5 Ways SaaS Providers Can Prevent Customer Churn

As the axiom goes: “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other gold.”

We all know new customers are important but retention is paramount to profitability. In fact, it costs more to acquire new customers than it does to upsell satisfied customers. So, why do customers leave?

Research shows that only one in 26 unhappy customers complain. And, a recent survey from Gartner revealed 81% of respondents said they expect to be competing mostly or completely on the basis of customer experience in less than two years.
Here are five ways a focus on customer experience can help you increase retention and perpetually improve SaaS revenues. 

1. Communicate And Connect

With SaaS, it’s easy for a customer to walk away and subscribe to another provider, which makes consistent communication important. And, communication is a two-way street.

Many times customers don’t disclose their full business needs from the start. When they suddenly bring up new expectations to a provider, that can present difficulties. Other times, a sales or service person may miss a crucial point in terms of customer needs. Both of these scenarios can be the reason for churn.

While communication is key, it’s essential to take it a step further and connect with customers. The more personalized relationship you develop, the more indispensable your service becomes. Cooler heads prevail and resolving issues is actually a chance to further the bond. Your customer wants to feel they are listened to—make sure your team proves they do.

2. Onboard To Increase Success

The best time to establish a relationship and demonstrate you want a customer to succeed is the onboarding call. People buy from people, rarely from companies, so making it personal makes a difference. For instance, ensure the customer has the name and contact information of the rep assigned to them. A high level of commitment from the outset sets the tone for a long-term relationship.
Determine a new customer path including as many phases as you can that positively affect their success. As examples, onboarding can encompass various types of training—tutorials, videos, and hands-on proof of concepts (POCs). Consider virtual instructor-led training for simultaneously onboarding multiple users, especially when they’re in different locations.

As noted by Geraldo A. Dada, VP of product marketing and strategy at SolarWinds: “Product-centric customer education is a powerful tool to increase satisfaction and retention, as customers learn to get more value out of the products they buy from you.”

3. Understand Customer Success And “The Experience”

There’s a difference between customer service and customer success. Service is resolving an immediate inbound customer issue. Customer success is about using such “touches” to grow a relationship. With the often complex nature of SaaS, focusing on customer success is particularly effective for avoiding churn and generating opportunities.

In addition, successful teams regularly contact customers to determine how their product is used and which systems and procedures can be improved to faster achieve goals. Further, if your team uncovers a strategy that speeds workflow, consider writing the customer’s story and—if they’re amenable—name them. Send an email to your list with the tip and consider offering a webinar to show everybody how it’s done.

4. Ensure Resources Help, Not Hinder

How thorough are your FAQ pages? Do you update them? Are the “help” sections written for users or filled with unfamiliar technical jargon? When a customer is looking for help, they may already feel frustrated. To go to the trouble of trying to figure out a solution, only to be further confused, can push them over the edge.

Be sure resources are easily understood and regularly updated. Additionally, the minimum standard is to provide help in whatever way the customer wants: chat, phone, and email.

5. Act On Analytics

Some sophisticated solutions collect data on customer usage, made available via a dashboard. If you have this insight, put those analytics work.

With such visibility, you can better understand what piqued a customer’s interest, identify pain points, direct them to overlooked features, see if they’re stalled, or worse, not using a solution at all.

This will allow you to take action to ensure they experience full value and don’t have “buyer’s remorse.” It’ll also could offer more details on personas to strengthen future sales efforts.

The difference between happy customers and canceling customers is ensuring they appreciate the value of your solution. Merely assuming your customers are satisfied is a path to more cancellations. Maintain your customers’ loyalty by making sure your value is heard and seen clearly, loudly and often.

The post 5 Ways SaaS Providers Can Prevent Customer Churn appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog – Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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5 of the Biggest Sports Marketing Trends of 2019

Once, big-name sponsorship deals were enough to satisfy sports marketers. But amid a saturation of advertising and proliferation of new channels, fresh opportunities are arising for brands and clubs alike to cultivate deeper relationships with fans.

From women’s leagues to AR and eSports, the sports marketing playbook is growing into a number of new arenas. Here The Drum charts some of the biggest trends in sports marketing for 2019 that brands should be aware of when entering or developing their work in the space.

