Getting Customers From Search to Storefront

Visibility Brief by Yext: You may have heard that the mall is dead. But the truth is the best malls have evolved into genuinely compelling destinations with dining, healthcare, entertainment, and so much more. My guest today is Patrick Flanagan from Simon Property Group, a premier innovator in global retail destinations. And he's here today to talk about how he drives brand visibility and exceptional guest experiences that keep their properties thriving. Let's get into it. Hi, Patrick. Welcome to the Visibility Breathe. Hi, great to be here, Rebecca. Before we dive into all the businessy stuff, I would love for the audience to get to know you a little bit better. You are an avid cyclist, a cyclist and a runner, which I absolutely love. I do both of those things as well. How did you how did you get into it? Yeah. So my lifelong affair with cycling started when I was about 14, got my first job turning wrenches in my local bike shop. And even today, I ⁓ bike commute. In the office. So it's, you know, near and near to my art. ⁓ running on the other hand was sort of an acquired taste. So my wife's an amazing runner. She's done all six Abbott World major marathons. And I think I got kind of jealous andor kind of blue, just always, you know, being on the sidelines, wishing that I could be out there doing it with her, ⁓ seeing ⁓ how fun she was having. So ⁓ little by little, you know, it's a kind of an amazing thing and just small incremental changes in your in your life can really add up. And now it's ⁓ work. part of you know who I am and always looking forward to it. ⁓ that's incredible. We and marathon training takes so much time as well. It's nice to probably have the opportunity to be up there with her for that. Yeah, we love our Sunday morning long runs are a real trick, especially in the winter. Yes. Yes. ⁓ they're so fantastic. I love it. Well, in addition to broading, you were also the SVP of digital development operations and strategy at Simon Property Group. ⁓ so tell us a little bit more about Simon Property Group and the real estate investment behind some of the coolest malls. Yeah. ⁓ so Simon Property Group is a publicly treaded ⁓ real estate investment trust. ⁓ we own and operate ⁓ shopping, dining, entertainment, and mixed-use destinations. We really think of ourselves as sort of ⁓ the retail real estate industry leader and the focus on owning and operating kind of iconic properties that serve as co vibrant hubs and they really serve as powerful engines for the communities that they're in and they serve. What that kind of breaks out to is you know we have big destinations around ⁓ the North America, Europe and Asia. ⁓ We have a portfolio of different types, you know, so we have everything from a regional mall, premium outlet, and this ⁓ kind of unique hybrid called mills. ⁓ and those are kind of you know blending traditional shopping, luxury dining entertainment and residential, which all to say is ⁓ it's a lot more than just a mall at this point. ⁓ my gosh. Yes. I'm a 90s kid. I love the mall, but I think the mall of the 90s is very different than the destination that ⁓ that your organization has built. So ⁓ I was also under the mistaken impression until we were chatting ⁓ at a brand visibility exchange event, I thought malls were dying. And you set me straight on that. So what is actually going on? ⁓ with malls today. Yeah, totally right. Some malls have died or are dying. That is correct, but they aren't a Simon mall. ⁓ you know, the old adage, the location, location, location, it still is everything. You know, America truly is and has been over retailed. And as such, there has been a sustained flight to higher quality retail assets by ⁓ retailers and restaurants. And that move to quality, ⁓ course tracks the best shoppers. And that's the course type of properties that we have and operate. So we have a lot of demand ⁓ for our properties. But don't take my word for it. You could sort of look at any of the kind of financial measures, NOI, FFO, stock price, you name it, ⁓ they all show steady growth and increasing demand. So no malls are nothing but dead. There's been a ⁓ a resurgence of even the younger generations, lots of third party, you know, trusted you know, valid research out there showing even Gen Z calling it, you know, making it their home in their own way. It's still different. They'd be our nostalgic, you know, ⁓ you know, Starcourt, you know, style thing, you know, like stranger things, but it's authentic to them in a in a new environment way. Right. It's so wonderful to have a third place to congregate as well, ⁓ especially for teenagers. I'm curious, you mentioned earlier that the mall has become more than just a place to go shopping. It's a destination for so much more than that. So tell me a little bit More about that? How do you how do you make it more of a destination? We have evolved beyond just being a place to acquire things. There's so many ways of getting an item to your house, right? And of course going to physical shopping center still is a big part of that, but it's ⁓ creating a robust offering that still incorporates retail as a