Three pillars of a customer review marketing strategy

One of the best secret weapons small business owners have when it comes to building confidence in their business is good online customer reviews. Customer reviews are not only essential, but they’re also a proven business strategy for building your location-based business. But don’t take our word for it, either. Read some of these examples of why online customer reviews are so vital. 

Today, we’re going to focus on the three key pillars of developing a solid customer review marketing strategy. First, though, let’s look at why having customer testimonials appear on your business listings is so important. And, to do so, let’s look at some statistics:

  • If you have less than a 4-star rating, over half of consumers won’t use your business. 
  • It takes less than 10 reviews for 90% of people to form an opinion about your business. 
  • WHOA! 72% percent of people won’t take action before consulting online reviews.
  • 15% of customers will not trust a business if they don’t have reviews to consult. 
  • Consumers will spend up to 31% more on a business that has great reviews associated with it. 
  • WHOA! Google accounts for 57.5% of all reviews available in the world. 
  • WHOA! 63.6% of consumers visit Google to check for reviews of a business.
  • 73% of consumers consider written reviews to be more important than star and number ratings.
  • LOCAL ALERT! Positive reviews encourage 68% of consumers to use a local business.
  • Have more than four negative reviews about your business? That may decrease sales by 70%.

These are just a few of the many statistics available about reviews. We encourage you to read others right from our source. 

So now that you understand the importance of your business’s reviews, it’s time to learn the three pillars of a customer review marketing strategy. 

Pillar #1: Make sure that you’ve claimed your Google My Business listing (and other directories)

While we’ve written a comprehensive post that details everything you need to know about Google My Business, it’s important to reiterate that a sound review marketing strategy starts with owning your listings. Why is this so important? There are several reasons.

Owning (claiming) your listing gives you full control over what business information is placed there. Yes, this refers to all the key elements you would think of, including your business name, address, phone number, business description and more. What this also does is allow you to 1) get alerts whenever someone leaves you a review and 2) respond to reviews and have those responses appear as being from you, the business owner (more on that soon). 

Owning your listing is the first step to having a successful online review marketing strategy.

Pillar #2: Respond to your reviews

Use the alerts mentioned above (see, told you it would be soon) to stay on top of the feedback you’re getting – and help guide your response. When reviews are positive, get in there and thank your customers, share your positive experiences with them and validate their visit and the reasons why they gave you that positive review in the first place. When reviews are negative, think of them as an opportunity to learn about your business, rebuild consumer trust and turn the negative into a positive. Most people will be shocked that you’re paying attention and care. This is a good thing. Take advantage and get them back on your side. 

Another very important factor was validated by Google earlier this year. The company confirmed that responding to reviews is an important factor in getting your local business ranked in a “local pack”. In fact, in the Google My Business help section, they explicitly state that responding to reviews is a vital element to improve your local ranking on Google:

Manage and respond to reviews

Interact with customers by responding to reviews that they leave about your business. Responding to reviews shows that you value your customers and the feedback that they leave about your business. High-quality, positive reviews from your customers will improve your business’s visibility and increase the likelihood that a potential customer will visit your location. Encourage customers to leave feedback by creating a link they can click to write reviews.

Pillar #3: Ask for reviews

At the tail end of Google’s note about how to manage and respond to reviews, you may have noticed the following note to “Encourage customers to leave feedback by creating a link they can click to write reviews.”

So Google is encouraging you to encourage people to leave reviews. Excellent! When you consider how competitive it is to get into the Local Pack and rank well organically, coupled with the fact that the average local business has 39 Google reviews associated to their listing (same sources as our previous statistics), you can see why it becomes important to solicit reviews from your best customers. 

There are many ways you can go about this, some easier to implement than others. Here are some ideas:

  • Personally email your best customers asking them to support your business with an online review.
  • Plant a link to your listing in your email signature.
  • Add a URL to your receipts
  • Embark on a drip email campaign with requests and links
  • Use a specialized tool to monitor reviews, send out requests or embark on a campaign

These are just some ideas, and we’re able to help with any online review marketing strategies as well, even the more involved processes. 

Go beyond Google if need be!

While we’ve talked a lot about Google here for its obvious power via its market share alone, it’s important to consider other search engines, directories, social networks and mapping technologies too. So if you’re established on Facebook, point reviewers there. If you’re reliant on Yelp, ask for reviews there and continually monitor that network. But remember where most people search, and that’s on Google. It’s likely that for most businesses, Google will have the greatest impact on traffic to your store and to your website. 

