Welcome everyone, to today's webinar. I've been working for a year now, working in the marketing department and I've seen that there's a high demand for local marketing advice. So we decided to create this presentation and give you guys some practical tools and takeaways. We wanted to make this really interactive for you guys.
Eric Vreeland: So we've prepared a couple questions that we'd like you guys to answer, right in the chat. And I really like this, that everyone can see what everyone else is saying.
So is everyone here familiar with what inbound marketing is? We're getting most mostly yeses, and a couple nos.
Maggie Georgieva: Great.
Eric Vreeland: OK. Well, really quickly, I'll just run through the idea of inbound marketing. Outbound marketing is focused on the idea of kind of in your face marketing. It's like television ads, radio ads, newspaper ads. The idea that you want to put your message in front of as many eyeballs as possible, with the hope that someone comes and buys your product or service.
And we've come to the conclusion here at HubSpot that people are getting very good at blocking out this message. We have TiVo now, we have caller ID. And people are kind of really good at ignoring this outbound marketing. And people are getting better and better at searching for products and services that they want to find, and finding the solution, the answer to that problem.
So you, as a marketer, have to put yourself in a position to make it as easy as possible for people to find you when they're finding the solution. And that's what we've referred to as inbound marketing.
Maggie Georgieva: Absolutely. Yeah. That's a great overview.
So the next interactive element that we have for you is, what tools are you currently using for online marketing? So if you could just put it in the chat pane again, so that we're all on the same page, that will be great.
Eric Vreeland: We've got some blogging, social media.
Maggie Georgieva: Nice. Great. Blogging is awesome.
Eric Vreeland: Google Places.
Maggie Georgieva: Yeah, we're definitely going to talk about that.
Eric Vreeland: AdWords, Facebook.
Maggie Georgieva: Great.
Eric Vreeland: Great. So it seems like we've got a wide variety of marketing experience here. And we'll definitely touch on a lot of those tools. Specifically the tools that are going to help you focus on global marketing.
Maggie Georgieva: Definitely. And what about some specific tools? Have you guys experimented with Google Places. I know someone already mentioned that. But what about Yahoo Local? What about Groupon? We've heard a lot about Groupon recently. Wondering what you guys think about it.
Eric Vreeland: We've got a Yelp is awesome, we've got a lot of Google Places, Yelp, Living Social. OK. Great. And then some people haven't even heard of any of these. So this is going to be a great overview, and then we've also compiled some more detailed information. So if you already kind of have the basics down, you're going to be able to dive in there, and maybe look to take more advantage of some of the advanced features.
Maggie Georgieva: Totally. That's great. I love it. All right. So why inbound marketing, Eric?
Eric Vreeland: Yep, that's the big question. And this is a local marketing webinar. So like I said before, when I was talking about inbound marketing in general, traditional marketing techniques, specifically traditional local advertising techniques have gone stale. They've become ineffective. And newspapers and magazines are losing their readers. Direct mail is getting thrown in the trash. Yellow pages are being more commonly used as booster seats than to find local businesses. And I can't tell you the last time that I've seen one of those sign-holding guys on the street and decided, hey, I don't need to go see mom, I need a new cell phone. So I'm going to turn off and go to this store right now.
I'm sure you guys have the same feeling as I do that these techniques are not working. Not only that, but these techniques are incredibly hard to measure how effective they're being. It's very hard to measure your return on investment.
And traditional media is actually going to discourage your measurement, because they don't want you to know how ineffective it is. They want you to keep spending your money on these traditional advertising techniques, because that's how they make their money. And they realize that if you start turning toward these platforms that are more easily measurable you're going to actually be like, well, you know what, that Facebook Places campaign, that actually got me 20 new customers last month. That worked out really well.
So that's kind of the reason we want to step away from the traditional local advertising and to the more relevant inbound marketing.
