Thursday, 29 August 2019

Discover Your Why How Finding Your Purpose Empowers Your Business

There are many reasons why people want to become a business owner. It could be for personal satisfaction, financial autonomy, or creative independence. The list might go on, but at the core, it all comes down to freedom.

In the business world, freedom can be in different forms. It could be freedom to offer people a new and different product or service, or freedom from working under your boss. Whatever your reason may be, having a clear vision of your purpose of going into a business provides you with a roadmap towards business growth and success. Think of your business purpose as a means of reaching your short and long-term goals. This could be immediate customer satisfaction to eventual business expansion.

The Power of Your Purpose

Profit is not the legitimate purpose of business

Knowing your business’ purpose will justify its existence. Its purpose could be selling an exclusive product or providing a unique service.  As a business owner, it is crucial that you know where you are going and how you will get there. Knowing the purpose behind your business gives you a vision for your company and helps you identify the actions needed to achieve that vision.

Starting a business is not all about making a profit—to succeed, it should also focus on helping improve the lives of your customers. When you have a clear picture of how your customers benefit from your business, you can lay the foundation for a successful business model and strategy. This allows you to a roadmap to where you want your business to be after a few years.

Knowing your purpose allows you to better communicate the mission of your business to your employees and customers. Without a clear purpose, it will be difficult to set targets and create delivery standards. Many people think that starting a business gives you the freedom of working for any is invigorating, but entrepreneurs will have to take failure all by themselves. This makes identifying your “why’s” essential.

Be Passionate About Your Purpose

Passion-is-energy

A purpose is essential in making your vision a reality. Without 100-percent commitment, you will not have enough passion to endure the growing pains of a new startup. Most startup businesses rarely make money right away, so if your only reason for building a business is financial autonomy, that may not be enough to see it through the lean days.

Passion is infectious. Being passionate about your purpose can fuel your drive to be successful in business. Once your employees and customer base see your enthusiasm, you will not only earn their confidence—they will be excited to support your business by buying your products or services.

Passion gives you the drive to achieve. It gives you the energy to commit to your goals, no matter how hard things may be at the moment. Pursuing the things you love and demonstrating your commitment will make your employees and customers more likely to trust your vision.

Understanding your “why” is vital in harnessing your passion for running a business. A passionate and enthusiastic entrepreneur makes people want to do business with you.

Why are you passionate about running a restaurant? Is it because you want to provide people with delicious food that they cannot find elsewhere? That is your “why.” That is the passion you want to share with your staff and with your customers.

Running a business does not automatically mean earning huge profits and becoming wealthy. Without passion and a purpose, it will be hard to grow the business you envision successfully. As a business owner, you deserve to achieve your vision, so roll up your sleeves and keep dreaming.



source https://thebtrade.com/2019/08/29/discover-your-why-how-finding-your-purpose-empowers-your-business/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=discover-your-why-how-finding-your-purpose-empowers-your-business

Tuesday, 27 August 2019

Ubersuggest 5.0: Generate 1 Million Keyword Suggestions in 7 Seconds (Seriously)

Organic+Local+Paid: A Holistic Approach for Fast-Changing Local SERPs

Every time you open your phone and search for a local business, something in the SERP has moved or changed. So what’s the solution for PPC? Here, guest contributor Chris St. Jean explains why, at a time of great uncertainty for fast-changing local SERPs, local businesses need a holistic and data-driven approach to paid search.

It’s no longer sufficient to think about local marketing on the city level. Every city is a biodiverse collection of neighborhoods, communities, and consumers; and in proportion, every comprehensive local marketing plan should include a more granular methodology to develop, execute, and measure a local Search Engine Results Page (SERP) campaign.

In practice, I exercise this principle with my own clients: “Don’t stop digging until you’ve reached the zip code.”

A comprehensive local marketing strategy breaks the silos of SEO and SEM into a unified SERP strategy in order to counter the trend of a Google ecosystem that continues to transition to zero-click search results.

Evolution of the Local SERP

Before we dive into developing a unified local SERP strategy, let’s rewind to a simpler time in local when ads were ads, and organic was lush and unencumbered by boxes and stars. Local search has so many stars now, it should be a charity event hosted by Jon Stewart.

In local, we continue to see ads dominate the SERPs for most queries. While we have recently seen a slowing of Google’s ad revenue growth in Q1 of 2019, we have also seen Google expand ad placements into more areas of search than ever before. As Cindy Krum has said, “follow the money.”

If you’re already helping clients in the local space, expect paid search to play a larger part of your overall strategy moving forward. If Google’s ad revenue slows in one area, it will simply expand ads into new areas of search (enhanced GMB profiles are potentially on their way) and/or continue to modify the appearance of the ads to increase CTR.

In local, the biggest change has been the expansion of Google Local Services Ads (LSAs), an ad type most suited to service-area businesses.

While Google continues to expand this ad type into other verticals and increase reach across the US, we have seen disruptions in traffic and paid search metrics. In the home services categories, this change has typically resulted in higher CPCs in PPC and/or a reduction of organic traffic, as LSAs can be zero-click due to increased visibility in voice search.

Below are LSAs for electricians and plumbers, as they appear on mobile.