What are some of your strategies to generate reviews? How do you go about monitoring for them? Do you respond? Let us know in the comments below.

How to write a description for your Google My Business listing

One of the best weapons within your Google My Business listing is the business description Google allows you to write. Your business description is a secret path directly into Google’s credibility book, as they use your business description to ensure that your business is a real business run by real people. This being said, it’s an excellent opportunity to provide those who land on your listing with authentic content explaining what you do. 

That’s why we encourage our clients to take advantage of their business description – right up to the last character allowed. Whether you’ve worked on your business description recently or it’s been years (see what a difference a year makes, by the way), here are some suggestions to help make it even better.

Elements of an excellent business description for Google My Business

  • Make every character count. You have 750 characters to work with—use as many of them as you can. The more relevant the terms you use within your description are, the more chances people have to identify their needs in your listing. 
  • Think keywords… If you offer unique services, state them. If you sell specific brands, name them. If you use special techniques to do what you do, list them. If your restaurant specializes in certain dishes, bake those terms in. 
  • …But be natural. Like anything you write and put anywhere online, be natural and don’t come across as if you’re a robot repeating the same words over and over. This is a big red flag to Google that may lead to your listing being taken down. 
  • Do not repeat your NAP information. Your Google My Business listing has a function to direct people to your business. Your Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) and other contact information are readily available. Even if your address has recently changed, do not waste characters repeating this information in your business description – besides, there are other ways to update your address. 
  • No links, no URLs. Links will not be clickable, so don’t waste characters on them. Remember, your URL is up in the “Website” button at the top of your listing and you can plant links in Google Posts as well. No need to put them here. 
  • Not the place to pitch. No special offers, promotions or pitches. Period. This goes against Google’s policies and will likely result in your description not being approved. 

What guidelines does Google recommend?

Google does an excellent job of describing some dos and don’ts of their own. Rather than repeat them here, we’ll share a screen capture of their guidelines. 

Need help with your business description?

Our clients often ask for help with their business descriptions. When you sign up for one of our plans, we’re happy to review your business description and help you dial it in. It’s a vital part of your listing and we want to help you get it right. If you’re unsure that it represents your business, we’re happy to work with you until it does. No questions asked. 

Looking for some more suggestions for how to make your Google My Business listing even better? Check out our post highlighting some more ideas. 

So, how does your business description look? Are you happy with how it describes your business? What are some of the challenges you’ve had in crafting your business description? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!

Where was your Google My Business listing a year or two ago?

We recently received an email from a client after her dashboard was updated with August data. It turns out that there were some dips in the business’s month over month data. And this created concern and some questions. 

Her email:

It seems that both “Actions” and “Calls” were down almost 50% from the previous month on the Google dashboard – is that simply that people were on vacation? Is it something that should spur action on our part? Just trying to understand it all.

When we received this email, I immediately looked at the data and realized that for clients with seasonal schedules, the month-over-month metric may not tell the right story. The answer to our client’s email was in the year-over-year data. As a result, we pulled this chart:

August 2019

Total Actions

 Calls Directions

Website Visits
vs 2017

+158.35%

 +175.00% +138.41%

+164.71%
vs 2018

+18.41%

 +3.13% +9.76%

+21.88%

Here you can see that though August is a quiet month for the client, we’ve been able to achieve significant growth when compared to the two previous Augusts. 

How did we get here with this particular client? The recipe has been a good one for them and other clients as well. First, we syndicated their business information to 15 of the most important business directories online, including Google, Bing, Facebook, Waze, Uber, FourSquare, and TomTom. This creates a wider web presence for their business and builds consistency across the web for their information. Right away, this helps generate more listing views and actions on Google My Business. 

We follow this up with regular Google Posts. New content on their listing helps plant keywords into Google’s engines and shows that the client is active with their listing. Again, this helps the client build interest in their listing. Reviews, which they also solicit, have been positive and affect their listing in a positive way too. 

Of course, we’ve applied this recipe for other clients and we see similar results. Our case study section highlights some of these successes and shows that for different clients in different industries, the results can be effective and fast. 

To learn more about our services, please head to our solutions section. The case studies on our blog also show how we can impact business in a big way for a very small price. 