So if you look here, you'll see kind of what makes up inbound marketing. It's all about blogging, it's all about SEO, it's all about social media, and the idea that people are searching for your products and services every day. And the real question is, whether they're finding your website, or whether they're finding your competition's website.
So there are hundreds of millions of searches every day. People are reading blogs and tapping their social networks to find the answers to questions, solutions, and even product recommendations. And inbound marketing is about making it really easy for people to find your site and what you have to offer online.
One thing that I do want to explain right now really quickly is the idea of an inbound link. Is everyone here familiar with what an inbound link is? Yes, yes, no. Mostly yeses, but we got a couple nos. Let's go over it really quickly.
So how your website ranks in a search engine is determined by-- well, Google's algorithm, or a web search engine algorithm. And it kind of varies. No one knows the exact equation or algorithm. But what we do know is that inbound links play a very large role in this.
And what an inbound link is, is say Maggie has her own personal website, and I find one of her articles very interesting. I might link to it from my website. And that's considered an inbound link.
And something interesting about inbound links is, they're not all considered equal. An inbound link from, let's say, the New York Times or a dot edu address is going to be considered more authoritative than an inbound link from, let's say, a teenage blogger. And because of that, that website is going to be given more credibility.
Now, in the scheme of things, all inbound links are considered good. But not all inbound links are considered equal. So you should always be working to get more inbound links, and you should specifically be trying to get inbound links from authoritative sources. But we're going to talk about some ways during this webinar that you can get those inbound links, because that's going to help with your overall inbound marketing strategy, and help you show up higher in search engines.
Maggie Georgieva: And another way people have been referring to inbound links is calling them the currency of the internet. So just notice that term is very powerful.
Eric Vreeland: Yeah. So we talked about what you have to do as far as inbound marketing is concerned, and the broad overview. But what we really want to get into for you guys, and what we think you're interested in is, how does this change if you're a small, local business?
Maggie Georgieva: Great. That's fantastic. Thank you, Eric. This was a great illustration of what our vision is for this webinar. And I'm sure it got us all on the same page.
So moving on, we just wanted to share with you the four keys we have identified for local marketing success. So they include some tactics and some incentives to leverage for customer acquisition. We're also going to tell you a story about rewarding loyalty among your regular customers. And we're going to talk about ways in which you can build a community using different local marketing channels online.
Last but not least, we will touch upon the notion of bridging your offline marketing efforts with your online presence. So these keys are going to be present in every pattern that we discuss today. And let's just get to the meat of the presentation.
All right. Starting with Google Places-- you have probably already heard a lot about Google Places. One of the leading platforms for local marketing online. This is a tool you should really get familiar with, because it allows you to rank high in Google. On the first page of Google, actually.
So if you go to places.google.com, you will be able to create your Google Places listing. So let's see what that listing might look like for you. Here's a sample one. Here is a screenshot that I took recently. And I was looking for a moving company near Cambridge, Massachusetts, and those are the results that showed up. As you can see, I only typed in "moving company." I did not type in Cambridge. The words that are in bold are the ones I searched for. But because search engines are getting so smart, they can tell that I'm searching from Cambridge. They can tell where my location is, and what's going to be relevant for me. So they're not going to just return results in Colorado or Las Vegas. They're going to tell me what's nearby, so I can really take advantage of that.
And this is a page where you should start ranking when you list your site with Google Places. So let's see how we actually do that. What's the importance. The importance is getting your site to the first page of the search engine results. And your result is going to show among seven other listings. If you go back to slide 13, you're going to see how there is seven listings that showed up. When you submit your site, one of those results is going to be you, basically. And that's where you want to be. So first page of Google Guides, that's exactly where you want to be.
What other benefits does Google Places offer? So you will gain more visibility by being listed on the first page of Google, that's for sure. But because you're going to get that visibility, in turn, you will get more traffic to your website.
So that's all great. But here's something else that you might have not necessarily thought about earlier. You will also be able to level the playing field and beat the competition for companies that might have been around online for a really long time. So again, if you check out that screenshot on slide thirteen, you will see that the local results appeared before, 123movers.com, which is a pretty primary site for moving resources. And you can be that. You can be those people.