Women in sports

A Nielsen Sports report stated that 84% of general sports fans find women’s sport more “inspiring” and “progressive” than the male version, which is seen by many as being more “money driven”. These figures reveal the receptiveness of the public to women’s sports and the opportunity it presents for sports marketers to explore. Phil Carling, head of global football at Octagon, touches on the significance of women’s football in this changing landscape for advertisers: “Consumers want their brands to stand for something and equality, diversity and inclusion would rank highly in any list of causes. In light of this, it is easy to see that women’s football can add a highly emotive cause-related string to its bow, offering advantages over its male counterpart.”

Brands are taking heed. Nike, for instance, put women’s sport at the heart of its ‘Dream Crazier’ campaign at the beginning of the year. Starring and narrated by tennis legend Serena Williams, the ad is an open call for women in sports to fight back against gender bias and unfair stereotyping. Its message resonated after the controversies that plagued Williams throughout 2018, including criticism of her Nike catsuit worn at the French Open and her hotly contested loss at the US Open final. The viral hit helped to drive conversation around leveling the playing field for women in sports.

Regardless of the moral reasons for supporting women’s sport, it makes commercial sense for brands to capitalize on the female consumer market. Currently in the UK, women are estimated to own half the personal wealth, a figure set to grow, and they are said to influence up to 80% of purchasing decisions. This presents a huge opportunity for sports to open up their marketing appeal to women and reap the economic rewards.

This surge in popularity is perhaps seen best in women’s football, where earlier this year we saw huge corporate sponsorship deals inked between Barclays Bank, Budweiser and Boots cosmetics and UK female football teams and leagues. Walgreens-owned Boots entered the sport for the first time to support Scotland, England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Republic of Ireland. Helen Normoyle, marketing director at Boots UK, said: “We are excited to give the inspirational women in these teams the chance to tell their stories and to hopefully encourage other women to experience the amazing confidence that sport can bring”.

This is a global trend. The Drum reported on a growth in interest for advertisers and sponsors in the Australian women’s Football League earlier this year. This is due to findings that more than half of the Australian population regularly tune into women’s sport, which represented a massive 48% increase on the previous year.

AR and VR

Although we are in the early days of virtual and augmented reality technology, there are examples of teams and brands making use of pre-existing platforms like Snapchat or Instagram to create immersive experiences for increasingly global audiences inside and outside stadiums.

In 2017 FC Bayern Munich created a fun interface for fans where they were able to virtually insert themselves into selfies with the team’s star players like Manuel Neuer or Arjen Robben. The feature was available to fans via its app, which could also personalize strips on the club’s online store. This immersive experience is reported to have bumped up the club’s revenue.

Major League Baseball has introduced AR to its ‘At Bat’ app, which shows data on each player including errors, fielding percentage and home run statistics when fans point their phones at the field. When a player hits a ball, the screen shows a trail tracing its trajectory with information on exit velocity, launch angle, apex and distance. The aim of the app is to enhance the game you’re watching on the field, said Chad Evans, senior vice president, product development, mobile at MLB. “AR is going to bring new experiences to the fans, and baseball will be at the forefront,” he added. “There are so many untapped possibilities of what this technology can do.” 

For advertisers and broadcasters, there are benefits too. Technology has already been trialled to personalize TV viewers’ experience of football games, most notably in 2018 when the FA and ITV ran a test during the England v Costa Rica friendly. Dynamic perimeter ads around the pitch were streamed to audiences based on location using Virtual Replacement Technology, allowing different viewers to see different ads. The ad offering was split into two feeds: one to the Americas, and the other to Asia, Australasia and parts of Europe.

Social channels

It is important that sports teams and athletes recognize the continued importance of social channels in building their fanbases and capitalizing on brand opportunities.

Social channels like Instagram and Twitter present spaces where fan communities can be cultivated and maintained. This prime advertising space can also be used to present a humanized version of athletes and round-the-clock access to the sport. Instagram stories and livestreams let athletes and teams give their followers what appears to be exclusive, behind-the-scenes style insights on training sessions and offer the opportunity to host impromptu Q&As to bring fans closer to their idols. Often these sessions are brand-sponsored.