as a ⁓ call it a a key pillar, but it's dining, entertainment, fitness, wellness, residential. All these other areas have are playing a substantial role in driving you know vibrancy and traffic, right? So an example, we have some centers where there are more non-retail tenants than retail, right? So it's not just like, ⁓ a little sprinkling, but it's a substantial, you know, shifting ⁓ of the store mix and to kind of cater to this more experiential, you know, what what's desire, right? We we don't go out just to buy stuff like that's the trip to the grocery store. It's a very ⁓ utilitarian thing. We're looking for, you know, an experience that is something that might delight has discovery, you know, is mixed with something ⁓ more than just, you know, acquiring goods. So ⁓ that's the type of a thing that we're out to create are creating. ⁓ you know right, it's a complete rewiring of ⁓ our DNA, you know, from our tenant mix to how are we shape our properties and creating these more sustainable, durable communities. Thank goodness for that because Full confession, I hate shopping. Like I am not a clothing shopper. ⁓ but I have to. I have a wedding coming up and ⁓ I need to get something new to wear. And the full experience makes the mall such a better destination. It's like when I go, we're gonna have a nice dinner, do some other things as well. So so thank you for pushing on that and making it a reality. Yeah, our shoppers put are pushing us in all honesty. It's what they demand, expect, it's what we need and want to deliver, right? It is a A two way streak. It you know, we build it, they come, but they we need to build what they want to come, you know. So it is a you know, a kind of a bi-directional flow. I'd love to understand a little bit more about your focus at Simon. How much of your time is allocated to serving the needs of your end consumer, the shopper who's coming to the mall versus, you know, your tenants that are leasing property? Yeah, the eighty twenty rule would probably be very valid measure here. So 80% of my team's time and probably of our greater marketing group's time is spent on consumer focused, you know, outbound marketing. We are want to have and have an amazing direct relationship with the end shopper, right? We're trying to drive food traffic first and foremost to our shopping center is trying to get that incremental store visit or discovery, right? So you're there kind of get you to go to one additional store that you haven't maybe ever visited or ⁓ it's been a long time since you wandered in. And then if so, Can I get an incremental purchase right? Core KPIs of the business. 20% might be more in tenant marketing and in our advertisers. So that's where we're trying to create loyalty ⁓ for you know there because we deliver, you know, high quality locations. It's a big, huge scale that makes up Simon. We have over a billion shopper visits a year across our portfolio. So a lot of people come through our doors. ⁓ and that's certainly what Dina helps, you know, our tenants, you know, in introduce their products to a very ⁓ in market shopper. And then we're of course doing it, you know, my world is of our digital focus. So that's things like, you know, digital wayfunding, our assignment plus loyalty rewards program. ⁓ and we just do a ton of content based marketing, always trying to surface the best of what's new now. Right. So you don't have to look at if a mall had two hundred tenants, which some malls have more than that actually, you'd have to look at two hundred Facebook pages, potentially two hundred Instagram streams, two hundred TikTok, you know, pages, two hundred websites. And then you can fully know what's going on. That's our job. Right. We try to make that really easy for you and like bring the best of what's new. So if it's a new tenant, a brand new menu offering, an awesome in-store event, we want to bring that to you. And that's the value that we can add to both the retailer and the shopper. Very nice. So you're curating ⁓ the best. I love that. And even at the store mix, you in it it's it's literally from the physical footprint to, you know, the actual ⁓ and marketing content. It's we talk use that word constantly in what we do. Patrick, I would love to understand. How consumers are finding their way to your malls. I imagine that that process has changed ⁓ quite a bit. It has. It's the so the core tools are still there, you know, ⁓ traditional search, vertical directories like Yelp and TripAdvisor and plenty of map platform serve as still the core foundation. But of course, AI being the gross vehicle that it is, ⁓ is delivering an ever-growing allotment of that traffic and visibility. So if we take a little bit of a ⁓ double click on you know what that actually means, that we look at it from crawlers ⁓ make up about 46% of our all the AI traffic that kind of comes through. Search of AI search is about 44%, and assistance is about 10%. So there's lots of different kind of flavors. Of course, of AI gives a little bit of a breakout of ⁓ so it's changing too. mean, that's today. And if I looked at it 30 days ago, it it sometimes swings. 