So this is all free, and you should definitely take advantage of this cost-effective way to bring about more customers to your business.
Great. So moving on to, next steps for your business. So as we mentioned earlier, we really want to make this practical, this session is all for you, and we want to make sure that you have some tangible takeaways.
So after this presentation, I want you all to go to places.google.com and create your listing. It's a pretty straightforward process. But here's some things that you need to consider while you're doing this. Make sure that you have optimized for keywords, images, and video in your listings. Collect as many customer reviews as possible. And this is something that we'll talk about later, as well. But we cannot really emphasize that enough. And also, make sure that those customer reviews are positive. It's great to see good feedback from people, and good comments.
If you have already listed your site with Google Places-- I know a few of you said that earlier today-- there is something else that you might take advantage of. And that's the so-called Google Tags platform, which is associated with Google Places. So as part of Google Places, businesses have access to this new ad platform which allows you to highlight information that you want your customers to see. It highlights your company with a special symbol, and you can see that on slide 17, we've highlighted it. It costs $25 a month. And for example, you can tag and highlight a coupon for new customers. You can tag a video about your store, or even a link to your menu.
So again, if you go to slide number 13, you can see how it looks like with other listings, and you can see what the advantage of this is. You basically stand out from the other ones. This symbol, this tag, allows you to stand out from the crowd, and really highlight what you have to offer.
And actually, Small Business Shift reported that tags increase the percentage of people taking action on Google Maps by 84%. That's really an interesting trend that you might want to take advantage of.
So we recommend you to try out tags soon, and take advantage of them before they become too common. Because if a lot of people start using them, right, Eric?
Eric Vreeland: Yeah, so we're getting some mixed feedback in the chat room right now. Some people are saying, tags are a waste of money. Some people are saying that tags are great, tags are cheap. And so we're not really advocating one way or another. There's not a set solution. Every business is different.
If every business in your category is using tags, then you're really not going to stand out. You're going to get lost in the crowd. But let's say that you're in a very specific niche, and you're using a tag, it's definitely a way that you can stand out amongst the crowd and get found. And like some people said, it's not that expensive. So you can try it out for a couple months.
But one of the important things is here, here at HubSpot we are very into data. And so we would recommend, see how many customers or how many leads you're getting from your listing before you add the tag, and then see how many leads and customers you're getting after you add the tag, and compare the two.
And we just got a remark in here that said, we tried it for four months, and we didn't get any results. Well, then that's, you know, at least you tried it out, you found out it didn't work, and so now you can move on to some of the other local marketing platforms out there.
Maggie Georgieva: In general, we feel like you should be investing in more long term strategies. And that's something that we wanted to emphasize HubSpot can help you with. We have, as you might know, an inbound marketing software that's an integrated tool, and includes a bunch of different elements that help you get found online. And one of the two that we have is called Keyword Grader. And that lets you enter certain keywords, and see what the monthly searches are for these keywords, evaluate the difficulty to rank for them, and it can do much more. So this is one way in which you can create a strategy around your keyword optimization. And then after you have identified the right keywords, the keywords that your target audience is looking for and not what you think they're looking for, so you need to double-check that information.
So once you've identified those, you can then go to Google Places and really optimize your description that we talked about. You can highlight-- if you decide to experiment with the tags-- you can highlight the tags that you think are going to be important. So really take advantage of this long term strategy of optimization.
Eric Vreeland: And so we're actually getting some questions about Keyword Grader right now, which is great. And one of the questions is, is Keyword Grader free? No, it's actually part of the HubSpot software package, but we do offer a free 30 day trial. So if anyone wanted to try out Keyword Grader, then they could just sign up for the free 30 day trial at www.hubspot.com/free-trial, and then you'd have access to Keyword Grader for 30 days, so.