How to Install a Fan / How to Unclog a Drain

When you combine the introduction of LSAs into a market with increased mobile usage trends, we can expect a natural slowing of growth in organic traffic along with an increase in leads and GMB actions. In the image above, Google LSAs have dominated real estate in local, including “how to” queries that are combined with action keywords such as install, repair, etc.

Think with Google

Source: Think with Google

In addition to LSAs, the rise of zero-click search has also affected local search. Recently, Rand Fishkin’s Sparktoro published an article, using Jumpshot data, which shows zero-click actions at more than 50% of all searches for the first time ever in Google this year. While this study does not isolate national versus localized search data, it does further substantiate the trend of Google searches staying in the Google ecosystem and the need for a more unified Local SERP strategy.

Whereas a few years ago I would have focused almost all of my efforts on increasing organic visibility for a local client, my philosophy to local search has since evolved. Taking into consideration all of the changes Google is making to the local SERP, as well the mass consumer transition to mobile, a more stable and long-term strategy would be to build the brand offline/online so that when consumers are at the moment of decision, they are more likely to choose a listing via a paid ad or direct GMB search.

Focusing too much or solely on organic will present long-term growth roadblocks as local organic real estate continues to disappear and become more volatile, especially in mobile SERPs.

Breaking Silos of SEO and SEM

Breaking the silos of SEO and SEM into a unified strategy is not a new concept; just one that needs more attention and execution in local search. Silo marketing limits us because it deconstructs the buyer’s journey into elements, but never reassembles them into a unified strategy.

That said, silo breaking does not exist in a vacuum and will require more than a strategy; it will require buy-in from the stakeholders and leadership at your organization. If you have been able to successfully align the needs of your search teams into the process of your production or development teams, this will just be another natural unification. If your inbound and web development teams have not yet aligned, get buy-in from the top. It is far easier said than done to force integration amongst teams.

Heather Physioc (agency and search icon) recently spoke about this unification at MozCon 2019 and provided a variety of tips to integrate teams and break silos.

A unified local SERP strategy begins with an evaluation of your client’s needs. Are they established in the market and looking to gain new customers? Or are they new to the market and looking for a sustainable growth strategy? Once you’ve identified the client’s needs, match your research into the typical buyer’s journey for that client’s vertical.

A typical unified local SERP campaign will include:

  • Optimized GMB listing (not quite the “new homepage,” but getting much closer)
  • Mobile friendly/first website (Google speed scores are overhyped – don’t @ me)
  • Geo-focused content, including meta descriptions, headings, and location pages
  • Online reputation strategy (responding to reviews is just as important as gaining new ones)
  • Google Local Services Ads (if applicable)
  • Geo-focused PPC strategy (see below – use PPC to supplement organic visibility)
  • Retargeting (GDN, YouTube, social channels)
  • Local link building (referral traffic is going to be the new DA)
  • Aggregated reporting
  • Citations and NAP consistency

When your teams are separated by silos, you can miss opportunities by blind spots from each team’s perspective. For clients with limited budgets, breaking silos is even more valuable as you can be more strategic with their paid spend for areas where they do not have organic visibility.

Finally, when combining marketing teams, it is vital that someone is assigned to oversee the collaboration. At our organization, I manage a team of digital strategists that oversees all marketing channels and who have begun having cross-functional meetings with inbound, SEM, and our media teams to ensure we are adapting to Google’s changes, sharing data and reporting with one another, and focusing on ensuring our strategies are as “algorithm-proof” as possible for long-term and sustainable growth.

City-Level Keyword Tracking Limitations

If you solely track keyword positioning using a city as the location, it may be time to update your process, depending on the client. City-level keyword tracking does not tell the whole story and may be resulting in a distorted or limited view of data.

On the left below is a search for ‘plumber’ using ‘33142’ as the location (random zip in Miami) vs the same ‘plumber’ search with ‘Miami’ as the location setting in Google’s preview tool. We can expect the local pack results to differ based on location, but notice the discrepancies in the organic results. If you were managing the campaign of the individual plumbing companies below, you may think your visibility is worse/better than it would be if you were just using city-level data.

Plumbing SERPs

Integrating Zip Code Level SERP Data into Paid Search

Now that we’ve established the growing importance of paid search in local and highlighted the potential discrepancies of city versus zip code keyword tracking, let’s integrate local and organic visibility data into paid search strategies.

To begin, collect your client’s local and organic visibility data from BrightLocal, focusing on Google results for the highest 100 keywords by search volume, including geo-modified terms. For this example, I am using Ellington Air Conditioning & Heat. I will focus on their primary location on the Space Coast of Florida.

BrightLocal Ellington Data

I ran BrightLocal reports for all zips they are targeting for this location, and then created and exported a roll-up report to understand which zips/keywords they had the best visibility in.

BrightLocal Roll-Up Report

Once you have a better understanding of the client’s visibility in local and organic, you can create a strategy to utilize PPC to supplement visibility in zips where the client does not have organic reach. You can also use this information to create an awareness and remarketing strategy.

If they are not in the map pack or the top five in organic, the client will essentially be invisible in local search.