The North Face clothing brand is a prime example of how social sponsorship deals with athletes can help to promote its own products, while also supporting the work of the sports star. Prior to the release of the Oscar-winning ‘Free Solo’ documentary, The North Face Instagram page featured stories and content promoting the film and extreme rock climber Alex Honnold. These stories gave viewers exclusive insights on where they could watch the movie and insider information on the athlete. Much of The North Face social content is produced with the aim of supporting outdoor athletes,  with its social content putting the experiences of the experts at the heart of the brand’s campaigns. 

Such activity creates a proximity between the sports stars and their fans and an opportunity for relevant brands to authentically sponsor the action.

Sports teams are also able to leverage the social accounts of their top talent to boost engagement with their brand. Using the example of FC Barcelona, their Instagram following at 70 million is dwarfed by the 118m followers of its biggest star, Lionel Messi. Yet using their biggest footballing star in the role of authentic influencer, the club is able to promote the team as a whole, and the work they do.  

Cause marketing

There has been a migration in the sports industry towards cause marketing, seeing big names and personalities using their authority to raise awareness of important issues. In 2018, former Manchester United star Rio Ferdinand and friend Jamie Moralee teamed up with mental health charity Calm (Campaign Against Living Miserably) to dispel harmful attitudes around men’s mental health. Playing up to typical alpha male banter, the footballers answer questions like “who would win in a fight?” and “who can drink the most?” before getting more personal about the importance of their friendship. By openly discussing their feelings and need for support, Ferdinand and Moralee were perfect ambassadors for the charity and helped to dismantle the traditional masculine stereotype.

Moreover, Sport England’s groundbreaking 2015 campaign, ‘The Girl Can’, was responsible for encouraging women to get more involved in sports. The minute-and-a-half spot features everyday women partaking in their fitness routines set to Missy Elliot’s ‘Get Your Freak On’. Rather than focusing on glamorous, impossibly fit women that create an intimidating culture in sport for the unfit among us, the ad homes in on the elements of exercise that are less than flattering – the sweat, the hard work – and celebrates them anyway. The campaign swept Cannes Lions in 2015.

Similarly, it’s important for brands to create narratives that both resonate with and involve their target audiences.  A strong example of brand storytelling comes from Nike’s ‘We won it in France’ spot for the French national team, after they won the 2018 World Cup. Launching the club’s latest strip, Nike celebrated the hard work of the French team and its players by drawing on their impoverished backgrounds in the banlieues of Paris and arid pitches of Marseille. This ad was a love letter not only to the players but to the supporters and their country, interweaving their stories with that of the club.

eSports

In recent years the popularity of eSports has seen exponential growth, a fact which has not been missed by sports teams. In particular, the format has proven popular with football teams with so many millions of their fanbase regularly playing Fifa videogames.

Spanish football team Real Madrid recently released plans for their updated, high-tech new home stadium which will include an eSports arena for fans. This is not dissimilar to plans from Tottenham Hotspur to host eSports tournaments when its new stadium is completed. The club thinks it will be able to earn upwards of £3m for every non-footballing event, due to its 60,000-seat capacity.

This is not the first time that Spurs have shown the club’s belief in the power of eSports. At the end of 2018, the club was one of 20 Premier League teams that launched a competition among their fans, offering winners the opportunity to compete for and represent their favorite team in the ePremier League, a competitive video gaming event.

Christian Fuchs, a Premier League winner with Leicester City, is working on his own eSports venture called ‘NoFuchsGiven’.  “One of my big goals right now and I’m in talks with several partners is that I will build an eSports arena in New York,” Forbes quotes Fuchs as telling the SportsPro Live 2019 conference. “I just purchased 36 acres, there are about 70 buildings on there. One will be transformed into a hotel, attached to the eSports arena which will be the only one in New York.”

Such significant investment suggests eSports will continue to be one of the dominant trends in real sports for years to come.

 

This article was written by Emma Mulcahy from The Drum and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.

The post 5 of the Biggest Sports Marketing Trends of 2019 appeared first on Insights.