Maggie Georgieva: And throughout this presentation, we're just going to illustrate a few tools that we have. So when you sign up for that free trial, you can use them all, and see if they really help you, and how that works.
So this is what I wanted to tell you about Google Places. And now we're going to move on to illustrate the importance of another platform that's really hot as well.
Eric Vreeland: Yeah. So you guys might have heard of a little company called Yahoo. And they have probably one of the more popular local business directories. And if you go to listings.local.yahoo.com, you can add your basic business listing for free. So everyone that's talking about, no, this costs money. well, this is something that you can try for free. You should definitely take advantage of. Starting your business listing is very easy. But it's basically as straightforward as filling out your business information.
There's a couple options that I wanted to mention that I think are very important that you might not think of. So one of the options is to have the reviews of your business sent to you automatically. And this is very important. We're going to talk about reviews a lot. Because similarly to inbound links, reviews-- as far as these local directories-- are kind of the currency of local business directories. And so if you have the reviews sent directly to you, you'll not only be able to stay on top of the positive reviews, but you'll also be able to stay on top of the negative reviews. And staying on top of those things is very important.
You can fill out your hours of operation, as well as your payment methods that you accept. And this is very good for maintaining happy customers. No one likes showing up at a business venue and finding out that it's closed, that the hours they thought it was open were incorrect, or to find out that the business only accepts cash when all they have is a Visa.
So those are some of the basic listing options that I would definitely check out. And similarly to tags, there's also the enhanced listing that I might try out if I was feeling comfortable. I wanted to maybe do a test and see how much more leads and customers I got from doing the enhanced listing.
And some of the advantages of doing the enhanced listing are that you get to add your company logo, tagline, 10 photos, and a more detailed business description. And all of these aspects are supposed to be more engaging for people that come to your listing, and potentially get people to click on your listing more. So that might also be something that I would consider.
Now why is this all important? Well, this is important because a lot of people, especially when they're searching for local solutions, are going to these local online business directories.
And here I've pulled up an example of a Yahoo Local search for a locksmith in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And over here, we'll see the map on the right, and the sponsored listings at the top and the right, and then the organic results in the middle. And as well as being able to manage your reviews, which is why I have the number of reviews here highlighted with these arrows, you'll also have the option of getting a sponsored listing.
Now, sponsored listings are very interesting, in that they show up on the search results page as highlighted listings when your keywords match the search initiated within 25 to 100 miles of your location. And you're only charged when someone clicks on your listing's link.
Now you might be saying to yourself, well, Eric. On a previous HubSpot webinar, you guys said that over 75% of the clicks are on the organic ad. Why would I want to pay for a sponsored listing?
Well, to address the first question, a lot of people do click on the organic results first. But if they're unable to find that they're looking for within a few clicks, they often resort to clicking on the paid link.
And another good thing about these sponsored listings is that you only pay when someone actually clicks on your listing. So if you do a good job aligning your title and your description, and you don't misrepresent your company or what you have to offer, the majority of these clicks on your sponsored listing are going to be very high quality leads.
And then again, coming back to the reviews. I want to point out the importance of getting reviews for your business. In the example search here for locksmith, you'll see that the first one has 804 reviews, whereas the second one only has two.
Now, even though the second listing has a five star rating, and the first one has a four star rating, I'm still very inclined to choose the first one, after I read a number of glowing reviews. And that's simply because the fact that the company was able to attract so many reviews definitely speaks to the quality of their business.
So we're going to talk a little bit more about this later. But learning how to encourage your customers to leave reviews for you is definitely something that's very important for a local business. And we'll talk about that in more detail later.
Maggie Georgieva: So what are the benefits of using Yahoo Local?
Eric Vreeland: So there's a few benefits. The first, as I pointed out, that map, is that the map emphasizes location. So people who may be limited by not being able to drive far, or just want to find a solution that's was right around the corner, it really makes it easy for them to see where business is located in relation to them. It allows you to monitor these reviews. And like I said, you can get those reviews sent directly to you, so you don't have to worry about checking in all the time. Once again, it's free. And then there's also this potential to upgrade to the enhanced listing and the sponsored listings once you feel comfortable with just the maybe a basic listing.