Again, your strategy will depend on the client’s needs and budget limitations. If you have a limited paid budget, start with the zip codes closest to the client’s location and build outward. Or if the client is more established and looking to grow into new areas, identify the highest potential for growth using zips with the least local and organic visibility, and build your PPC, awareness, and retargeting campaigns based on those targets.

Once you’ve executed this plan and are collecting paid search data, share it with the SEO teams to identify keywords that are producing the best conversions and spend more effort increasing the visibility of those terms. This will require reporting to be shared across teams and the appropriate attribution model to be used if you are utilizing more than just PPC in your campaigns.

Google Scripts and Automation

Once you have implemented your paid strategy based on organic visibility, you now have a variety of options, such as using the visibility reports from BrightLocal and either inputting results into Excel or Google Sheets.

From there, you can create bidding rules using search data such as increasing bids for keywords or locations in campaigns that are not currently in the top five results in local or organic.

Another option is to use a location-based Google Script such as this one from PPCnerd. This script is especially beneficial for marketers managing clients with multiple locations and will allow you to set performance metrics based on your client’s specific location metrics.

If you are managing local clients at scale and need to extrapolate from a larger data set, consider using Python’s Excel capabilities.

Local Remarketing

Another important element of a unified Local SERP campaign should be remarketing. However, remarketing on the local level can be tricky. We tend to think of remarketing from an e-commerce or B2B perspective, which can produce a variety of metrics that speak to the efficacy of remarketing.

But what about local companies like home services, health, attorneys, and auto repair? In many of these cases, a consumer has completed a transaction, typically at the time of need, and a typical discount-based e-commerce strategy would not necessarily apply. In these cases, a more thoughtful approach must be taken.

An interesting approach to retargeting, and one I’m going to start using more, is drip retargeting. This tactic not only helps to reduce some of the inherent annoyance of retargeting ads, but it allows marketers to be more strategic in their offerings. For example, in the home services category, we can use seasonal offers that naturally trigger as the seasons change.

You can also use the zip code-level visibility data when creating a retargeting campaign. If a client wants to grow their brand presence, apply the same methodology to increase spend in your remarketing campaign where the client has less organic visibility, especially in the local pack.

An example of a local retargeting campaign we did with this summer was Griffith Energy Services. This client is an energy provider in the mid-atlantic region, primarily known for fuel delivery. However, Griffith also provides air conditioning and heating services. We changed our heating-focused remarketing campaign in May to one that offered new AC systems with $0 down.

For this retargeting campaign, we saw a 774% YOY click increase, and while most of the ads were on apps, we saw a 140.4% YOY increase in time on site with less than a .75% bounce rate increase. We also increased traffic to our primary target market of Washington D.C. to correlate with Griffith running a major broadcast tv campaign there, which we also supplemented with YouTube bumper ads and FB videos to increase the likelihood of brand recall. Unity!

As of late summer 2019, Griffith has improved its system installation numbers.

Griffith Retargeting

Conclusion: You Need a Granular, Comprehensive Marketing Plan

I predict a few things will happen in local search over the next couple of years. Once consumers are more comfortable and trusting of Google Local Services Ads, they will continue to expand into all local search categories and will transition from a pay-per-lead structure into an auction model. Secondly, we will continue to lose control over our ability to control keyword match types and bidding in paid search due to Google’s machine learning models.

Google is going to have to rip negative keywords from my cold dead hands, though. Never!

The best way to adapt to the changes that are already happening in local is to have a granular and comprehensive marketing plan that does not rely too heavily on any one channel and that unifies your SEO and SEM efforts into a common goal of constant improvement.

The post Organic+Local+Paid: A Holistic Approach for Fast-Changing Local SERPs appeared first on BrightLocal.



source https://thebtrade.com/2019/08/27/organiclocalpaid-a-holistic-approach-for-fast-changing-local-serps/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=organiclocalpaid-a-holistic-approach-for-fast-changing-local-serps

What Marketers Can Learn From Equinox’s Mishandling of Its Most Recent Crisis

It’s been a rough month for the Equinox brand, and it continues to be challenging.

Just a few weeks ago, the brand’s owner Steve Ross held a widely-covered fundraiser for President Trump, which did not align with Equinox’s long-standing marketing campaigns supporting the LGBTQ community.

The protest by Equinox members on social media and the press appeared to have caught the organization off guard. Members flocked to social media to announce the cancelation of their memberships. Meanwhile, other gyms took the opportunity to poke fun at Equinox. New York Sports Club posted on Instagram:

Screen Shot 2019-08-26 at 10.45.14 AM.png

Following the fundraiser, the Equinox team formulated a plan to combat the crisis and stated that it was donating $1 million to LGTBQ causes.

However, the move continued the crisis by using a fundraising action to entice members to stay with Equinox. In order to decide where the money goes, according to reports, Equinox is “pitting five charities against each other to win a share of a million dollars, and you can only vote if you don’t cancel your membership.”

What can be learned from Equinox’s ongoing PR situation? Here are three lessons:

Check yourself before you wreck yourself

For years, Equinox positioned itself as a champion of inclusivity and diversity. On its website, it states “diversity celebrated” as its first core value. With its owner’s public display of affection for the president, however, the brand appears to be hypocritical at best.

It takes years to build a brand and only seconds to destroy it.