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Advanced Hack: How to Improve Your SEO in Less Than 30 Minutes

B2B Vendors Need To Play Catch Up In A “B2E” World

Adobe recently published a report detailing the findings of a survey we conducted of 1,215 marketers and B2B buyers in the U.K., France, and Germany. The findings reveal that European business buyers expect vendors to display traits traditionally associated with consumer brands, demonstrating B2B and B2C landscapes are no longer distinct.

The “Creating Epic Customer Experiences” report shows how the B2B buying experience is more similar to B2C, giving rise to a “Business To Everyone,” or “B2E” world. With 70% of B2B marketers saying they can’t differentiate, B2E poses a new challenge for all business in an already competitive environment.

The report highlights three areas of convergence:

Desire For Security, Protection, And Transparency Align B2B And B2C

It’s safe to assume that all buyers—both B2C and B2B—are looking for a great product at a reasonable price. Other buyer must haves are security, protection, and ease of business, are important to both consumers and business buyers. Marketers won’t be surprised to learn that the vast majority of buyers say it’s vital a supplier is serious about protecting both their organization’s and their own personal data. 85% want to be treated fairly as a customer, and 78% want a brand to be transparent about how they work.

The Rise Of Altruistic Brand Purpose In B2B

B2B buyers are increasingly motivated by other factors. Sustainability is an essential area of consideration, with 67% of buyers seeking to work with companies that are striving to lower their impact on the environment. Of course, a focus on green credentials is hardly a nascent trend. Being eco-friendly has been a hot topic for years, and marketers are well aware of the value of this. What’s interesting is the emerging importance of brands showing their stance on people, ethics, and the “big social issues” of the day. In short: altruistic purpose and brand values.

B2C and B2B buyer sentiments are converging. For example, just as many consumers will no longer shop with retailers whose ethics they disagree with, 30% of B2B buyers will disengage from a brand whose values don’t match their own. 68% of B2B buyers place a high importance on how a company treats its employees. A similar amount (64%) seek to do business with brands that ensure their operations are fair to people throughout the supply chain—and 63% expect suppliers to demonstrate authentic ethical values. Meanwhile, three in five want the brands they work with to take real action to support human rights at home and abroad.

These are big changes that stand to drastically alter the way marketers work, the campaigns they create, and the messages they deliver. In fact, many have already been impacted, with almost half (48%) of marketers agreeing they have lost sales in the last two years because they haven’t demonstrated a strong enough sense of brand purpose. So, for B2B organizations, purpose might not only be thing that sets your brand apart—a lack of it could even stop you from winning new customers.

All Buyers Crave A Personal Experience

Consumer brands are increasingly turning to technology to help deliver personal experiences across all digital touchpoints, and solve business challenges like driving first to second purchase, notifying visitors when products are back-in-stock and deploying relevant messaging based on behavioral data. This report indicates personalization is crucial to keep B2B buyers too, with 49% saying tailored offers and communications will encourage them to stick with a provider.

Accounting For The Generational Divide

B2B marketers face an additional challenge in that not all buyers feel the same way. The study shows, younger buyers are more likely to feel passionately about working with a company whose brand purpose aligns with their own values and beliefs. But for older buyers and board members, the landscape changes significantly.

Just 42% of board members are looking for suppliers to stand up for something bigger than their own product and services, in comparison to 64% at the sub-board levels. Meanwhile, only 34% of board members expect a brand to invest in and engage with cultural issues, next to 57% of sub-board employees. Finally, the board is 20% less likely to think it’s important that a company shows genuine engagement with diversity and inclusion for employees. However, board-level buyers are more likely to be concerned about being treated fairly as a customer and having both their organization’s and their personal data protected.

It’s a complex situation. There’s no point pushing this messaging on a big-ticket investment that will require board approval, when factors like security, privacy, and the promise of efficiency savings are more likely to be appealing. But if they don’t include brand purpose in “top of the funnel” marketing sent to younger/sub-board buyers, they may risk being passed over for RFPs. Marketers must have a nuanced understanding of when to bring out purpose-based messaging—and they have to find a way to create a customer experience that factors all of this in.

CXM And The Importance Of Lifecycle Engagement

39% of B2B buyers won’t switch providers if they’re doing a good job, so vendors need to adopt a robust full lifecycle engagement strategy and focus on customer experience, not just in marketing but across an organization. Whether it’s analyzing data to provide funnel-tailored messages, creating engaging experiences across different platforms, or delivering multichannel customer communications, marketers need to ensure they’re providing the end-to-end experiences that customers seek.