10% in any direction. So it's not a a static, you know, like number. A lot of times you'll kind of get traffic patterns that are pretty etched in, but these AI ones are highly dynamic, and even which players and models and Frontier Labs, those jump around all the time as well. So you'll see they might be, you'll see a model retraining all happening almost before it's publicly announced. Like you'll see, ⁓ why is Microsoft just smashing your site with a crawler? Then you two four weeks later, like, ⁓ They just had a big model announcement. You could you can see the the writing on the wall as they kind of cause there wasn't any good reason why they would just be, you know, crushing you with ⁓ with ⁓ crawlers. What do you think the data is telling you about the details that people are looking for before they come into the visit? Yeah, they want very local specific information. You know, the hours and phone number maps, there's a lot of ways of getting that. And a lot of partners do a great job of that. But they're looking for those hyper local details. They want information on parking, they want ⁓ information on wheelchair access, they want hour changes, they want this exact in-store yoga free clinic that ALO Yoga is putting on. They want the 10-minute changes, brand new stories that open today or this weekend, because they're trying to plan ⁓ so it's really, really fine ⁓ grain information that they're seeking. And often that's where we can you know have a really key place to play at this point. And giving the hours A lot of places, but knowing that the grand opening is this Saturday at ten AM, that may not be as widely understood yet. Yeah. So we have a a lane a key place to still deliver high value. So how do you think about your job then as a marketer to to help the consumers find the information they're looking for? You think of ourselves as guides, you know. ⁓ we're first, you know, trying to guide you to our own you know, solutions if we could, if we have a bias, right? So we'd love to introduce you to the world assignment through our own apps, sites, digital directories, whatnot. Because those are branded experiences, you might, you know, offer you join our loyalty program. We could add additional value ⁓ to your shopping business. But we fully admit in understand that you has so many third-party tools, sites, apps, platforms. ⁓ that's okay. So if we're gonna steer if you're gonna be steered there by your own preference or ⁓ biased, that's okay. You We want to make sure that yeah, your outcomes there certainly are influenced and guided as best as we can influence, right? So we don't control it, but we can influence it, right? That's right. That's exactly right. ⁓ so I'd like to talk about that a little bit. You've been using YX listings for 13 years or so. to help manage that process and ensure that those third party directories and listings have, you know, accurate, consistent information everywhere. Do you remember the early days? Like what problems were you trying to solve at that time? Yeah, it was a really core one. ⁓ so way back then we w were and still are amazed just how often that the external partners had no information on a shopping mall. Like how I I could understand if it was a local doctor's office or a brand new business, but these shopping centers have been there for twenty, thirty years. They're fifty acres plus in size. I mean these are massive businesses, right? C containing two, three, four hundred other businesses, you know, that call our home. ⁓ they weren't listed, listed incorrect information, missing data, outdated data, no attributes, poor attributes, you name it, we saw it. And it was we were trying to do that through some very time consuming manual methods. But then the magic of, you know, update it once, centralized kind of redistribution, republishing across the huge network made our life, ⁓ continues to make our life, you know, so much better. ⁓ because we do really need to make sure that we are optimized, fully correct, you know, doing everything we can that as again we talked about those third party channels, if that's your preference and choice, that you do find us and you find us as best as that channel will allow us to be found, right? You mentioned accuracy, which I find to be really, really important. The last thing I want to do is pull up information about mall hours or store hours and then get there and they're closed. That's super annoying. ⁓ how do you manage those details across so many? different locations. Luckily, we have an amazing field marketing team that they know their local properties better than anyone in the world. So we look to empower that frontline team that is the closest to the data to maintain it and curate. Yeah, they know if there's a sudden snowstorm and they're going to have to close at 2 p.m. just to know for the safety of the shoppers and employees, they're going to make that call and just do it and update you extra. I may not know that's even happening, right? I'm hundreds, thousands of miles away. The same thing, right? We might be deploying a brand new amenity as part of a reimagining of that shopping center. We're pull deploying a billion plus dollars in capital ⁓ continuously