Maggie Georgieva: Yeah. That makes sense.
Eric Vreeland: Now, as far as next steps. I talked a lot about Yahoo Local right now. And here we just had a comment, Yahoo was hot in the beginning of the internet, not so much now. OK, let's talk about Google Places and whatever.
But you know what? That fits in perfectly with what I wanted to talk about right now. Is that you might think, oh, I have to list in Yahoo Global, oh, I have to list in Google Places. But it's really important that you actually list in all of the local directories out there. Not just the big ones. It's very important that you should link your site to as many of the local directories out there as possible.
And the reason for this, when I talk to people about this is, I like to use the analogy that submitting your website to a local directory, is like-- let's think of your website as a marble, and a local directory is a stack of marbles. Now, someone coming and searching for a solution gets to pick out a couple marbles from that stack and then pick their favorite one.
Now, we know that not all people are picking out of the same stack. There's actually over 50, 50 to 100, different local directories out there. And some of them are very specialized in specific verticals, and some of them are broader. So you really want to make sure that you're putting yourself in a position to get found, no matter where people are searching for your products and services.
And here I've just mentioned a few. We see the Business Journal, Citysearch, Local.com, Yellowpages. com. And we'll talk about ways in a little bit. So making sure that your business is submitted to all the search engines is important. But then making sure that your result stands out as well is also important.
So I wanted to highlight a company that probably not many you have heard of called Yeck, and that is found at www.yeck.com, that addresses both of these issues, making your marble stand out, and getting your marble into all the stacks out there.
The first is Yeck's Tags, and that's very similar to Google Tags, so I don't need to talk about it too much. But pretty much how Google Tags allows you to create this tag on Google, Yeck's Tags allows you to create these tags on superpages.com, mapquest.com, Citysearch, et cetera. And once again, you know, it's not for everyone, but it's a way to maybe highlight that search result, and possibly get found.
And then the second thing I wanted to talk about is a product they offer that's completely free called Yeck's Rep. And what Yeck's Rep is, is they've established partnerships with all these local search directories out there, and they allow you to manage your listings in one place. So you can go and claim your venues on Yeck, and connect your account with all these other directories, and then you have one central hub where you can go and update your local listing, and it's going to go out and it's going to update that for you in all of the listings that they're partnered with.
Maggie Georgieva: Right. And that's basically to accumulate more inbound links, right?
Eric Vreeland: So that product, Yeck's Rep, is actually free. So I would definitely take advantage of that. And Yeck's Tags has a seven day trial where you can try out the tags for free, too. So if you wanted to go and test that out, that would be cool.
Now, how can HubSpot help you with this? Well, we've been talking a lot how importance of links, and figuring out who is linking to you, and also the quality of links. And HubSpot has another tool called Link Grader that will show you not only how many inbound links you have, but it's going to grade these links for you. So that let's say you get a link of a particularly high grade. You might want to reach out to that person and ask them to write a review for your business, or something like that. So that's just another tool in HubSpot software that can help you with that local marketing.
Maggie Georgieva: It's definitely powerful to know where your links are coming from, and how you can further engage with those people. Thank you, Eric.
Moving on to another really hot tool, is Facebook Places. So Facebook is clearly one of the most popular platforms for local marketing. And you might be wondering, why is that? So we think it's that popular because it is a channel that's not only local, but is also social and targeted. And that's a really winning, winning combination.
So while there are other channels out there, they don't include as much data about your target audience as you would find on Facebook. For example, on Facebook, you can see people's interests, you can see their preferences, their demographics, their location. And this data is really valuable, and it's much harder to find elsewhere. So you should definitely take advantage of its availability here.
So you might have have also heard about the recent launch of Facebook Places. And we just wanted to showcase this tool and show you how it can benefit your business.