While hindsight is 20/20, Equinox might have been better served by going with a completely different positioning in its marketing campaigns. For example, it could have focused 100% on fitness and wellness. Moving forward, marketers will need to check where their owners stand on issues before proceeding with cause-oriented campaigns.

Test your response

The day the crisis broke, Equinox released a response that did nothing to calm the storm. The statement positioned Ross as a “passive investor” and “not involved in the management of the business” in an attempt to distance the brand. Many were outraged by the statement because it simply was not believable.

This moment shows how important it is to test your message before you release it publicly. One solution is to always have a focus group ready to go so you can quickly gather feedback. Equinox could have included members as well as employees. A quick session with such a group would have immediately demonstrated that the statement was not going to be effective in calming the controversy.

Admit you’re wrong

Within the statement, there was no admission of wrongdoing, which was necessary, especially considering Equinox built its brand on the back of LGBTQ+ causes.

What members would want to hear is: “We believe it’s wrong to build our brand supporting LGBTQ causes while our owner is holding a fundraiser in direct conflict with our core beliefs. We are in active discussions internally to correct what has happened and will seek your guidance in the best way to rectify this unacceptable situation.”

Admitting you’re wrong is challenging, but that’s the only way to move forward, especially in Equinox’s case.

It takes years to build a brand and only seconds to destroy it. Can Equinox turn its ship around? By actively engaging with its membership and collaboratively coming up with a plan to move forward, there is hope. And for all marketers, there are lessons to be learned from Equinox’s experience.

 

This article was written by Mark Pasetsky from Adweek and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.

The post What Marketers Can Learn From Equinox’s Mishandling of Its Most Recent Crisis appeared first on Insights.



source https://thebtrade.com/2019/08/27/what-marketers-can-learn-from-equinoxs-mishandling-of-its-most-recent-crisis/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-marketers-can-learn-from-equinoxs-mishandling-of-its-most-recent-crisis

Monday, 26 August 2019

Do You Speak B2B Marketing?

The digital revolution has changed everything for marketers. Over the past few years, we’ve been given more power and more leverage within our organizations. And that power and leverage has brought with it sky-high expectations.

Marketing now has a seat at the executive table, working alongside the C-suite to not only deliver on its traditional short-term KPIs but also facilitate the brand’s long-term vision. This means that every day we must communicate marketing’s value to key stakeholders and department heads—all of whom have different interests and concerns.

To do this successfully, we need to think about what occupies each of these stakeholders’ thoughts, what they want to hear, and what we can offer them in pursuit of their own goals.

In short, we need to change the way we think and talk about marketing, creating a new, cross-functional language capable of articulating marketing’s importance and value to everyone in the organization.

What Are You Trying To Prove With B2B Marketing?

Before we think about the way we talk about marketing, we need to be clear about the value we provide and how we measure that value.

Measurement is a huge part of marketing. We use metrics to validate decisions and explain the need for and value of our activities. Additionally, we use metrics to gain new insights that help us disrupt old processes and kickstart innovation.

It’s these things that our new marketing language needs to convey to the C-suite. But are we sure we’re measuring the right areas?

The truth is, as marketing has changed, what we need to measure has changed too. Goals like generating MQLs and SQLs—although still relevant—are now too shortsighted for a department that has an impact across the wider organization. They should still be measured, but viewed as touchpoints in a wider customer journey

As an alternative, we should be looking at more holistic metrics; metrics that show how performance aligns with intentions, the influence of the marketing department on customer actions, which programs and channels perform best, and how to make marketing growth and customer satisfaction more predictable and consistent.

Our Native Tongue

So, what is traditional marketing language? How do we talk about what we do right now?

For the most part, marketing speak has been entrenched in “funnel talk” for eons. We talk about top-of-funnel (TOFU), middle-of-funnel (MOFU), and bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) engagement—and that’s fine, to an extent. But with the evolving role of the marketing department, the traditional funnel has become overly simplistic and outdated. 

The traditional funnel’s problem is that it views marketing merely as a supplier of leads to sales. It doesn’t fully explore its impact on the wider business or cover those harder-to-pin-down metrics like marketing-assisted revenue. 

The reality of modern marketing is it has an impact at an operational, departmental, and enterprise level. And the way we speak about it needs to reflect that.

At an operational level, that means:

  • Talking about campaign results
  • Reducing cost per lead
  • Integrating campaigns across channels

When we move up to departmental considerations, the conversation becomes about:

  • Improving marketing ROI
  • Boosting contributions to the sales pipeline

And when we talk about enterprise considerations, we must focus attention on:

  • Growing revenue
  • Increasing market share
  • Improving margins

We’re All Multilinguists

Being able to articulate all of this is like being fluent in several languages—because the stakeholders we deal with all have different needs and want to hear different things.

The executives want to hear about predictable, profitable revenue growth. Sales VPs want to hear about your contribution to the pipeline. CFOs want to know about your department’s ROI. Sales directors want to know about SQLs. And sales reps want to hear about the most qualified leads.

On any given day, you’re talking to a minimum of five different departments. And you have to be on the same page, speaking the same language as all of them.

Creating A New, Unifying Dialect

So, if the way we currently talk about marketing is outdated, what should our new language look like?

