How does it work?

Google displays the new Places pages when it predicts that the user is looking for local information, and those listings include address, phone number, customer reviews, and links to your place page.

Previously, results included just the business name, URL, phone number, and the number of reviews available. Searchers had to click on each business listing to find out how many stars the business received in customer reviews and to see details like address and actual review content.

How do you make sure your business shows up?

To start, if you haven’t already, you need to make sure you claim your Google Places page using the following steps.

1.) Do a search for your business. In many cases, it may already show up with a generic places page that has been created automatically by aggregating web content. If it does, under your business name, you’ll see a “Place Page” link. Click it. (If your business doesn’t have a “Place Page” link, go to Google.com/places and click on “List your business” on the right. You may need to create a Google account if you don’t already have one.)

2.) If Google has created a place page for you, you’ll see information about your business, whether it’s near public transportation, a map of its location, reviews, and more. Toward the top of the page, you’ll see two links: “Edit this place” and “Business owner?” (if you see “Owner-verified listing” instead of “Business Owner, you can skip to step 3). Click on “Business owner?” to Edit, Suspect, or Validate your listing. Click on “Edit this listing” to update information about your business. It’s also a good idea to follow the steps to Validate your listing so you can have more control over the content of your Google Maps listing.

If you don’t have a Google-created Places page yet, you’ll want to click on “Add another business” on the Dashboard page and you will be guided through a series of steps to create a validate a page for your business.

3) Once you’ve located or created your page, you’ll want to optimize it. Google doesn’t reveal the specific details on how it ranks the pages in these search results, but Places pages with good information, numerous reviews, and elements like images or videos are likely to help with those rankings.

Short of reviews? Add a review yourself, encourage your friends and fellow business owners to do the same. Even consider running a promotion encouraging customers to provide feedback online. Not only will the feedback be useful for your location ranking, but it will provide valuable feedback to you about your business, too.

And Google seems to constantly add new ways to enhance your content. Consider adding Google tags, which can highlight coupons, videos, and whatever you consider to be most important about your business. Google Boost Ads are being rolled out for select categories in certain cities, with more to be added in coming weeks and months. Those ads allow you to draw attention to your Google Places listings. Google also offers the ability to post to your place page, so if you’re having a sidewalk sale, a book signing, or even just want to highlight news about your business, you can keep your Google Places page an interesting and useful destination for your potential and current customers.

Your Google Places page can also act as a secondary website, and it offers QR tags if you want to share your Place Page with your customers. And on the right rail of your Places page admin screen, Google even shares helpful hints on getting the most out of your page.

Best of all, the service is free (with the exception of Google Tags and Google Boost ads). Optimize your Places page today and make sure your potential customers can find you.

How Friendly is Your Website

The setup of your website is extremely important, not only to the visitors, but to the search engines.  SEO or search engine optimization is all about making your website friendly.  Is it easy to navigate through?  Are appropriate keywords strategically placed throughout your web pages?  Is it clean and fresh?  These are things that the search engine spiders will use to rank your website and should not be overlooked if you want to get to the top of the rankings.

Content is King

The content of your website is what keeps visitors coming back, so you want to provide up to date, good quality content related to your niche market.  The keywords should be used sparingly, but stand out so everyone will know what you are promoting.  The most important thing about content is that it should be original.  No one wants stale content, so; if you are not a good writer, consider outsourcing the task.  There are tons of services that will write content for your web pages at a very reasonable price.  Not only do the search engines love fresh content but also so will your audience.

The Importance of Links

Once a website is up and running it is not seen until it is indexed through the search engine spiders.  These spiders crawl sites and rank them based on the quality of the content and the relevance to the targeted keywords.  Manually submitting your site to the search engines can take weeks, but linking to another quality site will get your site crawled faster.  Since the spiders crawl established sites faster; linking to them will get your site crawled as well.