With all these challenges, it’s little wonder that marketers are finding their task harder across the funnel. To survive and thrive, all businesses should be looking at creating the same engaging emotional connections already prevalent in B2C because in a B2E world vendors can’t afford not to. Marketers in all arenas must adopt a robust CXM strategy and focus on engagement and experience to build trusted, long-lasting relationships.

The post B2B Vendors Need To Play Catch Up In A “B2E” World appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog – Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

source https://thebtrade.com/2019/07/30/b2b-vendors-need-to-play-catch-up-in-a-b2e-world/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=b2b-vendors-need-to-play-catch-up-in-a-b2e-world

Google My Business Insights Explained – A Quick Guide

Are you a data-driven marketer?

As a small business owner or marketer for a local business, harnessing data can be a daunting prospect. It’s not just a question of where to look to access the most useful data but how to interpret it and put the findings of your analysis into action.

Google My Business offers an easy place to start, with accessible analytics that give useful insights on your search presence. If you’ve carried out a Google My Business audit recently, you’ll likely have a plan of action which maps out the changes you need to make, additional activities you need to perform and, hopefully, aims and objectives to take your Google My Business presence forward.

Google routinely makes additions to Google My Business and occasionally makes new Google My Business Insights available, too. We’ll keep this resource updated as new Insights and data points roll out.

We’d also thoroughly recommend reading our comprehensive Google My Business Insights Study once you’re done with this piece, as it gives you a detailed look at how your business’ Insights performance is comparing with others in your industry.

Why do I need all this data?

According to an Econsultancy survey, many marketers feel ‘data-driven marketing which focuses on the individual’ is the most exciting opportunity of 2019. As a local business owner or someone responsible for local search marketing, you too can leverage this trend and make Google My Business Insights work for you and your customers.

If you feel like you don’t know where to start or how to effectively harness your data, a round table discussion that took place off the back of the survey discovered that many marketers feel the same. Many say that organizing data is increasingly difficult. They identified three ways to use data more effectively;

1. Keep data up to date – data must be current and stored in an appropriate format

2. Integrate – combining data across various channels such as search and social media is important as integrated data provides much more useful insight.

3. Improve – the point of data is not just to measure previous performance. Data in hand can be used to improve marketing effectiveness and drive future improvements.

With that in mind, let’s look at how you can use your Google My Business Insights data to help you work more effectively. If you’re ready to use Google My Business Insights to inform your own performance improvements, read on for our quick guide to this often-overlooked tool.

Google My Business Insights, Search Console, and Google Analytics

Google offers business owners and marketers several different data tools; Google My Business Insights, Search Console and Google Analytics. These three properties are individual tools in their own right. While some integrations exist and all provide useful information to help you build a full picture of your business online, they do differ.

Google My Business Insights

Google says,

Many customers find businesses through Google Search and Maps. Google My Business Insights focuses on how customers find your listing on Search and Maps, and what they do after they find it.”

You can think of Google My Business Insights as your window on local search. It contains information relating to your local search performance such as the number of views your listing has received, how search users find you, and the types of interaction they have with your listing such as clicking through to your website, calling you or requesting directions.

Google Search Console

Google’s official description of Search Console is that it offers a series of “…tools and reports to help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues and make your site shine in Google Search results.”

Search Console is more advanced than GMB Insights. Here, webmasters can submit a sitemap and individual URLs to the search engine to assist with crawling and Google visibility, and delve deeper into search analytics metrics such as impressions, clicks, and search queries.

Registering your business website for Search Console is important even if you do use Google My Business Insights, as Google uses this tool to alert webmasters when it identifies issues with a site. Through Search Console you can see the affected URLs and inform Google when you have fixed the problem.

If you’re struggling to differentiate between Google Search Console and GMB Insights, it may help to think of Search Console as your health check and maintenance tool. Use it to check on things like mobile usability and keep abreast of potential problems.

Google Analytics

Part of the Google Marketing Platform, Google Analytics is the most advanced and comprehensive of the trio. It allows users to build a complete picture.

