Google Places Blueprint Free Report
Shoot me an email and I’ll send you a copy of
Google Places Blueprint.
It’s concise up-to-date info that you really
should be implementing for your business.
martin@ez-campaigns.com
Best Small Business Marketing Idea: Google Places
One problem with marketing your business on the Internet is the countless advertising options you have available to you.
This is a very serious drawback for many reasons. First is causes you to lose focus. You try one possibility and soon another one rears its ugly head.
So you give that a shot before the first one has had enough time to bear fruit.
And the cycle continues.
And Internet marketing consultants don’t help here either. They stay up late thinking of new Internet silver bullets that will solve your business promotion woes.
Being an Internet marketing consultant myself, allow me to try to break the vicious cycle and offer a solution that I have talked about before.
It is a solution that solves a handful of challenges at once, is very user-friendly and here is the big one: most likely your competition is not exploiting its power at all.
It is, of course, Google Places.
What caused me to revisit this topic once again is that yesterday afternoon I put all my preconceived notions aside and just went to Google and stared at the screen a bit.
Then I decided to do a little role playing. I pretended I was new in town and was looking for, of all things, a good liquor store.
My search query was “liquor store waterbury ct”.
But before I searched, I went to Google’s external keyword tool to see how many times a month that search term was entered.
Last month it was entered about 100 times.
Next I looked at the results for the search.
A few liquor stores showed up on page one. But mostly the results were directory listings where you could go and then find liquor stores. This is of little help to a liquor store owner.
However, the liquor stores that showed up on page one had done at least something with their Google Places listing. I think one store had two reviews the other store maybe had one review but it was obvious that liquor stores are not doing much with there Google Places listing.
Too bad. There is a huge opportunity there.
If I owned a liquor store here is what I would do.
First I would make sure I claimed my page. Then I would start uploading photos to Google Places.
Then I would begin a campaign of getting my customers to post reviews on the various review sites.
I would make up a flyer that clearly explained what I was requesting them to do. A liquor store owner usually has a personal relationship of sorts with good customers. I bet they would be glad to make the effort to post a positive review. You could even offer an incentive if the customer followed through.
If you did this and naturally and organically grew your reviews, Google would recognize this and reward you with a top ranking.
Such a tactic would cause you to stand head and shoulders above your competition.
I predict that if you did this, some of those one hundred searchers I spoke of earlier would come into your store to see if all the buzz was true.
It would take time and a few bucks (less than 500 for the whole shooting match) but in my opinion it would be the best advertising investment you made all year.
And those reviews you now have? They are permanent, valuable business assets that will last the life of your business.
Online Reputation Management
The interview with the prospective client was
going well. I was asking most of the questions and the prospective client was giving me valuable information that would enable me to to improve his online lead generation efforts.
Then an interesting thing happened.
I asked the potential client, “I noticed a couple of pretty negative reviews on Yelp. Are you doing anything about that?”
The change in the atmosphere of the conversation was palpable. His body language told me that I had hit a real sore spot.
It was like watching a balloon deflate in front of my eyes.
To say I hit a sore spot would be putting it mildly. It was more like a gaping wound.
It turns out this was a second generation business owner. His father had owned the business before him… and before the advent of of the Internet.
This bad review on his business made him feel like he had let his father down, I think.
But in a way his father had it easier: back then businesses pretty much controlled the content of public conversations about businesses.
It was sort of a one way communication channel. But now, thanks to the Internet, everyone controls the conversation via blogs, Social Media, and customer reviews.
I explained the way I look at this problem.
“First of all we are dealing with data here, not reality”, I said. It’s important to make that distinction for many reasons. Most of all, data can me massaged, manipulated and sometimes deleted. Looking at negative customer reviews as mere data is empowering.”
I continued “In this case our data set just happens to called: online reputation management, the bastard child of Social Media.”
My prospective (now probable) client laughed his head off at that. Deftly slipping in the word bastard in a business conversation usually has that effect.