Introducing New 10|20 Marketing Client Dashboards

10|20 Marketing’s clients now have Google My Business metrics at their fingertips. Every month, we’re pulling location specific statistics straight from Google and making them available to you via Google Data Studio. Each dashboard is designed to help you see how your metrics are progressing every month, with comparisons to the previous month and trended for the most recent 12-month period.

The dashboards will also show an important comparison: your metrics before and after you subscribed to our services. And that’s what really gets us going! Because with these metrics, we’ll be able to show you the impact of owning, organizing and optimizing your Google My Business presence.

See an interactive sample of the new dashboard right now!

The Metrics You Will See

What will you learn when accessing your dashboard? We’ve mapped out the following:

  • Total Views: Total number of times your Google My Business (GMB) listing has been viewed.
  • Total Actions: Total number of times people clicked through to call, map your address or visit your website from your GMB listing.
  • Action Rate: Total actions/total views. This shows the percentage of people who acted on your business information to learn more about your business.
  • Map Views: The number of times your local listing appeared in the Google maps results following a query.
  • Search Views: The number of times your local listing appeared in search results following a query.
  • Calls: The number of calls initiated from your local listing on desktop or mobile.
  • Directions: The number of times someone mapped your address from your local listing on desktop or mobile.
  • Website Visits: The number of times someone visited your website after clicking from your listing on desktop or mobile.

Plus, for each metric, you’ll have two boxes below where you can review your monthly averages from before and after subscribing with us. This calculation has already helped us turn out some pretty impressive case studies, as the before/after snapshot shows us the impact we’ve had on our small business clients.

How To Read Your Dashboard

Reading the first page of your dashboard is key to understanding the impact we’ve had on your business. Here’s how to get the most out of your board.

10|20 Marketing Dashboard Example

  1. Use the navigation on the top left to change pages.
  2. Use the date filter to choose the month you’d like to review. New data is updated on the 12th of the following month.  
  3. This is the date that you started working with 10|20 Marketing.
  4. The big number is the total for the selected time period. A comparison to the previous month is below and indicates whether the total has increased or decreased month over month.
  5. Each metric has a comparison of your business’s averages. The lighter blue box is your average prior to working with 10|20 Marketing and the darker blue box shows your average after working with us.
    • Note: If there are no metrics for your Google My Business listing before you joined us, these comparison boxes will only show the average since joining 10|20 Marketing.
  6. The charts trend your total Google My Business views and actions. Hover your mouse over the bars to see your breakdown for each data point and your total for each respective month.

Optimizing Your Local Business Listings

Remember, there are several things you can do on your own to help your views, calls, website clicks and in-store visits improve. Here are some quick pointers on how to optimize your Google My Business listing and your presence on the other directories we’ve claimed for you.

  1. Always maintain consistency with all of your listings. If you have changes to make, please let us know so we can apply the same change to all of the listings in your package.
  2. Keep on top of your online reviews. Thank your customers for their positive reviews and help solve the issues related to negative reviews. Show your clients – and everyone who reads your reviews – that you’re responsive and care.
  3. Update your Google My Business listing with social posts. The content associated with your posts will be indexed by Google and help you increase the number of views your listing attracts.
  4. Post pictures to your listing and name these images with the terms that best describe what is in the image, along with your business name.
  5. Answer any questions that may be posted to your listing. You’ll receive an alert for these. Answering these questions help your customers learn more about your business.
  6. Update your business description for Google. You have 750 characters to use for your description, so fill this space with the keywords that best describe the services or products that you offer. This description helps your listing index with Google as well.

We’re happy to answer your questions or arrange to help you with these optimizations as an addition to your service contract with us. We’ve helped many businesses just like yours increase the views of their listing and the total number of calls, website visits and clicks on directions — all to increase sales.

Alerts Coming Your Way

When you sign up with 10|20 Marketing, we’ll be sure to send you an introduction with a link to your dashboard. You can bookmark it or wait for your reminder to arrive in your inbox every month. You’ll be pointed to your metrics directly from the email.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. We’re happy to walk you through the metrics and help you understand how to optimize further!

How to Change Your Address on Google My Business

10|20 Marketing recently moved. While we couldn’t be more excited to get settled into our new office, there was definitely some work to be done to get move-in ready for Google. Ready for Google, you ask? Of course! It’s probably just as important to optimize your new address for Google as it is to tell your bank, your suppliers and just about anyone who would send you a package. Simply put: because Google wants to send you customers and they can’t do that if they don’t know where your business is located.