So here is how a simple Facebook Places page would look like. And this is on slide twenty seven. So it's pretty much like your regular Facebook page, but it includes check in below that profile image. And this is actually a screenshot from a place that a lot of my friends are visiting, so it's always showing up with my news feed. And that's something you should be aware of. When you are using a Facebook Places page, your'e pretty much gaining free advertising on Facebook, because they're exposing your brand to a lot of people.
So imagine that you visit a new town, and you want to go out for Sunday brunch. So traditionally, you might call your friends who are located in that area, and ask them for recommendations. Where should you go? But if they have already checked in to that restaurant, and if they liked it, that's pretty much the same type of statement. That's pretty much them saying, I've been there. I put it up on Facebook, because I had a good time. And you should check it out, too. In other words, that's, as I already mentioned, free advertising on Facebook, and you should totally take advantage of it.
All right. Let's talk about why this is so important. It's an awesome combination. Targeted, local, and social. Facebook users have 130 friends on average, which means that if someone checks in to your business, and you're offering a deal, their friends have the opportunity to hear about it through word of mouth marketing that's generated so naturally on Facebook.
Lastly. over 200 million people use Facebook on their mobile devices. And they're looking to discover what's happening here by opening their smartphones and seeing what's available nearby, are there any deals. So my offering a deal, you give these new potential customers great reasons to stop by your business.
And here's some practical next steps for you. Actually I think we skipped a slide. Yeah.
We wanted to just talk about the benefits as well. They seem pretty clear. I just went over them. But really wanted to demonstrate the value of Facebook for local marketing. It allows you to gain access to a larger network, to reach people through mobile, to spread deals, and really advertise for free.
And so let's look at a time next steps for you. Actually, Facebook is the best resource to look for those next steps. They have included a pdf about how you can go about creating a Facebook Places page. And you can go ahead and take it out. There are some detailed instructions.
But I just wanted to give you some quick tips here. First of all, you can choose from four types of deals that you can run. There is individual deals, there is friend deals, loyalty deals, and charity deals. And each of them highlight the specific element that you might tie back into your business.
For example, the friend deal is great for up to eight people, so you might really take advantage of that group buying activity. The charity deal, on the other hand, is great for you to highlight the human element of your business, and just showcase some interesting stories that might be relevant.
And when you're creating your Facebook Places page, he's just a few quick tips. First of all, start by offering a lot of value. Facebook has found that offering 10% to 50% discounts or gifts with purchase perform really well. So those are a couple of ideas or deals that you might want to try out.
The second tip is, write simple copy. Don't write lengthy descriptions, but stick to simple language that explains your deal in very straightforward ways.
The third one is, be mindful of the number of deals you're running. Right now we are flooded with coupons and deals, and maybe if you were having that same approach, your target audience might feel overwhelmed. So just keep in mind how many deals you want to run, if that's really smart, and how you should pace those.
The fourth tip we had for you is, Facebook presence overall is something that you should think about when you want to bring business to your website through that channel. Not only your Facebook Places page, or not only Facebook deals. Think about it in a more holistic approach. Because when people want to take advantage of your deal, or like your business, they're most likely going to visit your Facebook page and see if you are active. So make sure you have some comments, you have some photos, videos, you're generating a dialogue. It's something to think about.
And another tip when you're engaging on Facebook and when you're running deals, is to market those deals well. So instead of just launching the deal, think about ways in which you expand its reach. And some ways in which you could do that is updating your status, for example. If you're active on other social media channels, you might want to feature that deal there, too. Just gain as much exposure as possible.
And the last bit is, make sure you're monitoring these strategies. As we already heard from a lot of you, some things are working for your business, some are not. So you need to be constantly tracking the results, and see how your reach is evolving.
