Thumbtack.com
Guerilla Marketing for the Small Business

More Changes for Google Local Business Places

Talking the time to make it as easy as possible for customers to review your business on a variety of sources just got a big shot in the arm. Google made the decision to place the third party reviews above the fold and above Google’s own reviews. Most people do not scroll so reviews that are placed directly on Google may not be seen. Potentially, your best reviews on Google will be hidden behind old content from years ago on third party sites. On the positive side, a review on Yahoo shows not only on Yahoo local, but in Google as well. Total exposure is the goal, not just showing well on Google.

The first third party site displayed is the review site that has the most reviews (opentable.com above), then up to two other third party sites (yelp.com & tripadvisor.com) are displayed.

It is somewhat technical, but Google has also announced the development of “Rich Snippets” for local search which means that testimonials placed on your website could be aggregated on Google Places and treated as a review.

Key take home points

• Create a review page to make it easy for people to see and review your business
• Consider updating testimonials on your website so Google will capture and place them on Google Places
• Do not concentrate on Google as the only place to direct good customers to review you.

My guess is that Google is continuing to develop Google places as the prime access point for smart phones to use for local business.  So keep up and continue to provide and link information about your business on a variety of local third party websites.

How to use Facebook Places

Facebook’s How to Video
A Field Guide to Using Facebook Places
Keep Facebook Places From Driving You Crazy

Marketing Opportunities of Facebook Places

Three ways business can take advantage of Facebook Places
What Facebook ‘Places’ Means for Marketers and Developers

Competitors & Partners – Facebook Places

Why Recommended Places Are the Next Big Thing in Location
To 100 million and beyond with Google Maps for mobile

The Dark Side to Facebook Places

How to Almost Sabotage a Dinner Party With Facebook ‘Places’

Is it Time to get on Board the Facebook Train?

Facebook Places (just announced) is a direct competitor to Google Places.   Any small business that wants to take advantage of people shopping, and looking for places & services with their Smartphones should consider developing their Facebook presence.

What is Facebook Places?

Facebook Places is a mobile product that  can be accessed through Facebook’s most recent iPhone app or via on other phones by accessing touch.facebook.com.  If a Facebook Place is already created, a business can claim its Facebook Place and merge their existing Facebook Fan Page with Facebook’s Place page. Facebook Places is similar to Google Places because information about the business is created and available.  The extra spin is that Facebook allows Facebook users to “check in” themselves and any of their Facebook  friends.  Check out Facebook’s video below to get a better understanding of Facebook Places:

Why should I care?
Remember that Facebook is the #1 application used on iPhones and Droids.  When people check into a Facebook Place, they are broadcasting that business to their Facebook network and any network of a friend they may have also checked in.  Right now if  10% of FB users use Facebook Places , that’s 50 Million people!  Over 100 Million people a month using Google Maps on mobile phones to find local businesses, Facebook Places may instantly have 50% of the value of Google Places.

I am not yet recommending investing in Facebook Places for all businesses. But if you are a restaurant or a business where people meet their friends,  Facebook Places could become as useful as Google Places, Review sites (ex. Yelp or UrbanSpoon) and Twitter combined.

For some large consumer brands such as Coca-Cola and Starbucks, their Facebook Fan page is becoming more important than their own websites.  Kraft Foods’ Oreo is the No. 3 brand page on Facebook with an 8.7 million fan base growing at a clip of 71,000 a day.

At a minimum I would recommend that you search Facebook to determine if they have created a Facebook Place for you business.  If Facebook has not I would create one.  This is a small effort for any small business, that could be the next big thing in promoting your business.  As always if you need help give me a call or send me an email.

This is a big topic and Part I of a series of Posts about Facebook Places I look to develop.  If you want more information now, here is a list of useful Facebook Places Articles.

Customers seeing wrong review ratings

The greatest asset for a business’s  Local Business Listing is favorable reviews placed on the listing  by satisfied customers.  New customers seeing a poor review rating can drive customers to pass you by and contact your competitors.

