone on a company staff to take on, right? To manage this whole process of the Google business side and making sure that everything’s up to date and then social media on top of that. It’s a huge lift.

Lori Stillman:
It is a huge lift. Automation now enables us to make that lift very actionable because to do it right to win search, search is very local. 90% of all search is now this near me, specific destination search. And so again, you want the results to be relevant to the location, which means you have to have a single Google listing for every single store location. You need to have a separate Facebook listing for every store location. So let’s say you have 50 stores. You start multiplying that by the upwards of a 100 to 125 different social platforms and search platforms that customers might be looking for you on. Then exponentially people just kind of cave under the magnitude of the work. And that’s why we moved down the path that we did to build THRIVR, which is the NACS new solution that allows us to put all of those localized marketing efforts on a single dashboard so that you can manage listings accuracy and where you’re making a change or you’re communicating a promotion or an offer that is applicable to all stores. It’s a one and done tact versus having to go to each individual page reversely. If you need to deliver messages or promotions that are unique to a set of stores, perhaps all of the stores in your portfolio that carry a certain brand of gas or all of the locations you have that have a made to order offer, you can also build those groups and clusters and be able to manage that content in a much more efficient way.

Jeff Lenard:
And the cost to do this is it’s really the opportunity cost. It’s what you lose if you don’t do something. So in looking at this solution, THRIVR, we’re working with this group called Soci, which doesn’t typically work with a lot of stores like those in our channel, particularly those with with fewer than 50 stores. Do you want to take us through what THRIVR means with this partnership with Soci?

Lori Stillman:
Yeah, so you’re right. Soci is the premier localized marketing platform firm that’s out there. And we looked at a lot of different players in this space. We realized very quickly that there were a lot of players who dealt with one discipline, meaning they were really good at helping you manage your store listing so that when you did search you, your likelihood to show up was much better or they provided opportunities to look at social so that you can manage your presence across Instagram and Facebook efficiently or third reviews and reputations. Because that’s the other thing that happens when someone does a search, right? If they see somebody only has a two star rating in the last three or four comments made about the business, we’re not positive, then they’re probably gonna remove that location from their consideration set. So we wanted a platform that allowed us to manage all three because you have to excel at all three in order to really win that Google three pack and show up in those listing results the way Apple search or Google search is gonna deliver the results.
Soci was the platform that was best at being able to bring all three of those capabilities together onto a single desktop, but they didn’t work with anybody who had 50 or fewer locations. In our industry, we have over 90,000 or fewer operators who are single store operators. That’s a significant portion of the number of doors in our industry. And so we knew that that solution wouldn’t be one that would allow us to get the scale that we needed to for the industry to really win convenience the way we envision it. And so we sat down with associate and said, what would it take for us to be able to white label your platform, bring all of the same capabilities that someone with 50 or more stores could license directly and make that available to the industry?
And so that’s what we built and we’ve partnered with them, they’ve been tremendous partners in helping us bring the solution for the industry forward next has taken on the investment required to enable any operator, whether they have one location or 20 or 500 to be able to have the same capabilities to be able to manage search, to be able to build solutions If you don’t have any today, because we know there’s a lot of retailers today who haven’t been managing their presence. And so this allows them to jump in, build those solutions and do it very cost effectively.

Chrissy Blasinsky:
You guys had a great presence at the NACS Show. UI know you had some demos and the associate team was there as well. What was the retailer feedback when they saw this actually in action? It’s one thing to talk about it, but it’s another thing to actually see how it all works.