For starters, let’s focus on these three rules:

  • Steer away from outdated metrics and the traditional marketing funnel. We know that customer journeys don’t just have three stages, and we know that they’re not always linear. So, let’s move away from any language that suggests they are. Instead, align the marketing department with the diverse and wide-ranging set of corporate goals it actually tackles.
  • Articulate to all stakeholders how marketing drives revenue and meets the goals of all the key departments across the organization. Concentrate on the metrics that provide insights into what matters the most to these people. And that means every one of them. Have at least one key metric for each key stakeholder. 
  • Focus on metrics that look at overall trends—like improvements in performance over time. If we can illustrate this, the influence of the marketing department will continue to grow for years to come. 

The post Do You Speak B2B Marketing? appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog – Best Practices and Thought Leadership.



source https://thebtrade.com/2019/08/26/do-you-speak-b2b-marketing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=do-you-speak-b2b-marketing

Friday, 23 August 2019

Pitch Perfect: How to Sell and Deliver Reputation Management to Clients

Research shows that online reviews and recommendations play a critical role in decision making for both consumers and search engines. This is even more true for local businesses, where competition is at its fiercest.

Why then, can it be so hard to convince local business marketers to take reputation management seriously enough to invest in it?

If you’re facing blockers when trying to sell in reputation management to local businesses, this is the webinar for you.

On Wednesday, 21st August, InsideLocal host, Myles Anderson, was joined by Dana DiTomaso (Kick Point) and Krystal Taing (Rio SEO) to hear their tips and processes to help you or your agency to start closing more deals.

If you missed it, the webinar recording is available to watch below. We’ve also written up a summary of our favorite insights from the discussion. If you had any further questions about managing your online reputation, please feel free to schedule a call with our reputation specialist here.

Contents

Video

 

Summary

The panel started by discussing their approaches to reputation management.

Dana said, “Reputation management is usually part of a solution. People will come to us, and won’t necessarily say, my reviews are terrible. They usually say, ‘I want to rank better in local’. Then, as part of the discovery process when we start working with the lead we see that they do have a reputation management problem, or maybe they have bad reviews, or they don’t have any reviews, or only reviews scattered in one platform.

“So then we roll it in and say, ‘I know we didn’t talk about this, but it’s important, and here’s why’. We’ll explain the benefits of having solid reputation management, then talking to them about the resources that are involved internally at their organization to make sure this continues beyond their engagement with us. Then, if all those buttons come together, we can make sure that reputation management is folded into that proposal.”

She went on to discuss the challenges Kick Point face when working with large multinational businesses. “They often don’t know who’s going to manage it for each location. Sometimes it’s like, ‘This is really important, but you don’t have a strategy to make it happen, so we’ll have to put a pin it in until we’ve dealt with the things that are on fire.”

Myles then asked Krystal how she’d seen demand for reputation management change among multi-location businesses in recent years.

She said, “I’ve definitely seen demand growing, and I think enterprise businesses typically were more afraid of dipping their toes into reputation management because they’re overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start, and there’s all this corporate compliance. Now, it’s non-negotiable. Your competitors are doing it.

“If you want to be a part of that local conversation, you have to start. We show our clients how to start in small stages, and training them is key. We give them the tools to take the small steps and get started, because if you haven’t responded to Google and you’re starting now, it can be overwhelming.”

“Part of this is understanding the business’s goal from the get-go,” said Dana. “At the beginning of the project we set a goal charter, where we outline what their goals are. Their goal at the time might be ranking better in local, which means that getting more and better reviews is part of that, but it may not be something they have the resources for right now. Or, their goal might be to improve their ratings, or to implement a reputation management strategy, and in that case they have the resources to make that happen.”

For further reading, Kick Point has a great guide on creating marketing dashboards.

Krystal talked about the link between reviews and listing management. “Typically when we’re approaching reputation management, we’re already engaged in listing management. One of the challenges for multi-location businesses if you don’t have all of your locations claimed, or they’re claimed by different groups, it’s hard to give them control to respond. But it can be a standalone product. Within there, there are different sites that are interesting to different industries.”

Myles queried how agencies sell reputation management.

Dana responded, “I don’t think I’ve ever sold reputation management separately, as no one just has this problem. If they haven’t handled their reputation well, that’s a sign there’s probably other stuff that hasn’t been managed.

“This could be things like Google My Business optimization – if they’ve been ignoring their reviews, they’ve probably been ignoring their Q&A as well. Or, their pages probably aren’t optimized, or they need listings management. Some franchise organizations are usually terrible because every franchisee has claimed their own GMB and no one knows the login, or, surprise there’s another Analytics somewhere.

“You end up with all these layers of the onion you need to peel back – it’s never been just reputation management, they can come to you in the beginning wanting it, but that’s not where you’d end up when you do the proposal. Part of that proposal stage is thinking about pushing them along the path of why they want to work on this, how they want to get there, and positioning it as part of a larger plan that is executed over a period of time.

“You have to explain how reputation management fits into the total ecosystem of digital marketing, why it’s important, and how it will have bigger benefits beyond star rating changes.”