How do you get linked to other sites?  Contact the webmaster and ask.  Your site should be in a relevant niche but not deemed a threat.  If your content is good, some will agree. Many sites have “Link to Us” pages but the quickest way to get linked to the more established websites is to post comments on their blogs.   Commenting on the content of another blog and inviting them to visit your site will get curiosity seekers to your web pages.  Do not forget to add your URL so they know where to go.  Remember building links it not about the quantity, but the quality of the links.  They should be niche-related to hold any weight with the search engine spiders.

Get Your Site Seen With A Blog

If your website does not change very often, you might want to consider adding a blog.  A blog linked to your website offers fresh content that is updated on a regular basis.  This works well in any niche market and you can offer tips and other information in your niche.  Most blogging platforms are simple and easy to use even for the beginner.

Learning how search engine optimization works is essential for anyone who wants to have a successful website.  What your visitors think about your web pages is only one piece of the pie; what the search engines think about your site should be a bigger concern.

How do you say “Hello”?
How do you and your employees greet your customers when they walk into your business? Do you approach them right away, offering help? Do you offer a passing greeting while letting them find their way around your store? Do team members only say something once customers make eye contact with them?

How you greet your customers is often the first touch you have with them (that day, anyway). Make sure your message engages them the way you would want to be engaged. Do your employees have the proper training to be able to offer help to customers and find them the products or services they need? If customers don’t feel like you understand what they need, they will go somewhere else to find someone who does.

Make sure all employees know what is expected of their customer interactions, and make sure you have ongoing training to keep their knowledge as polished as possible. If your customers have confidence in your employees, you have a better shot at them having confidence in your business.

Do you know what you could be doing better?
What you’re doing might have been working for years, but what happens when your customers’ expectations change? Do you really know what your customers think about how you stack up to your competition, or even with other non-related businesses?

You can engage your customers informally during checkout or by picking up the phone and calling after their visits. If you want more formal answers, send them an email invitation to take an online survey (if you have their permission to email them), or email questions directly to them. If your Point-of-Sale system allows it, include a couple of questions at the bottom of your receipts with an email address where they can send their responses.

Most importantly, if you’re going to be soliciting feedback, you should be willing or able to make some changes. If your customers do have a problem AND they know they’ve told you about it, they’re going to expect you to do something about it (or at least to address it with them). If you ignore it, you could end up frustrating your customers even more.

Get involved in helping your community
Do you know about organizations or other businesses in your neighborhood who are helping in the community? And do they know about you? Are you doing what you can as a company to inform your customers about how they can help in the community? Are you getting involved in the fundraisers and events going on right around you?

Many major manufacturers have millions of dollars they can spend on philanthropy. And it works! But playing a role that helps people in your community doesn’t need to cost much – or even any – money.

Find local organizations or causes that align with what your business does or causes you believe in. Own a neighborhood shoe store? Contact a local group coordinating a 5K fundraiser, and volunteer to hang posters, accept / process sign-ups, and host a pre-event shirt / chip pick-up. Have a store that closes early or opens late? See if any groups can use your parking lot for a concert in the evening or a neighborhood garage sale early in the morning. (Just be sure to make sure your insurance covers you for such events). Promote the event inside your store in the lead-up to it. Think creatively about what you have to offer, and find a cause that can use it. Odds are, there’s an organization out there who’d love to take you up on your offer.

Engage online
Do your customers know how to find your information online? Do you know what is being said about you on business review websites? Are you getting the pages views you were hoping for out of your Search Engine Marketing efforts?

In all of these situations, engaging online can improve your presence and drive more customers your way.

Take advantage of free services such as Google’s business listings to have your location, contact information, and hours readily available for users who look for your store online. To improve your chances of being listed in organic searches, make sure to create a site map of your online site and submit it to the search engines. Find blogs or other sites that offer information about the type of goods and services you offer, and use your expertise to offer valuable comments on those sites. Visit customer review sites, such as Yelp, often to protect your brand reputation online.