Be Proactive And Tell Google You’ve Moved

It’s easy to get caught up in your move. After all, there is a lot to get done. But before you pack up your computer, head on over to Google My Business and change your address in the backend interface. You’ll find it in the “Info” menu. Just hit the pencil icon to the right of your current address and enter in your new address.

You may want to do this prior to the move as well. In some cases, changing your address will prompt a verification process that could take up to 12 business days. If you want to hit the ground running on the first day in your new location, let Google know ahead of time so the postcard with your PIN will arrive before you do. Once you have the PIN, you’ll be able to verify your new location within Google My Business.


Change The Information On Your Website

Remember to give your website some attention too. It’s not uncommon for businesses to have their address and phone number in several places on their website, such as within the footer and on the contact page. If you can’t handle the change yourself, make sure your webmaster knows about your move and the deadline for making the change.

It’s important to format your address the same way you did on Google My Business, as Google craves accuracy and consistency and rewards businesses that format their business address the same way across the web – right down to the comma or pound sign.


Add Pictures Of Your New Location To Google

Google loves your images. So why not give them some? This helps them understand the exact location of your business – try a few exterior shots – and helps visitors contextualize your location. Upload some pictures from the street or parking lot, take some photos of your reception or lobby. Even throw in some new pictures of your people. If you’re a store, show off your new merchandising approach. If you’re a restaurant, show the layout and size of your place. There are many different photos you can provide, don’t be shy!


Get Some More Reviews

While you’re in your listing, take a moment to check out your reviews. Have you had any new ones recently? Reach out to some of your bigger advocates by email, or create a handy shortlink to post in your store that points them to your Google My Business place ID. Take a look at our post here for some help getting this done.


Are You Listed On Other Local Directories?

Even though Google has the biggest share of the search market, it’s worthwhile claiming your business listing on other search engines too. If you’re listed on other directories, such as Bing, Yelp, FourSquare, Yellow Pages, and Facebook, or on mapping technologies such as Apple Maps or Here.com, you’ll want to provide each of these services with the same information you’ve placed on Google My Business and your website. This will entail digging out your passwords, logging into each of these platforms and manually editing your various listings.

Doing so can be tedious and may lead to inconsistencies or errors in your listing. One alternative is to opt-in to a service such as ours to syndicate your business information across multiple directories with one single push of a button. You provide all your business information, and it’ll be set up once and pushed out across the web. Your listing will be error-free and 100% consistent. An additional benefit? Google loves this consistency and will trust the business information you’ve provided to them even more when they see that it’s the same across the web.

This will lead to more views of your Google My Business listing. Which leads to more calls, clicks and business.


Change Your Address With Google Early

To recap, it’s important to be proactive when moving. Not just with the timing of the move itself, but also with the timing of the changes you need to make online. Get ahead of the timeline by providing your new business address and phone numbers to Google. Make those same changes to your website. Add pictures of your new location to your listing. And syndicate those changes across the web, maybe even with a little help from your friends at 10|20 Marketing.

Building Online Reviews Are Worth The Effort. But Don’t Take Our Word For It.

Meeting with clients every day, we get to see their frustrations with online strategies, promises of improved SEO and solutions that have come, been paid for and gone. We talk about SEO – and the corner of it that we operate in – as a series of small improvements that add up to make a big impact.

What we’re seeing now, with the adoption of online review building solutions now a stable of our offering, is that a steady stream of reviews can have a significant impact on getting discovered and generating conversions to sales. Building online reviews does have seen success, but don’t take our word for it. We’ve been reading quite a bit and have found some really great articles around the web that point out the reasons why.

We encourage you to have a look at these and join us back here in the comments for a discussion about building online reviews.

• Reviews are the Most Prominent Local SEO Ranking Factor in 2017
Search Engine Journal, November 13, 2017

A business with a significant number of reviews on its Google My Business page can rank relatively well in local packs. However, it’s not just the number of reviews that matter. Even more important than quantity of reviews is what’s being said in those reviews. Google My Business pages with reviews that mention a keyword, and/or the name of a city, were found to have higher rankings in Google’s local pack. (Read more)

• The Impact of Online Reviews on Businesses
BrightLocal, March 15, 2017

Key ‘Takeaways’ From This Post

  • Consumers are likely to spend 31% more on products/services from businesses that have excellent reviews.
  • 85% of customers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation
  • A negative review can drive away approximately 22% of customers
    (Read more)