She continued to discuss an issue one client faced. “We were working with a camera store with several locations in the province they were based in. But, if you Googled them, their main location would come up as the single listing on the right-hand side, and would never show a pack with all of their locations.

“This meant this one location was getting all of the bad reviews for all of the locations. They approached us for reputation management, that’s all we need, but then it turned out the issue was actually listings management and then being able to create a locations page.”

Managing bigger businesses’ reputation can often fall outside the realm of marketers, meaning that agencies need to build relationships around the business. Krystal said, “It definitely depends the relationship with our clients. We often find that the team we work with for listings management or location pages is seldom the team that is managing the reputation management solution.

“It’s quite often customer service, or a team in corporate compliance that’s responsible for responding. It’s an additional pipe that you have into the business, and it’s harder to remove you once you have that connection. Learn those teams, and make sure you’re guiding them and making them successful.”

Myles agreed, “Once you’ve got those touchpoints and relationships with multiple departments you’re much more ingrained. You’re much more involved with the business.”

Dana followed, “This is where it’s a trust factor. Depending on the size of the organization, you often have separate departments, so we try to go as far up the chain as possible as soon as we get that trust from the department we’re working with, and keep working your way up. Ideally, you’d want to have the CMO call you from the very beginning.

“But, as soon as you get between 10 and 200 locations, it seems like no one really knows what’s going on and it’s really disorganized. Once you get above 200, that’s when it gets organized again. In that awkward spot, it’s easiest to go up the chain as fast as possible because they probably haven’t thought about it before. There’s a lot of management in getting them organized, whereas with the smaller organizations, you can come in right away and they know where everything is. It’s way faster for the smaller, or way larger organization-perspective.”

Done-For-You vs Self-Managed

Dana discussed Kick Point’s approach to reputation management for clients. “Unless we know the customer really well and have been working with them for a long time, you should do it yourself. To be frank, part of it is a resourcing thing – we’re a small agency that wants to stay small, and you can’t stay small if you’re selling more and more monthly retainers where we do everything for clients. If our lead wants that, we’ll refer them to an agency that does that as it’s not a good fit for us. It’s a great model, but it’s not the model that we’ve chosen to embrace.

“In the beginning, we’ll set up a Slack channel where reviews are pushed to so we’re aware of what’s going on – this is our coaching period where we’re keeping an eye on absolutely everything that’s going on. When we think they’ve got better control of it, then we feel like we can slowly step back and eventually have them take it over.” She said that the majority of Kick Point’s new leads used to ask for the done-for-you model, before they became known for self-management.

For Rio SEO, the majority of customers are expecting to self-manage. “If you train them how to respond to reviews, they can then take that and apply it to Q&A and other elements of their local program.

“In my opinion, it’s more powerful to train them and invest the time in the beginning how to view and respond to reviews, then communication success upwards within the organization. Doing it for them is less powerful, with less information for them,” explained Krystal.

Myles queried the pricing models and efficient resourcing for reputation management. Dana said, “A lot of it is automation actually, thinking about where we’re going to receive reviews, and making sure these don’t languish in someone’s inbox.

“We use Zapier and Slack – when we’re managing reviews or coaching new clients with reviews, these will be pushed to Slack or a common mailbox so we can jump on stuff right away. That’s the biggest thing, is making sure you’re not relying on one person to be ‘on it’ all the time, so whoever’s most available can deal with it right away, including on weekends. You know how it is, you get the bad review on the Saturday of a long weekend, or someone’s complaining on social media, and you don’t deal with it until Monday. You need to set the plans in place so someone’s always paying attention at all times.”

She continued with a client example, “We worked with a symphony orchestra, and their people were working 9-5, Monday to Friday, but symphony performances weren’t happening then. Think about when your social person should be working, as it should match when the commentary is coming in on social media and when they’re leaving reviews. That helped them realize it’s not a 9-5 job for the person managing your reputation for you.”

Dana went on to discuss what a typical reputation management project looks like for Kick Point’s clients. “We’ll say, here’s the project plan over the X number of weeks and months. Here’s the total cost with some variables, then we typically ask clients how they’d prefer to be billed.”

“We first want to know what they’re already paying for, because often not using it to its fullest potential. If they do need to buy software, we buy it for them and introduce them to the company. They know which software they’re using, and are helping them manage it, but it’s their software, and they’re paying for it,” she said.

Client Understanding and Expectations of Reputation Management

Krystal discussed whether all businesses need reputation management. “We do have quite a lot of clients that are doing well, with lots of reviews and a high star rating, but we focus on the opportunity and how they can take a proactive approach in the conversation they have with clients.

“If they don’t have the resources to participate, we’ve typically seen most still wanting to be aware of what’s being said. Maybe there are scenarios where it’s a healthcare organization where they find out there are issues with the reception – they’re able to see and identify and proactively solve some of those issues that wouldn’t have made it to the right teams in the same amount of time if they weren’t paying attention to the reviews.”

Dana explained which indicators to watch out for to know if a potential client needs reputation management: “Looking at reviews, are they ever responded to? Are they on multiple platforms? Are they in the industry’s niche? Look at which companies have the worst reviews, and which have the best reviews, and start somewhere in the middle.