About the tool, Google says,

Analytics helps you understand how people use your sites and apps, so you can take action to improve their experience.”

It has sophisticated modeling capabilities, a variety of reporting options including behaviour, conversion and user-flow, and data visualization capabilities as well as intelligence and anomaly detection and expansive integration options (including with Search Console). Google Analytics is available in both small business and enterprise versions.

Getting started with Google My Business Insights

Now we’ve established how Google My Business Insights compare with other analytics tools, it’s time to dive into the data.

Accessing Insights is quick and easy. Simply sign in to your Google My Business profile as usual. The Home tab should load and to the right of the screen, you’ll see the ‘Performance’ box. This shows data from the last 28 days on Search and Maps.

You can also click on Insights from the left-hand side menu.

The Insights data is split across a number of different features, each of which will help you to build a better understanding of your listing.

How customers search for your business

Knowing how users search for your business isn’t just a point of interest, it can also help you to make better marketing decisions. At the top of the Performance box, you’ll see three sets of numbers Views, Searches, and Activity.

When you click on Searches, a panel will drop down and show you data related to Direct and Discovery searches.

A Direct Search is when someone heads to Google and types in either your business name or your business address. You can draw a clear conclusion from this figure – these are people who already know about your business and have inputted their search with the specific intention of finding your listing or finding information related to your business, such as consumer reviews. Regardless of intention, these are people aware of you.

By contrast, a Discovery Search occurs when search users have typed in something generic such as ‘plumber near me’ or ‘convenience store open now’ and your business listing has appeared in the local search results.

These search users may or may not already be familiar with your business but they haven’t set out to find you specifically. These searches are general in nature and typically relate to a specific need and the desire to find a product or service that fulfils that need.

If this figure is smaller than your Direct figure, it’s a sign that you need to revisit your approach to local SEO. Having a higher Discovery search number means that you’re visible to new customers rather than relying solely on people who already know about you for web traffic and sales.

Click on Insights in the left-hand menu to access this data in graph form.

Queries used to find your business

The queries used to find your business information is a very useful content optimization resource. This, as the name suggests, shows which keywords and search terms Google users are inputting to find your business.

This data, available from the Insights menu, lists the top search queries – you can use this to confirm you’re using the right keywords across your blogs, web page, and Google My Business Posts.

Here, Google Search Console and Google Analytics can also be called into action. Both of these tools will also give you search query data, meaning you can compare how your GMB performance compares to the wider online presence of your website.

Where customers view your business on Google

This section of Google My Business insights shows you where your impressions on Google have their origin, in standard Google Search or from within Google Maps (desktop site or app).

You’ll see two numbers here, Listing on Search and Listing on Maps, with options to view for the week, month, or quarter.

While this may not seem helpful at first glance, in reality it can clue you in on how well your mobile optimization is going, particularly if you’re working with a high-footfall business that should expect lots of Maps traffic, such as a restaurant or hotel.

According to a 2018 study by The Manifest, Google Maps is 6 x more popular than other navigation apps, with 67% of smartphone users opting for Google Maps over competitors.

A higher percentage of Google Maps views in GMB Insights would suggest that more search users are seeing your business listing on a mobile device. You could easily cross-reference this with referral data in Google Analytics to confirm this.

Customer actions

If you’re unsure where you should be focusing your GMB efforts, the Customer actions data should help you determine what to do next. This part of Google My Business Insights shows you what type of action a search user commonly takes on your listing. This includes things like visiting your website, requesting directions, and calling you.

You can use this insight to inform additional work on your GMB profile. A slew of direction requests shows that there is an intent to visit your location. This could lead you to create a Post sharing nearby parking facilities or bus stops. You may also want to edit the contact page on your website with directions, parking, and public transport access to help those planning a visit. On GMB, you could also upload additional images of your location showing the approach from different directions.

Depending on the action, additional information may also be available. If search users have requested directions, for example, you’ll see a map showing where those direction requests came from.

Directions requests

When direction requests have been performed, you’ll see a directions heatmap which outlines the location of those search users.

This heatmap is a great resource for local businesses, as it gives a very good indication of where your potential customers are traveling from. This can help you better understand in which neighborhoods to focus your marketing efforts.