And engaging in casual conversations with business owners about Internet marketing is what I do for a living actually. After selling online for over 13 years it’s safe to say I know a lot about Internet marketing, but my real skill, the skill that puts bread on the table is my knack for initiating these casual conversations with business
owners. My solutions, services, and suggestions flow naturally from these little talks.
This practice of monitoring and influencing the Internet reputation of a person or business is called reputation management. But before I give you my approach and some simple rules I must make an obvious but mandatory caveat: if your products or service are poor then bad reviews are not the problem. You must correct the root cause first.This truth is painfully obvious. So elementary, in fact, that I probably should not have even mentioned it. But sometimes where there is smoke;
there is a fire.
It is true that bad reviews could adversely affect your bottom-line. But you have two big things in your favor when dealing with this issue. First, the very nature of the Intent is constant change and evolution. Therefore, over time, most bad reviews will almost disappear from view. They will be “pushed down”.
Second, you can and should respond to all reviews-both positive and negative- yourself. It has been my experience that when a business owner responds to a negative review with tact, understanding and savvy the business ends up looking like the bigger and better person.
So with a tip of the cap to David Letterman, here are my Top 10 Rules for dealing with reputation management.
10. Monitor with Google Alerts
9. Sources of bad reviews are: Bloggers, Forums, Social Media, Former Employees, consumer sites and Google alerts covers them all.
8. Actively seek reviews from satisfied customers by offering incentives, discounts, free samples.
7. Send these customers to your business listing on Yelp,
Google Places, City Search and others.
6. Link your business listings to your website.
5. Consistently provide search engines with positive, branded content
to facilitate the “push down” effect.
4. Respond to both positive and negative comments.
3. Always offer a solution in your response to negative reviews.
2. Ask for a negative review to be removed. Works only occasionally and probably not worth the effort.
And the number one rule for dealing with negative reviews is:
1. Remember: It’s only data.
Google Places: Your Best Internet Advertising Option
Are you confused about how to advertise your business on the Internet and get results? If you are, it’s not surprising. It seems every week Internet marketers are pitching the “next greatest thing” that is guaranteed to get your phone ringing with potential customers. First it’s Facebook, then email marketing, then SEO, new websites, blogging, podcasts and on and on. It’s enough to make one long for the good old days of the Yellow Pages.
But the past is dead and the Internet as the new advertising medium and it is here to stay. So the question is how to we separate the wheat from the chaff and make it payoff for our businesses?
At the risk of over-simplification here is my 5 step “course” on Internet advertising for typical bricks and mortar service type businesses. It is the distillation of my years of experience in this field. I’m not trying to sell you anything. The following represent the best state-of-the-art ideas that really work to the best of my knowledge.
- Keywords The Internet is an amazing thing. People seeking solutions type words into the search engines and hope that by doing so they will find a reputable service provider to help them. Knowing your industry’s keywords is the backbone to any successful Internet marketing campaign.
- Page One Rankings When a potential customer types in their search query (keywords) you had better come up on the first page. If you don’t come up on page one for that particular search term your chances of getting a call from that potential customer are near zero.
- There Can Be Only 10 There are only 10 slots available on a search page. The #1 position gets 22% or more of the traffic. The top three positions get the lion’s share of the traffic. Let the critical importance of this reality sink in.
- Google Places is For Real Google has put a lot of resources into local search. Their crowning achievement is Google Places. It is free, robust and helpful to consumers and businesses alike. Although it is free, it does require time and intelligent attention. But for ROI, nothing on the Internet comes close. It’s the quickest way to achieve top rankings for most local businesses.
- Pay Per Click Is Important You have probably tried it and hated it. But that’s because you did it haphazardly. Back in the good old days, how much did you pay per month for your Yellow Pages ad? If you are serious about advertising you should have a monthly budget for pay-per-click.
So there is my mini Google Places Course course for effective Internet advertising. I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Is there more to say? Of course. But my byword for 2012 is: keep it simple. Focus 90% of your Internet marketing efforts on Google Places.