“The companies with all 1-stars and scam reviews won’t pay you – pick those with a 3-star or low-4 star rating – the people who don’t have spectacular reviews, haven’t been responding, and have unanswered Q&As, and don’t really manage Facebook. Those would be the types of people that would be happy to have some help because they don’t necessarily understand.”

She shared her tips on finding new clients. “Our best leads don’t necessarily come from industry events, but instead from events from that vertical. Have a booth or do a talk about reputation management, because that’s where your customers will really be. We don’t get our best leads from conferences like Mozcon, we get them from some podcast in Australia that’s about running a business.”

Krystal explained the importance of competitor benchmarking, “It’s really helpful to show clients markets where they’re not performing well locally, and then show them their competitors in those markets and their engagement. Point out the opportunities, look at the language in the reviews, and show them which reviews are highlighted on their GMB listing. Showing them how they can lead the conversation is really eye-opening, and then they start understanding how big and important this task is, and how critical it is to take the first step.”

She shared her experiences selling to multi-location businesses: “It’s incredible to show them the markets where there are just small mom and pop shops that are killing it when it comes to reputation management. At that point, resource isn’t really thought about. For a multi-location business, they have to consider what it takes to compete at that level. Quite honestly, it’s a hard conversation to have, and a different thing for them to consider that they hadn’t thought about.”

Dana discussed how it’s different selling to smaller businesses. “I honestly think that single location businesses ‘get it’ almost immediately. I’ve rarely had to sell them on the idea that they’d manage their reputation, they want to know why they’re not in the local pack, and how others get so many reviews.”

Making a Convincing Argument and Handling Objections

Myles asked the panel how they convince clients that they need reputation management. Krystal said, “It often starts with a ranking conversation. When they come to us asking what the next step is to improve rankings, and to take a look at reviews and reputation management. When they say that, it opens the doors for how powerful it can be.

“Sit out and talk through the KPIs in advance to show them what can be delivered on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis to show them all of the opportunities that come alongside a reputation management program.”

Dana shared her experiences working with smaller businesses. “Let’s say you’re in the three-pack, and someone has a rating of 4.8, and you’re in number two with 3.4, and the person below has 4.6 – who do you think the person is going to call? Particularly when no one visits your website, they call or make an appointment directly from Google-world, these no click searches means it’s really important to have a good-looking listing in search results.

“I think that’s something people don’t think about, they’re ranking number one, but they’re ranking something that looks horrible so no one’s going to call you. That’s truly reputation management, we can SEO the crap out of this and you can rank so much better, but you’re just ranking something bad. Make it better, then try to rank it, rather than ranking crap.”

Myles asked which review sites the panel’s clients requested. “It depends on the industry, and often the location”, said Dana. “If you’re in home services, I’ll mention AngiesList or HomeStars. In Canada, YellowPages is still a thing, and different countries all have their own review sites. Google is the monster in the room, but Yahoo is super popular in Japan, for example.

“It really depends where the client is. There’s even super-hyper regional stuff, in the US there’s Craiglist, in Canada we have Kjiji, but then if you’re in Victoria, BC, which is a small town of 250,000 they have used Victoria.com. If you don’t sell to clients that aren’t physically located where you are, you have to do your homework and see which sites matter for you.

“You often get, ‘I don’t use it, so therefore no one does.’ That’s where I wish we could use tracking numbers in citations to prove that people are calling you from these sites, but that’s where it’s good to have good Analytics to show which sites you’re getting clicks from. Houzz, for example, often has people calling directly from but they won’t mention it. Ask, how did you find me? If even one person mentions it, it probably means others are looking even if it isn’t on your radar. You’re not your target market, you’re not your target customer.”

Industry-Specific Strategies

Krystal discussed the differences between the key industries she works with. “In retail, your goals have to be a lot lower than they are in restaurants and hotels, and more service-based businesses where it’s going to be easier to get good and bad reviews. Hotels and restaurants you’ll be looking at niche sites like TripAdvisor, while Yelp is way more critical for restaurants than it is for retail, for example.

“For financial businesses, their average review score is the lowest across any industry, so telling them they can go from a 1 to a 2-star rating would be immense for them. If you’re dealing with financial and wealth advisors, you have a challenge because they can’t technically ask for reviews.”

The panel went on to discuss how the type of business, and the personalities within it can make a difference to reviews. Dana shared Kick Point’s successes with pet-related businesses, where asking those who had  a positive experience led to glowing reviews.

Myles said, “There’s an emotional aspect to what you’re buying. If the emotional aspect is something that’s pleasing to you, and solved a major problem, they’re delighted. But, if someone is having to part money with a financial services business, they’re not so happy about it!”

Dana discussed how many reviews they aim for. “It really depends on the competitors showing in the pack for their most important terms. How many reviews do they have? Let’s get 20% more than that. It’s also a moving target, because over that 6 months the competitors will get more reviews as well, so you have to keep moving the needle on how many reviews you need.

“The other function is to find out what proportion of your clients are going to leave a review. When we start a review management program where we’re asking for reviews using a platform, we see which percentage of those come back and make it onto your review sites. If 5% of your clients are leaving a review, this means you need to sell to X people per month – can you actually hit this number? If they can’t, it might take 12 months instead to compete.”