per year and we're updating things all the time. So that we just added a new, let's say, nursing lounge in one of our shopping centers. I may not even know it happened, but that's an important amenity. It serves a very key constituent, you know, our mothers. And that local team needs to make sure that that gets reflected in all of our different ⁓ Content maps and location based marketing ⁓ act activation. So they're the ones that are gonna know it, do it, you know, and do it the best. What gives you the trust and the confidence to enable these local teams to do that? You know, not not all organizations ⁓ are structured that way. I don't think we could do without doing that. It's so done great training. We've had governance in place in the system, ⁓ operational oversight. So, for example, in the platform, we're able to define what an individual can or can't do it by a role. So you have to call custom roles who are marketing directors. They can change the R. Sure, great. Special R is wonderful. Can't change the phone number, for example. That's something that should probably either never change or if it changes, it's a very impactful change and needs to be like well understood and and replicated across many, many channels, right? Even beyond our, you know, external third party stuff. That yes helps with like our own website, needs to make sure we get our phone number changed if it ever happens. So things like that really make it work well that you know you're empowering those things to where they change is allowed and then you're preventing just silly human mistakes like the name of our shopping center should never change unless there's a very, very good reason. That occasionally happens, you know, we would do a big rebrand, but by and far like one person should have control of that, right? Not ⁓ hundreds of field years or right. Very sensible approach. A few times you have mentioned that your ⁓ locations have a reputation ⁓ for being premier destinations. I'd love to talk about how you created that reputation and how you manage it. So at some point in your YAX journey, you layered reputation management on top of your listings. So tell me a little bit about your thinking at the time and why reviews are so important. Yeah. We realized early on that visibility, not just to use the the the podcast name was so key. And that was really what was driving force behind reviews, right? How does a bots or an AI or back then just a search engine know what's best or top? You know, it looks at number reviews, recency reviews, how the reviews are responded to how quickly they responded to the sediment of reviews, the number can you know total reviews, you know, all these factors. So we're like, hmm, if reviews are so important to the search engine, which for us is a huge source of of traffic invisibility, then we have to manage, monitor, and are ultimately even encourage more of them. as it's mission critical to us, you know, growing and increasing our visibility. So if AIO, SEO, GO, whatever you want to call it these days, is, you know, key and near its reviews, I think, are just bedrock, you know, to actually getting and driving that that portion forward. Are there operational insights that you've been able to derive from the reviews, themes that you've been able to pull out? So absent of any awesome impacts that it can have. Yes, they they literally help us run our business better every single day. And so we do a ton to ⁓ parse and get that direct local intelligence that really is revealed like they're not complaints, right? You can't start like even though there's some that are just complete noise, there's so many valued, thoughtful, may not always agree with everything in them, but there is truth, there is a perspective. That has to be listened to. And yeah, we mine that constantly. So we do ⁓ aggregate them, we disseminate them at a local level into ⁓ individual shopping centers have access to theirs. We have, you know, response mechanisms in place, you know, from both human AI and ⁓ managed responses, you know. So we're doing as much as we can to engage with those. But yes, they are an amazing place of kind of the voice of the shop. You mentioned you share it with the locations. Are you using the ⁓ reputation and insights in any way to prioritize action or to reward your top performers? Yeah. So we first we analyze everything ⁓ through a bunch of sediment keyword filters. So we have like 3.4 million rule, for example. It's a huge pile. And we so we take all those through this process and we try to figure out is this a review about parking? Is it a review about our Wi Fi? Is it a review about the traffic leading into or out of a shopping center? Is it a review about I don't know, cleanliness and housekeeping. It could be we have all these very hyper focused little topics. And each of those is then mapped to one or more people, teams, groups inside the company. So if you're the parking team, which we have a group that manages parking here, ⁓ they get all reviews about parking, regardless of where in the country it happens, good and bad, right? We give them everything. ⁓ it's organized, they can sort it, sift it, right? If