And again, this is something that HubSpot is passionate about, and we have included in our info marketing software. We have our social media reach tool, which keeps track of how many people you can reach on different channels. So right now, on slide thirty one, you're looking at our own, HubSpot's, reach on a bunch of channels. They include YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, our blog, and how many leads we're generating from those platforms. And that's ultimately what you care about. Seeing how many leads you get from those channels, and seeing how we can improve your strategy to generate even more leads, right?
Eric Vreeland: That's great.
Maggie Georgieva: All right. So what's another channel that we haven't talked about yet?
Eric Vreeland: Well, we had some interest in Yelp at the beginning of the webinar. And so now I'm excited to finally have gone to this, and we can talk about this. But so what's the main reason that Yelp is important? And it's because Yelp offers a way for people to connect with great local businesses.
And the way that these local business are judged is through reviews written by its users. And Yelp allows people to friend each other, so they can follow their friends, who they probably respect their opinions a little bit more than just random strangers, which is another way that these reviews are kind of judged.
But it makes it very easy for a business to, first of all, claim its business, and make sure that your business information is correct, and keep track of your reviews.
And why is keeping track of your reviews so important? It's because it allows you to see what your customers are saying about you. What you're doing right, what you're doing wrong. And hopefully, all your reviews are going to be positive, but most likely they're not. And most likely, you're going to have some negative reviews. And it allows you to take the time to address them, which could ultimately have a positive impact on your business. And we're going to talk about that in a little bit.
So if we look for it and we say, OK. Well, why is this important? I want to do a little exercise. And I stole this from our social media scientist here at HubSpot. He does this in one of his presentations. But why don't you guys take a look at the two restaurants that I've put up on slide 33, and tell me which one you would go and eat at.
OK. We got mostly left, one neither.
Maggie Georgieva: I understand that comment, actually.
Eric Vreeland: OK. So we got mostly left. And that's what I was going to expect. And the reason for this is because people don't like to take risks. Whether in real life, they're walking and choosing a restaurant that they want eat at, or they're online, trying to choose where they're going to go to their car serviced, or to purchase maybe some plumbing equipment. You're going to listen to other people, because they've have that problem before. And this kind of acts as a signaling effect. And this is called the wisdom of the crowds.
And I want to tell you guys that you don't need to completely be at the mercy of the crowd to determine whether or not your business is perceived as busy. Because most happy customers are willing to write a review or rate a business highly if they're just asked nicely. So making sure that you're engaging with your community is important on all platforms that provide avenues of engagement. But this particular example that I want to hit on today is Yelp.
And what are some of the benefits of Yelp? Well, Yelp, like some of the other platforms that we talked about, allows you to easily manage your reviews. It allows you to encourage word of mouth marketing through this social networking that I kind of talked about earlier. Someone leaves a positive review, Maggie leaves a positive review, I'm going to respect Maggie's positive review. That's kind of like her passing it on to me. Although she might not be just physically telling me what she thought of her dinner that she had last night, I'm still following her on Yelp, and so I'm going to see that she had a great experience.
And lastly, it's not only this idea of managing reviews, but they also have the ability to create special offers and events, which is bridging the online and offline gap that we kind of talked about before.
Maggie Georgieva: Yeah. Definitely the value of Yelp is amazing. And it's so great to see what people are saying about your brand. It's delightful to receive positive reviews, but sometimes, you're going to receive negative feedback.
Eric Vreeland: And actually, we've gotten already some requests that say, how do you manage bad reviews?
Maggie Georgieva: Perfect! Well, here is how not to do it, actually. This is a case study that I encountered last summer. And it's basically the story of this person who went and visited this baking company in Arizona. And he went there, and he was not happy with the product. He was not happy with the service. He was not treated well by the waitress. So he left as an unhappy customer.
And what he did after he left the place, was he went on Yelp and he wrote a review based on his experience. He said he was not going back there, he didn't like that baking company, he didn't like the service, he justified his entire region why he's not going to return.
And what the response that he got was just absurd. The baking company came back to him and called him a loser, a moron. They accused him of working for the competition. So it's just really inappropriate comments. And as you can imagine, the other comments that followed in that thread from customers were not happy, either. Because who is going to visit a business that has such a negative attitude, even if it's towards their customers who are not happy?