Hopefully this will be a short term problem, but you should check your business listing on Google Places.  Hopefully only a few unlucky business owners are having the problem of Google  displaying the opposite star rating of review sites that it imports.

An example is The Paper Place.  Their ratings have been reduced from over 4 out of 5 stars to less than 2 out of 5 stars.

The Real Story - Good Reviews

The real data from the imported review sites are:
Ourfaves.com
13 reviews – average 4 stars
Toronto.ibegin.com
5 reviews – average 4.25 stars
Blogto.com
average 3 stars
Yelp.ca
8 reviews – average 4 stars

The good news is that The Paper Place posted this in the Google Maps Forum and Google’s Joel H states that this is now a problem that Google hopes to fix in the next few weeks.

Thanks for letting us know. We’re working on a fix and hope to get it resolved soon. It will likely be a multiple weeks before it’s resolved.   Thanks for reporting the issue!

Joel H

Google Employee
7/14/10

So check your Google Places listing to make sure you are not one of the unlucky. All you need to do is search for your business on Google Maps.  Click here http://maps.google.com/ , type in your business name and city, and search for your Google Places listing. Take a minute and make sure your business is not effected.

Tell us if you are experiencing this issue.  If you are we can help mitigate  the issue.

I have been working with Rib City Grill in American Fork and have established a great starting point for taking advantage of Google Tags.  The key is that when you search for “Restaurants American Fork” Rib City Grill is on that list (Click here to understand how to get on the Box 7).  If that is established then Google Tags can be leveraged very effectively.

Good Reviews & a Coupon - How can Customers not find out more

By being on the Box 7 list on the first page of Google searches, a business has a great deal of free exposure to potential customers.  The next step is having the customer first (or only) look at your information on Google Places.  Before Google Tags, having multiple, great reviews was the only key differentiator.  Now with Google Tags, you can differentiate by being the only one (at least right now) with a coupon or promotion.

If a customer is viewing Google Maps, Google Tags are also highlighted and right now with few businesses taking advantage of this new offer from Google you really stand out.  Check out some of the views of  how Google is highlighting Rib City Grill’s use of Google Tags.

The last view can potentially expand your reach and notice beyond the local map.  In a sea of red pins, customers will start to look for those lonely Yellow Tags with scissors indicating a coupon that saves them money.  And Remember that all these views are also on Google’s applications on smartphones.

Customers will be looking for those Yellow Scissor Tags

Take advantage of this new Advertising tool quickly and get ahead of your competitors that are either not in the know, or are slow to move.  But there is a process here.  They are:

1. Take control of your Local Business Identity
2. Maximize your presence and get on the Box 7 on Google
3. Get positive reviews of your business
4. Start advertising with Google Tags

I can help you with this effort

Tags are yellow markers that allow business owners to promote important aspects of their businesses. Scroll over Tags on Google or click on the sponsored link to view coupons, photos, or other select features.  Tags do not affect the rank of search results; they simply add more information when a particular user is searching.

Hightlight Coupons with Google Tags

If you are already on the Top 7 Box for your key search words and have a coupon or event your want to promote, spending $25.00 per month could be a no brainer.  It is clear that Google is looking to make some money from the development of Google Places.  Google is charging less then $1 a day to post a small ad of 22 characters under the short listing that appears next to the Business listing within the Top 7 Box on the Google Search Page.

To get the most out of those  little yellow arrows you need to be in that Top 7Box.  Knowing how we all want a deal,  being able to mention discounts, events and coupons directly on the search results page is going to help you entice people call or click.

Google Places Tags used on Mobile Web Applications

Coupons for Customers that are Smart Phone Enabled

With Nielsen’s latest study that 21% of all wireless subscribers in the U.S. now have smartphones,  Google Maps being the 2nd most popular download (after Facebook) and Google is providing retailers the ability to include coupons as part of their location search results – You have a real winner for a great way to promote your business on cell phones.