Any of these efforts stands to improve your standing within organic searches on the major search engines, and that improvement in content quality may also improve the performance (and decrease the cost) of your purchased search engine ads. We’ll be featuring more articles in the coming weeks on how to improve your placement in search engine results.

Analyze your numbers
Do you know what subset of your customers bought your highest-margin items last year? Do you know how successful your advertising last year was in bringing you new customers? Do you know how many people are visiting your company website each day, and what percentage of those potential customers are buying from you?

Analysis is the key to understanding what is and isn’t working within your business, and how to improve on the areas that need some work. And while it can be pricey or time-consuming to do a full-scale analysis of all areas of your business (and it’s often worth it), you can start small by first coming up with a few questions you want answered and trying to find the answers to those.

First take a look at the basics. What ARE your highest-margin items? Do you a have loyalty program (even if it’s just a basic one) that affords you a bit more understanding of who your customers are? Even if you only have basic information, you can often have that augmented with pay list services, or do it yourself. The customer satisfaction surveys mentioned earlier in this article can be a great way for you to ask a couple of targeted questions about your customers (do they live in the neighborhood? Do they have kids? Do they own or rent their homes?) Once you know that, you can figure out how to target other people like them to buy your targeted products.

Consider email campaigns for some of your advertising so you can measure how many customers responded to that communication. Think about adding something like Google Analytics code to your business website so you can see where your customers are coming from, what they do when they get to your site, and how many of them are buying your products.

Even if you don’t think you have a lot of data, you can learn a lot, even from a little. If you start small, you may be surprised at what you can learn.

And that’s the case for any of these ideas. Starting small (and having goals for each initiative before hand, so you know if your efforts are working) can have a real impact on the success of your business. With most of these ideas being free – or close to it – it can’t hurt to try.

We’d love to know what affordable (or free) marketing strategies you’ve tried to improve your business. Let us know some of them in the comments. If you have questions about how your business may start with some of these strategies, let us know.

As Toyota faces waves of recalls, individual dealers run the risk of their local brands taking a battering along with that of the
manufacturer. And while Toyota runs spin nationally on the recalls and questions about product safety, dealers have to manage crisis communications of their own to ensure their local reputations aren’t damaged.

Michael Sommermeyer, the Nevada-based strategist and PR consultant behind wordymouth.com, says the standards of crisis communication come into play at the local level, as well as nationally.

Sommermeyer likens the process to battle planning and points out the four keys in dealing with crisis communications: 1) Understand the field, 2) Develop a plan, 3) Think logistics, and 4) Have reserves.

That’s just what some Toyota dealers have done to do their part to assuage owner concerns.

People visiting the Pennsylvania-based Ardmore Toyota’s website are greeted with a prominent message atop their normal dealership homepage. The dealership announced extended hours, increased staff, an Open House, and live repair demos, all in effort to comfort concerned customers.

Ardmore owners told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the efforts were helping. “They’re a lot more at ease after they’ve spoken with us,” Paul told the paper. “There are a very few that seem to be overalarmed, and we handle those individually.”

Grossinger Toyota in Lincolnwood, IL, posted a 24/7 toll-free number, recall information, a service appointment scheduler, and a video on what to do if the accelerator sticks. Grossinger started 24/7 hours on Feb. 4 to handle the volume of customers affected by the recall.

Other dealers were taking things a step further. The New York Post featured a Long Island dealership that offered manicures for customers while they waited for the recall repairs. “We’re giving out free movie passes, and we drive them to the movies while their car is being worked on. We’re also giving free manicures,” one senior employee at Atlantic Toyota told the Post. “We are trying to calm them down a little.”

And Dealers aren’t totally on their own to deal with the 4.6 million-vehicle recall — Toyota provided as much as $75K to some dealers to manage the influx of calls and additional staff hours.

Only time will tell whether the extra effort can keep the dealers from feeling the brunt of the reputation damage caused by the recall.
Do you have a creative way that you have — or are handling — crisis communications at your company? We’d love to hear about them. Please share your ideas in the comments.