Myles asked which offline tactics work best for physical businesses. Dana said, “Have a sign, as sometimes that’s all you need. If you’re handing stuff to people, put a receipt in their bag saying to leave a review. I know QR codes aren’t very attractive, but they work on most phones now. Some places now have a text option and we’ll respond back with a link to the review site, that totally works. Remind people to leave a review in as many ways as possible without getting annoying.”

Dana shared her final thoughts: “Be honest about your expectations. If people are saying that they’d heard that getting more reviews help you rank higher in Google – yes, they will, but it’s not going to suddenly elevate you from position 1,000 to position 1.

“I find that the math is really important to cover. If you have a review rating that is 3.2, you need X number of 5-star reviews to hit your target. And, make sure that you look good as an agency, and provide the solid numbers in your proposal sets the tone that you’re someone you can trust.”

Krystal concluded: “Really listen to the challenges that the brand or agency has today with reputation management. Be honest about what’s realistic in their goals, whether that’s short-term or long-term goals. Show them how you can expand that and roll that out.

“For multi-location brands, really showing them the power of reputation management, and that it extends a lot farther than increasing your rank. There’s likely a lot of other people in your organization that can benefit from a reputation management solution.”

Thank you to both panelists for sharing their expertise.


Resources


Q&A

Below are some of the highlights from the live Q&A. Thank you to BrightLocal’s Head of Business Development, Matt Coghlan, and Reputation Consultant, Ernest Olaseinde, for their answers below. If you had any further questions about managing your clients’ reputation or selling reputation management, set up a call with Ernest at the link below.


Q. Which tasks belong to reputation management? Is it just review and listing management? Or are there other parts?

A. “Reputation management is a blanket term for everything related to your reputation. This can be the simplest form of simply replying to reviews but can involve asking customers to leave a review which can be done by staff or sotfware. You need to have your listings managed in order to respond to reviews which is why the two work very closely. But listings management is a service in its own right by all accounts.” – Matt Coghlan, BrightLocal

Q. How do you determine what to charge for reputation management?

A. “It depends on the overall SEO objective of the client and your agency’s hourly rates. Additionally, it will also depend if the client wants to self manage or the agency fully manages.” – Ernest Olaseinde, Reputation Consultant. [This led to an interesting discussion in the chat, where attendees shared how much they charge. Answers generally ranged between $200 and $500 per month – but of course, it depends on your own agency, offering, and location.]

Q. How can a “teach you” model in reputation management can be profitable for agencies?

A.  “It positions your agency as a trusted advisor, reputation management doesn’t necessarily require super technical knowhow so you can train your clients to self manage whilst they lean on your agency for more technical tasks such as link building or on page optimization. Your client will then have more trust in you for the other services you provide and appreciate the transparency. You can also provide them with reporting and charge a smaller fee for this. This is just one option, you can also offer them a done for you service at a higher price point of course.” – Matt 

Q. If you have software for requesting reviews that you provide to your clients as an added value, how do you encourage them to use it? How do you encourage them to use it regularly? How much training/follow up do you recommend in beginning stages and then on?

A. “I think you need to get the business to fully buy in to the concept of online reviews and typically the businesses that get the most/best reviews get their staff to ask for the review personally then follow up on email or through software. This is super important as the staff member has the relationship with the customer. So in the onboarding meeting of whichever tool you choose, you should work out the buying proccess for their customers, and then train their team to ask for the review after they’ve delivered the service. Getting buy in to add this to their proccess will make any software so much more effective. Some companies have success by making targets for their team members to get reviews from their customers – that’s a good way to get buy in across the company.” – Ernest

Q. So clients come to you if they have bad reviews and want better reviews. But of they have a lot of bad reviews there is obviously something wrong there. What do you do in that case?

A. “First, take a closer look at the service levels, and customer services etc at that particular location to get a better understanding as to why the reviews are bad. If there are a significant number, this could indicate a fundamental operational issue. Watch out for common themes, and make sure to share these with staff – both positive and negative!” – Ernest

Q. I heard something about pitching leads by showing them the reviews of their local competitors. Does Brightlocal have a “competitor spy” feature of some sort?

A. “Absolutely our Google My Business and Local Search Audit can do this, we can return the top 10 local competitors and show their reviews (alongside other crucial metrics) vs the prospects/clients. Here’s a quick screenshot so you can see what this looks like.” – Ernest

Q. Knowing that Yelp doesn’t want businesses to ask for reviews, what is a good way to get reviews there?

A. “Yelp have some pretty strict guidelines on what they want. If you want to follow Yelp’s guidelines then you shouldn’t ask for reviews – period. You can add a sticker saying “we’re on yelp” at the business, but that’s it. But, that’s not to say your client’s competition are asking for reviews for Yelp! We have more advice here.”

Q. Does BrightLocal offer an option that works with QR Codes?

A. “We looked at QR codes but felt that they never really took off with consumers and are tough to include on every medium – email, print, SMS etc. Instead, we have a link that you can send to customers instead to start the feedback process. Find out more on Link Mode here.” – Ernest

Thanks to everyone who attended live and contributed to the excellent chat.

The post Pitch Perfect: How to Sell and Deliver Reputation Management to Clients appeared first on BrightLocal.



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