For an example of how Tags works, enter “hair salon” as a Google search on your phone. (You do not have to type the location – Your phone knows where you are). At the top of the page you will see a Google local search result listing a number of hair salons in Washington DC,  and one of the listings, Easel Hair Studio has a little yellow tag. When you tap the tag, which is clearly marked as a sponsored item, a coupon displays that you can present to the retailer for a savings.

I have not yet come across one of these ads yet in my own smartphone searches, but I will keep an eye out for them.  I anticipate using this service to find coupons for my favorite bike shop in the near future.

Have you received a call from a Google sales person yet about this service? It may be happening soon.  One of my clients got a call yesterday.  You can get in touch  with a customer service person at 800-838-7971.  I just wish that there was someone at Google to talk to when you have a problem (One of my mantras is that there is no customer service at Google.)

If you have used me to set up your Google Places listing, I will set up Google Tags for you for FREE.

You & Stephen Cobert can put Yellow Pages on Notice!

In 2010, the properly informed Yellow Pages customer  has all the advantage in negotiating with any of the Yellow Pages Providers. Today advertising in Yellow Pages is only one of many ways new customers can learn about your products and services. You have strong alternatives and Yellow Pages knows it.

Yellow Page Providers need your business – Negotiate early & smartly and you will save big.

.

With the use of the internet, the value of  that Dog Eared Yellow Pages Book by your customer’s phone has diminished (Is it still there?).  To create more value for their customers, Yellow Page Providers  have been creating a large variety of advertising services for the internet. With the attention Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are giving to local businesses, all the Yellow Pages Providers are fighting to maintain revenue.

The Yellow Pages Sales Person will provide proposals that seem to show tremendous value that Yellow Pages can deliver to a business on the internet, but without some basic knowledge of Local Search and Local Business Listings you cannot understand the real value of advertising services that Yellow Pages is offering. It is important not to take the information in Yellow Page Proposals at face value. You must analyze the information yourself. My observations in evaluating these proposals are:

• The Yellow Pages sales person has a lot of flexibility in pricing and services. You can push for a better deal than last year and get it.
• Yellow Page proposals can be a large list of services, but the cost is not broken down. This makes it hard to determine the value of any single part of the proposal.
• Even if you do not pay to advertise in the Yellow Pages, they need your listing and will not delete it.
• The statistical information presented in Yellow Page proposals can be out dated and skewed to increase the value of Yellow Pages.
• If the proposal includes paid search, the cost of having Yellow Pages administer the program costs 2 to 8 times the direct cost of using Google, Bing, Yahoo or Ask pay per click services.

The most important point is that in 2010, no matter what, re-negotiate your Yellow Page contract as soon as possible. At a minimum you should either pay less for the same level of advertising or get a whole lot more from your Yellow Page Provider than last year.

Below is an analysis I did for a client.  The client was presented a proposal from Yellow Pages that cost $600 per month and had three elements where we saw value; Yellow Page Book, YP.com, and PPC YP.  We included in our analysis our our best guess of the cost of each element  and placed the value for each element against the other Internet efforts that were being done for the client.  We doubled the value (Probability of Sale Factor) for Yellow Book and Local Search as customers that are looking to those places are more likely (more valuable) to call or purchase than just visitors to a website or people that click on PPC Ads.

The analysis above is in 4 parts (Cost Ranking, Initial Analysis, Refined Budget, Total Cost).  You can see each sheet by clicking on the item in the spreadsheet above.  Other than the ATT&T YP (Yellow Book), which was an educated guess, the other # of search actions were measured by Google Analytics.

The client’s final decision (As shown on Tab – Refined Budget) was to:

• Drop Yellow Pages (Save $600)
• Increase PPC Google ($90 to $250) to increase Customer Search Actions by 52 per month
• Overall reduced their marketing budget by $440 per month.