Out of Home (OOH) digital video display is gaining popularity as a way for marketers to reach the ever discerning consumer. These digital displays are being used by numerous venues including grocery stores, hospitals, restaurants, and colleges/universities in storefronts, on public buses, billboards, gas pumps and bus stops. A 2009 Arbition study of the effectiveness of OOH video marketing revealed that digital media displays reach 53% of American adults a month – including me.

Recently a new burger restaurant opened up near my neighborhood in Chicago. The restaurant serves up custom built burgers to cater to the most discriminating of tastes. As I watched the progression of the construction unfold, nothing struck me as extraordinary about this restaurant visually. I decided to check out their menu online – definitely not trying to reinvent the wheel with the menu. Even after walking by this new restaurant for nearly two months after it opened, I had no desire to ever stop in, until the day I saw the glow. Walking home one evening, I couldn’t help but notice the bright vibrant glow coming from the restaurant’s front door. I had to stop and look. There it was, a digital media display showing one of the most amazing looking burgers I had ever seen. I could literally see the juices dripping from the burger on display. That did it for me. I had to at least try one of those burgers. I proceeded to visit the restaurant later that week with four of my friends.

I would consider myself a pretty savvy consumer. I am an educated college graduate with a  knowledge of the advertising that marketers often use to ploy people into purchasing. OOH video displays are not necessarily a ploy, but rather a response to our ever-increasing “visually stimulated society”. Everything about the burger restaurant’s digital display caught my attention. It was short, to the point, and showed me exactly what I wanted to see without wasting my time. In case I wasn’t convinced by the photo, also on display was a comment from Oprah Winfrey dubbing their burger as one of the best in America. Anyone (especially Chicagoans) know that aligning yourself with Oprah is tapping into a huge consumer base and fan following.

If the restaurant had their OOH video display up one month earlier, they would have had one more month of my loyal support and probably others’ support as well. As digital media displays become more affordable to businesses, it is no doubt that we will begin to see them in places we never thought we would. But as digital video displays inundate our lives, will consumers become desensitized to their draw? Will shopping malls and grocery stores become mini Times Squares, packed with flashing lights and displays? Will this advertising always work as well as it did on me?

With the swarms of consumers blogging about everything under the sun, opinions spread like wildfire. It is imperative that companies respond promptly and adequately to negative conversations online.

Defending your brand has become more important then ever, so why are so many companies still not regulating these outlets? In a recent conference in New York, Ad Age columnist Pete Blackshaw, discussed how businesses can defend against negative press on the internet. Below are a few of his tips to remember when you begin to monitor your brand online.

1. “Empower the influencer.” Blackshaw emphasized the need to make information available to those who may be looking for it, like bloggers and social media users. Companies need to utilize search engines on their home websites and keep information up to date and positive. The likelihood of a negative blog decreases if there is an ample amount of information refuting the writer’s opinion.
2. Use tools to monitor what is being written about your brand on the internet. Free applications such as Google Alerts and Summarize make it easier for companies to keep an eye out. Check every so often to see who is talking about your company online and determine if a response is necessary. Keep in mind that with today’s social media landscape, replication is everywhere. It is no longer just a few hundred people reading a blog from the net, but rather, (possibly) thousands of people tweeting and re-tweeting harmful press about the brand.
3. Timeliness is everything. Making amends with a dissatisfied customer before damage is done is the key. Any number of people could have been influenced by the bad press before the company came in for damage control. The value of a customer (even just one) is great. Customers allow businesses to keep their doors open, after all.
4. Watch what the competition is doing. Learn from their mistakes instead of your own. If they are getting it right, take the opportunity to make sure your business is on par with offers.
5. No Customers? Just because a business may not have “traditional” customers doesn’t mean it should let the World Wide Web determine the integrity of the brand. Just like above, address the problem and take a stance.