• How Online Reviews Impact Local SEO and Why They Matter to Your Bottom Line
Shopify, February 7, 2018

Typically, by the time someone has started looking at review websites (like reviews on your product pages or Facebook, Epinions, Angie’s List, or elsewhere), they’ve already figured out what they need and how a business might ideally fulfill that need. The critical thing to note is that the mental gap between reading a review and making a decision is ridiculously small — and customers typically decide yes or no almost immediately. So, as a small business, your online reputation can directly influence your bottom line. (Read more)

• Why Online Reputation Management Is Like Brushing Your Teeth
Entrepreneur, December 17, 2015

Think about why you brush your teeth. You don’t do it because your teeth are brown and dirty. You do it preventatively. It’s a habit that’s good for you because it impacts your long-term health and the look of your smile. Now think what would happen if you waited until your teeth were gross before you decided to start brushing. Your teeth might fall out. You’d probably get gum disease. Your smile would be tarnished and discolored. It might be too late to fix everything and, at the very least, you’d have a lot of ground to make up. Brushing your teeth is an insurance policy against all those negative outcomes. Online reputation management (ORM) works the same way. Many folks realize how important their online presence is only once they have a problem — a nasty negative, an ex’s rant, a sketchy forum that sticks out like a sore thumb, etc. We fix these results, but it can take months and months, or even years. And that can be a hard pill to swallow. (Read more)

• Why you always need to get online reviews?
BirdEye

You could have hundreds of reviews and a high average star rating, but if your most recent review is from a year ago, for all a customer knows you could be a completely different business by now. How do they know that your current staff is as friendly and knowledgeable as last year’s? How can they be sure your product quality hasn’t declined over time? If customers haven’t been reviewing your business lately, who have they been reviewing instead? (Read more)

These are just a handful of articles about the importance of building online reviews that are available online. It’s a topic we’re always happy to discuss too.

Say Hello To Google Posts From Google My Business

We recently were invited to write a post on RestoBiz and thought that it would be really interesting to cover a relatively new feature from Google My Business (GMB) simply called Posts. It’s a feature that Google would like you to think of as a status update – and Posts is powerful.

As Google describes: Posting through Google My Business lets you publish your events, products and services directly to Google Search and Maps. By creating Posts, you can place your timely content in front of customers when they find your business listing on Google.

Nuts & Bolts of Google Posts

As we wrote in that article, posts are meant to be timely, which is important to retailers. They expire seven days after they go live, so when thinking about what to publish on your Google listing, consider promotions, events, holiday information such as changes to your hours or contest information. If you’re creative by nature, you can add pictures, short-form videos and GIFs.

For businesses with less of a retail focus, such as professional service companies or practices, consider adding thought leadership pieces as well. This means you can feel free to link to content that you find interesting or important from other websites, along with your thoughts and opinions.

Accessing this feature is easy, it’s the second option down on the left hand side menu. And when you log into your Google My Business account after after posting content to your listing, Google offers insights into your content, allowing you to see the number of views and button clicks generated for each post. Check in on your GMB insights section to learn which posts work best and what perform below average. Using this information, you can optimize your next batch of Posts, and refine the marketing recipe that works best for your business. We recommend to our clients that they post at least once every three to four days to avoid having no posts present on your listing after they expire.

Ultimately, though, why use Posts? Well, Early indications show that posting content to your listing has an impact on your location authority. That affects the ranking power in Google local search results, which impacts the position of your business on Google Maps. Put another way, the greater your location authority, the more likely your business listing will show up on Maps. This will result in not only more views of your listing, but also more calls to your establishment, more foot traffic via directions and mapping and more website visits as well.

At the end of the day, Google wants to know that you’re engaged in your listing. The more engaged you are, including new Posts, customer reviews and keyword heavy descriptive text (another new rollout), Google will be more favourable to your listing.

Why use Google Posts?

  1. They help searchers find your business
  2. Google likes businesses that keep their listings relevant
  3. They’re currently underused, which gives you a first-mover advantage in your market

To learn more about Google Posts in Google My Business, email mark@10-twenty.com OR call 1-888-388-1020.

Claiming Your Business Location Is Foundational, But Does It Match Your Mapped Address?

We’ve recently learned an important lesson about claiming your business location online, thanks to the collaboration of one of our clients. As a result, we’d like to ask you this important question: Have you searched for your business’ address recently? Here’s why we’re asking.