you're the person you know, deep inside of our network team inside of the IT area that's functioning, you know, running the the on-center Wi-Fi networks. Let's let's share that information with them. If there is a down AP or a a dead zone, our shoppers know. They're they're often, you know, a great canary in the coal mine of, you know, finding these things that we can do better at. So yeah, don't we're not just treating them as, ⁓ yeah, it's just fodder for the AI and search. It is that. Also, it's a hugely important way of improving day to day like our actual business. ⁓ so yeah, they are used constantly get real time alerts on you know somebody if it's like a really serious situation, you know, we have filters for that so that we can at least ⁓ understand and assess and figure out what what what if anything we need to do. But highly encourage, yeah, that those are ⁓ not the people think as the circular recycling bin, you know, it don't really matter. They are at least to us one of our best, clearest, consistent streams of ⁓ what we can do often better. Okay, we're gonna pivot into our final section. This is our stop, start, and rethink section. So when you you've been in this industry for a long time, what would you advise marketers to start doing? I'd start measuring how much AI source traffic is coming to your website. And then if you can, what the average scrape to referral ratio is. I think it'll blow you away if you do that. I think you'll see a massive amount of scraping is happening and how. little referral traffic is being handed out to your brand's website. I think it could reshape your thinking and just how many answers and insights and visibility is being delivered within those AI searches or agentic answers that would never result in a clip through. It's still a win. It's just a different kind of win ⁓ than we might traditionally see. ⁓ that's really interesting. So maybe expanding my reporting dashboard beyond clicks to include that metric. It's a great, great recommendation. ⁓ What should I stop doing? Yeah. So it's similar. So I'd stop looking at your declining organic traffic as a search problem. ⁓ and instead reframe the situation, right? So that things have shifted left. And what I mean by that is they're just getting their answers in a different, earlier way, right? They used to have to come to your site, you know, to get the answer, but they're getting it increasingly, you know, in a earlier form, probably from an AI search summary or an AI chat assistant kind of thing. So It's not that you're not getting talked about or share a voice. It's just shifted and just need different tools, right? To help understand, look at so it's one of the reasons why we're using Scout is just to get a better handle on it, to measure it, to see what we can do to influence it, of course, right? We don't ever just want to be happy with what we always want more. So that's a great way of doing that. And yeah, you probably will see stop just focusing on, ⁓ worries me. AI is crushing my business. I'm not getting the traffic I used to. You're getting a different kind of engagement or of ⁓ interaction. It's just not a click. And what should we be rethinking? I'm gonna harp on the on the review on. It's not just a big pile of complaints. It's a wonderful insight stream that's ultra specific. It's real time. It's n full of nuance, insight, sediment. Figure out a way to make sense of it, parse it, make it work for your business. can't imagine life without it. It would just be I mean might as well just go back to I don't know the the comment cars, but no one's gonna go find the mall office. I mean here's a there's a there's a challenge. Try to find a mall office. ⁓ but you know how to find Facebook, you know how to find Google, you know how to find Yelp, right? So that's what you're ⁓ probably doing at this point, which is fine. You know, we're listening. We're here and we wanna ⁓ we want to listen. You might want to learn and do better. Excellent. Well, speaking of listening and learning, how can folks ⁓ connect with you if they want to hear more about what you're doing? ⁓ I'm on LinkedIn, like everyone, I do a pretty poor job of manning the inbox there. I struggle with my little corporate and you know, regular email inbox. ⁓ I don't need another inbox in my life, LinkedIn, but ⁓ I got one, whether I wanted one or not. So you can do that. I've I'll try. ⁓ my best. I'm also on Instagram at ⁓ narpal N A R P O L E. You can catch ⁓ where I'm running or riding around ⁓ the States with a globe occasionally. So Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your insights today. super helpful. ⁓ really fascinating. And we'd love to have you back again sometime soon. ⁓ lovely. Yeah. So good being here with you. And yeah, it's been a lot ⁓ Really enjoy what you're trying to do for the greater community, like just helping us all navigate these changing times and understanding how we can better be seen. Wow, that's so kind. Thank you so much. That's a wrap on this episode of the Visibility Brief. If you found this useful, subscribe, leave us a review, or send us to a colleague who needs to hear it. We'll see you next time.