Use the zip code and location data presented in the directions heatmap to finely hone your advertising and marketing targeting. You could, for example, use the zip codes to focus your Google Ads targeting, or use this data to geo-target social media campaigns.

Phone calls

If a search user has clicked on your Google My Business listing to call your business, you’ll be able to monitor that data from this section of the Insights tab.

You can use this data to see which day of the week and time of the day generates the most calls from GMB – this information could again be used to fine tune ad performance or help you decide when to schedule a new Post.

Photo views

Photos are crucial to GMB performance and can play a role in how much traffic filters through to your website from your Google My Business profile.

According to Google,

Businesses with photos receive 42% more requests for driving directions to their location from users on Google, and 35% more clicks through to their websites than businesses that don’t have photos.”

This part of the Insights tab will help you see how your images stack up against your rivals. Not only can you see how many times your own photos have been viewed, you’ll also get a competitor benchmark, comparing your views to businesses similar to you.

If your images receive more views, you can confidently continue to post in the same vein. Fewer views mean you’ll need to rethink your approach to images and may need to do a little competitor research of your own to see where you may be going wrong.

Photo quantity

There is no doubt that strong images propel search users to take an action. Our own research from 2011 found that good images are important to 60% of local search users and can help them make a decision about your business. You can also use our Google My Business Insights Study to understand how your photo quantity compares to the average business in your industry.

The photo quantity Insight enables you to see how many images appear on your business listing compared to your competitors. If you have fewer images, take this as an indication that you need to upload more pictures. You can find our complete guide to looking good online with Google My Business photos here.

Google My Business Post Insights

When you write a blog post or update your social media, you’ll probably be in the habit of checking post views and likes.

In a similar vein, Google My Business Insights will give you some data relating to your Posts on GMB – just click on Posts in the navigation and you’ll be able to see how many new views your Posts have received in the week prior.

Google My Business Gold Product expert Ben Fisher advises that you don’t look at this stat in isolation, though, as it doesn’t always give you the full picture.

He says,

From what we can tell, a Post impression is registered when a Post is fully displayed on the screen on mobile or desktop. What I mean by this is it’s not registered when the Posts section is, say, displayed on the Knowledge Panel but when the user actually clicks on the Post itself or scrolls through previous Posts.”

Conclusion

Google My Business Insights provides you with plenty of useful data which is both easy to locate and easy to interpret.

It’s an especially user-friendly introduction to analytics and data-driven decision-making if you’re new to this side of things. There are some areas, however, where GMB Insights data isn’t as detailed or granular as you may need it to be.

If you’re serious about local SEO you’ll need to go deeper. Perform a full audit of Google My Business to begin this process and investigate additional tools such as Google Analytics.

The post Google My Business Insights Explained – A Quick Guide appeared first on BrightLocal.

source https://thebtrade.com/2019/07/30/google-my-business-insights-explained-a-quick-guide/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=google-my-business-insights-explained-a-quick-guide

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Introducing ‘Client Access’ for Reputation Manager

Today we’re launching a highly-requested feature for Reputation Manager: Client Access.

Client Access is designed to help agencies streamline review generation for their clients.

It lets your clients log in into their own Reputation Management dashboard, allowing them to:

• See their latest reviews
• Figure out their overall reputation through easy-to-understand charts
• Easily reply to Facebook and Google reviews
• Run review generation campaigns themselves

What’s more, the client dashboard has fully customizable white-label options. So you can add your own logo and brand colors, and customize which reports are shown for each client.

Watch the video below to learn how it works.

Helping agencies sell and deliver reputation management services

When we launched Reputation Manager in 2018, we saw it as an end-to-end solution that helped local businesses monitor and grow their reviews.

Businesses would be able to get accurate review data across dozens of websites in a single dashboard.

They could watch new reviews come in, see potential issues, and quickly respond.

They could pinpoint the locations and sites that needed a boost in reviews.

They would be able to send review request emails in bulk and measure the success of campaigns.

It was a perfect fit for businesses, but for a couple of reasons, it wasn’t ideal for agencies.

