Google My Business, it's a roadmap for customers to your business and mine

I'd like to share with you today the issue that we've got around bringing traffic to our websites or going out and finding it. The reason I'm talking about this is because I have been working for the last month to get people to come to my website through a combination of proactive marketing with a newsletter, a podcast, and social media. I've had some 855 people visit my website and about 1,100 sessions, so I'm making some good traction, but what I haven't been getting is any leads, any inquiries to my business. There's just one, but not as many as I would have hoped for with that much traffic, and I'm not sure if this is a function of COVID or if it's a function of my getting my marketing wrong. One of the things that I'm looking at now is if I'm doing all this content marketing and people say they like it when I publish it, how do I start to grow the audience that seeing it and how do I make sure that it's targeted more clearly?

I got to thinking about something whilst I was walking Binky, my beagle, in the woods here. I was listening to the Russell Brunson ClickFunnels Marketing Secrets podcast. Russell Brunson is the founder of ClickFunnels, and now he's become quite a celebrity in his own right as an entrepreneur and as a social media expert. Russell was talking about the need to find your audience rather than to gather the audience. It struck me that I've been doing some part right but some part wrong when it comes to the public relations. I've been creating content and sending it out, but what I've been doing is the equivalent of, if you like, organizing a nice party at the house and then saying to everyone, "I'm having a party and I hope that you come," when actually, if you're looking for friends, you don't just start to invite everyone to your house at the beginning. You go out and find friends where they are, whether it's night clubs or sports centers or whatever the function they fulfill. 

I stumbled upon Google My Business, and I've got an EastWest PR Google My Business registered in Singapore, but it's actually been left rather fallow. What's slightly embarrassing is that I've had 1,766 views in the last 28 days. In other words, I've had more views on a passive Google listing than I have on my hardworked website. What I did today then was I spent some time looking at Google My Business, and I claimed the UK company because I have already Singapore. I was able to add the British company within the same account as a second office for the same company name. Once I did that, I added in my logo, a picture of the team, a 360-degree video of the interior, although I don't have a facility and office to do that for. I could also add in some pictures of my work. 

Another great feature of Google My Business is that I can add in my hours of operation. I can also put in there if I've got busy hours or slack hours. I can even add in directions. What's interesting too is that they have a Call Now button for mobile users. I'm reminded of that being useful because just the other day, I went with Binky, my beagle, to pick up his medicine. We had to ring the vet when we're on the way, because we're not allowed into the clinic during COVID times. When we were five minutes away, we were able to use the Google search and get the phone number for the veterinary clinic here in Bath and ring ahead using the hands-free. So mobility and location-based search are obviously key trends that we can all take advantage of when it comes to our PR, and Google My Business is a platform that enables us to use those two trends to our favor. 

The other thing that the Google My Business does is it enables you to showcase customer reviews. You can invite customers to leave reviews by sending them an email or they can simply leave a review on your Facebook page. The cool thing about this is that we've looked at reviews and we know that people buy from trusted vendors, so if you start to have customers leave reviews, not only do you know yourself, what people think of your company, and how it can be improved, but also your other consumers and customers can rate and benchmark that they should come to you. Having tried Trustpilot, which we've signed up for, it's also very powerful. The issue of Trustpilot though is that it's not next to your business listing and your business location, whereas Google My Business is on the map on the browser which enables you then to see all of the businesses ranked both by geography or location and also by rankings. This will become increasingly important, especially if you've got a company that's in a competitive space, as I found in EastWest Public Relations in Singapore. There were about a dozen PR firms all listed on the same page. Some had got ranking; some had not. East West Public Relations didn't have any rankings, and that's something that I've endeavored that I'm going to change because now I'm onto this. I must capitalize on it.

One in three searches are now location-intent, apparently. One in three searches are where people are looking for things that are close to them or near a place that they're going to, which means that Google My Business, in other words, is trying to search for the location, and it's only going to become more important. And as we know, with mobile devices, location-based advertising is growing in importance as well, because as people get closer to a location, then advertisers and PR people can send them messages that are relevant to their location. These are all very important things that we can think about in PR, because what we see now is that if we know that visual content is becoming more important and more effective than text-based messaging, when we have PR messaging going out, we need to make sure that we're using infographics, because they're shown to grow traffic 12% faster than those messages that don't have infographics. The infographic is simply the inclusion of both text and pictures together. If you have infographics, or you have videos, you can add video to the Google My Business (but only 30 seconds worth) and then tie in all these things together. 

The beauty and power of Google My Business is that it's tied into the other aspects of Google. Your Google reviews and your Google content in Google My Business will then appear in the Google search. As we work always to try and improve our organic search ratings by what we've included in links and by what people say about us, the authority of our website and our business which is listed on Google My Business will complement the contents of your website. The Google marketing platform which is this new holistic environment has the advertising, the analytics, the Google My Business, and more. It's becoming a bigger and bigger platform for Google to integrate all of our marketing activities. 

I started off by sending out a press release today to announce the 25th anniversary of EastWest PR and watching my traffic on my website to see what would happen. Of course, one can't expect traffic immediately, but readership from PR really often doesn't translate into a bump or a burst on our website or to a call to the customer hotlines. It's really a branding and an awareness exercise. What we need to think about is the engagement activities that we can we can use. Social media is great when it comes to, for example, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, but they're detached. They're detached from the location of the business. 

Google My Business has posts, photographs, 360-degree video. It has the location, it has the phone number, it has the reviews. That's a very powerful customer journey that we need to be on with the customer as they're deciding to look for something, go leave their home, leave their office, leave their facility, and travel somewhere to pick up either takeaway, to sit in, to participate. Obviously, they'll have choices along the way, and as we can see from Google Maps, the services displayed will change according to how close your business is to them. 

Your marketing material on Google My Business can be kept up-to-date with both direct effort into the Google My Business platform, which you can run on Android or on iOS as an app on your phone or your iPad or, and this comes all the way back to my Zoho, you can integrate Google My Business with some of these platforms that automate content distribution. I use the Zoho Social platform and Google My Business is one of the channels that I can automate my posts to, so once it's set up, when I've got my Singapore EastWest Public Relations and my East West Public Relations offices and materials all up-to-date and connected, then I'm in a position where when I add my content from one place, one time, which is scheduled, don't forget, I'll be confident that it's going out on my Facebook, on my LinkedIn, on my Twitter, my Instagram, and now also my Google My Business. That's very reassuring. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that I can stop doing the marketing and the hard work that I'm doing on the podcast, on the videos with Vimeo, on the search engine optimization, and on the sending out of press releases and stories about today, for example, how jumping out of a plane at 18 led me to a career in PR in Asia. We have to constantly be creating content that's compelling. Google My Business is another channel that we need to be issuing it out onto, and what's great about Google is that it has all these analytics tied into it. 

As we finish for today, I'd like to share with you that, often, we think that PR is about bringing people to us. It's sometimes about that, and it partly is about the outreach, but it's also about going out and being where the audience are. As Russell Brunson has said in one of his podcasts, it's about finding your top 100 customers or influencers, finding out where they are, and being as close as you can to their environment. If your customers are mobile, then Google My Business could well be a brilliant and free and cost-effective way for you to reach out to them before they leave their home, the office, or wherever they are, and to make sure that once they've got to you, they've communicated with you and also that, afterwards, they leave you a customer review because ultimately, there's nothing more powerful in any business than a happy customer who leaves a testimonial. 

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

Cover Photo by Benjamin Dada on Unsplash