After working with the business owner to claim his store’s location on Google My Business and Google Maps—along with other directories including Bing, Facebook, FourSquare, Yelp and Apple Maps—the client’s location was properly placed and pinned across these networks. Leading with his store’s name, we claimed, placed and pinned his store on all of these online networks.

Almost immediately, we noticed that his listing was performing well. In fact, amazingly well. His Google My Business metrics exploded from the minute we took control of his listings. His views have increased and held steady every month, to the tune of 190% growth from the first month to the most recent. His total actions, which add together clicks of their phone number, directions and website buttons from their Google Listing, have increased by 202%.
Like any good business, though, his marketing presence didn’t end there. Because of the nature of his business—he’s a retailer with time sensitive promotions and always-changing inventory—he also advertised in local newspapers. And at the bottom of every ad, he wisely put the address of his store.

That’s when he started to get phone calls. The problem? When potential shoppers would search for the address of his location, the pin for that search was misplaced on Google Maps and was leading his customers to another store. In other words, if you searched for the name of his store, you’d be brought to the right location. But if you searched for the address of his location, you’d be lead elsewhere. And he had concrete evidence that his customers were being misled, leading to lost visits and sales.

“My customers would search for our location on Google Maps and were brought to another area on the opposite side of our premises,” said our client, who asked for his name not to be published. “This was frustrating and confusing for all concerned. I had numerous clients tell me that they circled around until they figured out on their own how to get to us, or called us.”

When he brought this to our attention, we immediately jumped into action, contacting Google directly and requesting that they match the pin placement for the search of his address to the one we claimed for the name of their business. It took some time—exactly a month—to go from request to successful pin move. The request was actually escalated from the Google My Business (GMB) team to the Google Maps team to reflect the importance of the problem.

So, now, when our client buys advertising in print publications, he can do so with confidence, knowing that those who want to come to his store to shop will find it.

Within a month or two, we should see the impact on the GMB metrics for this listing, likely resulting in more views, as well as more calls, website visits and in-store traffic. We’ll check back in on this story and let you all know.
In the meanwhile, we suggest you conduct a search of your address and see if it matches up with your listing. If not, we’d be happy to help you set things straight—and help shoppers head straight to your front door.

A Note To Small Business Owners: We Hear You

If you are a small business owner in North America in 2018, you are undoubtedly feeling the pressure. And likely very confused.

Every day you are bombarded with messages about online sellers coming to steal your business, large competitors adopting “omni-channel” strategy and reports of your imminent demise.

At the same time, you are told of the opportunities presented by social media can level the playing field. How Facebook will save the day….no make that Instagram….or is Twitter the right vehicle? Maybe LinkedIn should be your go to.

One thing is certain, if you try to follow all of the advice out there, you will undoubtedly have to work full time on your online strategy, leaving little time for what you do best.

Not to worry, though, there are steps to take that are not overwhelming and that do not require much management. These are foundational steps that can help you to set the building blocks for a more cohesive online/offline strategy.
Here is how you can get going:

  • Take care of your online findability: register with as many search engines, maps and review sites as you can in order to maximize your footprint. This is the best way out there to ensure that paying customers who are looking for what you offer TODAY can find you and make their way over to you instead of to your nearest competitors.
  • Get customer feedback: Once those searchers become visitors and/or clients, get their feedback. The Voice of the Customer has never been so critical. Get their emails so you can market to them, solicit their feedback with a simple survey and encourage them to write online reviews, especially when you know that their experience was a positive one.
  • Use that feedback: Use that information as constructive criticism. Improve. Use the emails to send out promotions and to stay in touch with your clients. Don’t bombard them, but send regular useful information to them. Send them insider promotions. Referral bonuses. News about new developments. Be selective but consistent.
  • Add in a data component: Use the data you collect from your listings and reviews to understand more about your prospects. Who are they? Where are they coming from? What keywords are drawing the most traffic? Build a profile of your best prospects. Tag them as your low hanging fruit
  • Paid social: Target the low-hanging fruit with Facebook or Google advertising using the data you have collected. Monitor the return on investment.

There are several services out there that can help you through this process. Some that are completely hands off and some, like ours, that will walk you through these steps and guide you.

In some cases, the annual cost can add to be less than the value of one new customer.

Either way, the only thing that you cannot afford to do is nothing. The cost of doing nothing is far greater than the small expense of getting the basics done. Start now. Your business depends on it. And work with a team that hears you.