Firstly, in order to send review request emails, agencies would need clients to share customer contact information. That might concern business owners who have their customers’ data privacy front-of-mind. While there are ways around data privacy issues, we realized there was more we could do to make this easier for our agency customers.

Secondly, we’re firm believers that responding to customer reviews is best coming directly from the business. Nobody knows their customers better than the people providing the service.

They know the right way to respond to customer service issues and negative feedback. Additionally, speed is of the essence when it comes to dealing with negative reviews. Agencies need to empower their clients to deal with feedback swiftly, rather take it over wholesale.

Empowering clients

With the launch of Client Access, we’re allowing agencies to empower their clients to take greater control of their reputation.

It reduces the complexity, friction, and data privacy concerns within review generation campaigns.

It gives clients better visibility on customer feedback and complete control over how they run review generation campaigns.

It speeds ups a client’s ability to respond to and act on feedback.

And it allows the agency to focus on strategy.

After all, every business knows that customer reviews are important. They don’t need agencies to simply send emails or reply to reviews every now and then. They need consultancy on how to craft effective email copy, the review sites to focus on based on data analysis, and how to grow reviews across multiple customer touchpoints.

Clients understand this, too.

In our Local Search Industry Survey 2019, local marketers told us that demand for reputation management was growing faster than any other service.

Reporting on rankings is no longer enough

Agencies that specialize in local SEO have to make reputation management a core part of their services. The good news is that many already do, with 92% of local marketers saying they offer reputation management services to clients.

If you’re part of the 8% who don’t, here are three reasons why you should start right away.

1. Reviews improve rankings

SEO experts agree that reviews are growing as a Google local ranking factor with each passing year. There’s data to back up the speculation, too — businesses appearing in Google’s top 3 local positions have an average of 47 Google Reviews.

The good news is that generating reviews is faster and more impactful than nearly every SEO tactic.

Link building takes time and effort. Citations, while important, are prone to diminishing returns — but there’s really no ceiling to review generation. If your client has customers, then you can increase their reviews.

2. Reviews drive action

Reviews are the best calls to action a business will ever have.

You could write a meta description that would make Don Draper drool. Or design a GMB profile worthy of a place in the Louvre. But it’ll all be for nothing if the average star rating sucks.

In fact, going from a 3-star rating to a 5-star rating gets a business 25% more clicks from Google’s Local Pack.

3. The trust threshold is higher than ever

According to one Uber driver, a rating of 4.2 is “very, very bad”. So bad that you might not even get picked up if your rating slips below 4.5.

Consumer reviews are an accepted part of every industry and every type of purchase. Reputation management doesn’t just need to be at the forefront of a marketing strategy, it needs to be an integral part of a business strategy.

It’s not just the average star rating that’s important, the volume is a big trust factor too. It takes 40 online reviews before consumers believe a business’s star rating is accurate.

Reviews freshness is just as important as volume — 85% of consumers think that online reviews older than 3 months aren’t relevant.

Reviews matter more than ever. So for agencies, it’s a huge opportunity to deliver more value — and now they have the tools to make reputation management simpler than ever.

Reputation management services made simple

This new feature is going to make reputation management a lot simpler for agencies, helping them to focus on bigger initiatives and deliver better results.

It also can help large enterprises, where separate teams are looking after SEO and reputation management. Or in franchise businesses where franchisees manage their own reputation. Client Access will mean individuals who are tasked with generating and responding to reviews can quickly access these reports without the need for a BrightLocal account.

We look forward to seeing how our agency customers make use of the new feature. And as always, we welcome any kind of feedback to improve our products further.

If you want to learn more, we have FAQs available in the BrightLocal Help Center. And don’t hesitate to reach out to our Customer Success team if you have specific questions.

We’re also offering our agency customers the opportunity to speak directly to one of our product experts. They’ll be able to give you a guided tour on Reputation Manager and help you get up and running with your clients.

Book your personal demo →

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Not a BrightLocal customer? Try Reputation Manager free for 14 days — during which you’ll be able to run up to five review generation campaigns.

The post Introducing ‘Client Access’ for Reputation Manager appeared first on BrightLocal.

source https://thebtrade.com/2019/07/29/introducing-client-access-for-reputation-manager/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=introducing-client-access-for-reputation-manager