Lori Stillman:
The feedback was pretty overwhelming. As a matter of fact, I was talking to a retailer yesterday that we had been in discussions with even prior to the Show and I asked him like, Hey, I didn’t see you at the Show. Why didn’t you stop by? He said, every time we came by the booth, all of the demo stations were full and we had so many other appointments that we knew we would be talking to you later. And really it was, you know, conversations from retailers who started out saying, Why do I really need this? I know my customer, I know my corner. And it’s like, it’s not your corner or your customer, it’s the customer that is driving by you and doesn’t know what your offer is. It’s the customer who doesn’t realize that your offer has evolved and that there’s other needs that they have that you can now meet that you need to be able to show up when they’re looking for those solutions.
And so I think the overwhelming feedback was a wow didn’t realize that the marketplace has changed to the point that we are losing business by not being as available to our CU customers in the digital landscape as we are physically. That was a big takeaway for a lot of retailers. And then quite frankly, when we started talking to them about the investment that would be required for them to actually enable the capability, they were pretty dumbfounded. And so, you know, I’ll cut to the chase and say that for a retailer who wants to start to win in the digital landscape, the investment is $300 a store a year. So we’re talking $25 a month and I think everybody listening knows all the other things that they’re probably investing in at store level that’s far exceeds that. And I tell folks, simply the margin that you can make on selling one incremental cup of coffee a day, we’re talking margin. We’re not talking retail price will more than pay for the solution. And I think when we think about the value of the offer and the average transaction that convenience store operators have today, that is not a heavy lift that’s selling, you know, maybe one or two more foodservice items a week. And so how do we win this business that is leaking to other competitors, both physically and digitally just simply by showing up and being available where customers are looking for us.

Jeff Lenard:
Well, it struck me what you were saying, the idea of ratings and we all have our favorite restaurants. Whether it’s true or whether it’s not true, perceptions kind of sit back there and it’s difficult to define, but I would imagine it colors whether somebody decides that you are going to be where they go just because the the ratings are just as important as, do you have it? Are you close to me? Are you open?

Lori Stillman:
Listen, unmanaged social media can be the biggest contributor to lost business, then anything else that’s out there. 70% of people today turn to social media when they have customer care issues. 78% of them make purchase decisions that are influenced by what they read that others have written about a business or an experience. And probably the most challenging one, kind of to your point, 63% say they shop elsewhere if they simply don’t like what people are saying about a brand on their social page. And so to me it’s like, you can’t afford not to do this. And let’s face it, people are gonna have bad experiences. And I think we’ve seen time and time again, brands who just ignore it and just let it sit on their social page. And then there’s brands who I think have a great control on it, and we have some in our industry who do it very well by saying:
We’re really disappointed to hear that that experience was less than satisfactory. Please DM me at such and such address and we would like to make it right. We’d like to give you an opportunity to give us another try. And we’re not talking about free gas for a year. We’re talking about maybe giving them an incentive for a free cup of coffee or 50% off a foodservice item the next time they’re in a store just to give them a reason to come back. And I’ll tell you the other thing that as we’ve started really exploring this space, our goal was really about helping us win more trips, building bigger baskets. But I’ll tell you one of the other things that we’ve uncovered that makes this even more valuable to operators is potential employees who are looking for jobs and wanna understand what they can expect when they work at a location will look at social media and see what other people are saying about their experiences in that store. And if customers are raving about how great their experience is, then that employee is gonna immediately say, Hey that’s a place I wanna work. But if they’re raging customers and they’re not happy with the experiences, then they’re gonna say, Hmm maybe something’s going on there, maybe I’ll look at another employer. So this can also be a great weapon in helping us really address some of the labor challenges by sharing not just to prospective customers, but to prospective employees what the brand experience is all about.
I truly believe in today’s landscape, retailers cannot afford to not manage and develop a very compelling digital presence. It is just the way in which today all of us are discovering and searching for the needs that we have and the experiences that we’re looking for. And many times we discover things we didn’t even know we were looking for, and it prompts us to go give something a try.

Jeff Lenard:
For those who are interested in THRIVR, how can they learn more?

Lori Stillman:
It’s very easy. You can go to convenience.org/THRIVR and learn how you can bring your stores into the digital landscape in a compelling way that matters to your shoppers.

Jeff Lenard:
Taking the E off is very much the personality of tech companies today. The misspelling is very much in line with our industry, which is known for misspelling. So THRIVR without the E, check it out for less than a incremental cost of a cup of coffee. Lori, thanks for joining us today.

Outro:
Convenience Matters is brought to you by NACS and produced in partnership with Human Factor. For more information, visit convenience.org.

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