This reduced the cost per Search Action from an average of $0.24 per action to $0.12 per action or looking at it another way – Save 50% per customer action.

The current use of the Yellow Page book is way down, but some portion of consumers still use the Yellow Pages book to find products and services. I do believe that the Yellow Book and YP.com can increase calls and walk ins to a business. The question is at what cost?  In the example above, the client saw no value to the Yellow Page Book and decided to opt out of all paid promotion through Yellow Pages. I am not recommending that all businesses do this, each situation is unique, and there are good reasons to maintain ads in the Yellow Pages.

To evaluate, adjust or eliminate your yellow pages expenditure you need to look at each aspect of the proposal and determine that value of each part. Start with answering the question, “When I want to buy something the first thing I reach for is (the Yellow Pages, my computer, my smartphone, or ?????).” Do a gut check to determine your bottom line value of the Yellow Book to your customers.  Ask new customers how they found your business and when was the last time they took out their hard copy of the Yellow Pages.

Then use a spreadsheet like the one above to determine some relative value for each effort.  Here is a link to the spreadsheet I used above.  Use it to analyze your advertising program or call me to do it for you.

Have you been able to reduce your your Yellow Page cost and increase the value you get? Tell us your experience with Yellow Pages.

It seems that in the past few weeks, Google is again integrating Yelp reviews into Google places.  Not only that, but Yelp reviews are the first reviews Google lists for businesses that have Yelp reviews (indicated by www.yelp.com/biz/name of business ). Yelp reviews are before reviews placed on Google (indicated by maps.google.com) or any other review service such as Citysearch, or yellowpages.

So if you have been getting good reviews rejoice.  If Yelp has not been your friend, start pointing your happy customers to review your business on Yelp

Yelp is back in the Saddle with Google Places

Get one - Use it like a Customer

.

I saved $150 on Sunday (covering the cost of my Droid)  using my Smartphone in the purchase of a new washer and dryer. My wife and I started our search  at our local retailers. We wanted to make a decision right away. We learned about models and availability from the stores and sales people,  I used my Droid  to find other stores close by and had the same product, in stock at a much lower price.

So why should you care? In the old days before my Droid I would have purchased my washer and dryer at the second place we went to.   They would have the  product in a few days, but they were selling it slightly above the price I saw in Consumer Report. If I were a retail salesman who saw a customer openly tapping away on his Droid, I would have liked to know what information came up on that smartphone to drive the customer away. I am happy; I saved money and got the washer sooner, but that salesman was not so glad, he lost a sale!

The good news is that if you have been developing your local business web presence (As I have been suggesting), all that effort will be reflected in the information customers will find when they are surfing the internet on their smartphone. And when they are doing that research at a competitive store they may  leave your competitor and come to you.

Each year since 2008 has been touted as the “Year of Mobility” and it has not come, I am thinking that 2010 may finally be “THE YEAR” , but whether or not, it is definitely the year that retailers need to understand how 32% (65 Million) of cell phone customers are starting to use their Smart phones in the US.

Every retailer needs to get a smart phone and use it like a customer. Retail store owners need to be aware of what is showing up on potential customers’ iPhones, Blackberrys or Droids. Your competition is being channeled through smartphones. The worst part is when potential customers are routed to your competition right in front of you by these evil phones. On the other hand, if you see your customer bringing up information on their smart phone, and you know what they’re seeing  about your local competition , you have an opportunity to develop your strategy to sell against this situation.  This is another situation where a failure to understand the changing technology landscape can hurt your business, while knowledge of the technology can give you a leg up.

This is the first of a series of posts regarding the impact of Smartphones to the small business.  Stay tuned for discussions on:

• How to shop with a Smartphone
• What applications customers are using on Smart Phones
• How to discover what Smartphones are providing about your products and services
• Smartphones and restaurants
• Using Foursquare and Gowalla for fun and profit
• Strategies to take advantage of customers using smartphones

What is your experienced with customers with Smartphones? Have you been effective in dealing with the situation?