So here's an advice for you. Just stay respectful, no matter what. Other people are also going to read the responses that you're getting, so make sure that whatever you want to say is respectful, nice. Maybe engaging and funny. Be apologetic if you have to.
But our recommendation for responding to negative comments is to leave it in the public domain. Don't take it to a private platform. Because when other people visit that Yelp page, for example, they're going to see your response. And if it's a good response, they're going to think, well, maybe it wasn't the fault of the company. Maybe that customer was just too picky, or something. So they're not going to be as turned off by the initial negative review, and they will give you a chance.
So just think about it this way. Respond in public and be respectful. It's common sense, to an extent.
Eric Vreeland: And so what are some of the next steps we can take? Well, I want you guys right now to either think about some customers that you've had that have been extremely happy recently, or just think, next time you're working, if someone comes up to you and says, I had such a great experience here, I found exactly what I was looking for, your salespeople were very helpful, helping me find the product that I wanted, I just wanted to thank you for that.
Don't feel like it's inappropriate to ask someone for a review. I know there were a couple people in the chat that said, is it bad practice to ask someone to write a review for your company? Not at all. If someone doesn't feel like they have something nice to say about you, if they didn't have a horrible experience, they're probably going to still say, yeah, sure, and then just not do it. They're not going to write a review for you unless they actually truly feel that they had a good experience.
So definitely take the time and remember how important these reviews are, and try to go out of your way to encourage your happy customers to do this for you.
Maggie Georgieva: Yeah. And just think about that social media monitoring as an ongoing strategy. And again, this is something HubSpot can help you with. We are offering this social media monitoring tool as part of our integrated software. And what it does, is it goes to different platforms, and it searches for conversations that you told it to search for.
So for instance, the screenshot that you see on slide thirty seven is our personal HubSpot account. And you can see that we've searched for lead generation, keyword, social CRN. Those are relevant for our B2B business, and LinkedIn is a great channel for that. But you can do a similar type of thing by going onto Twitter, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, industry blogs. And that's just a really effective way of searching, who's talking about your brand, who is talking about things that you might want to engage in.
Eric Vreeland: OK. So next we're going to talk about Foursquare. And I'm sure a lot of you guys have heard about Foursquare. It's one of the more popular location-based services that's coming up right now. Foursquare has over 6 million users, over 383,000 checkins, and even a checkin from space. So if you're looking to start your local business on Mars, you might want to check out Foursquare.
And one of the reasons that Foursquare is important is because it promotes this idea of brand loyalty. Now, we know that it's important to acquire new customers, but it's also really important to keep your existing customers coming back. And how Foursquare does is, is by offering a variety of different specials that you can use. And I'm not going to highlight them all, but I'm going to talk about one specific example called the mayor special.
Now, the mayor in Foursquare is the visitor who comes your venue the most over a 60 day period. And you can reward this person by offering them some sort of incentive. So you say, the mayor will get a free drink every day of his reign. And not only is this going to encourage this mayor to coming back, but it's going to encourage those people who come back to your business often, they're going to be competing for that mayorship, because they wanted. So it really promotes that loyalty.
And another reason that this is important, because more and more people are moving to mobile phones. Less and less people are-- we kind of talked about this shift from yellow pages to the computer, but now we're even experiencing another shift that's kind of going from the computer to the mobile device. People are no longer Googling something before they go out. They're Googling something on their phone, when they're out.
And Foursquare is just another example of this. People are checking in, or people are looking at venues around them. And if you have a special, it's going to be highlighted in all of these screens, and you right here, on Foursquare.
Now, what are some of the benefits? Well, like I just said, the number one benefit is reaching that mobile audience. Another benefit is that you make visiting your business fun. So Foursquare is built on this kind of gaming platform. You check in, you get badges, you compete for this mayorship. And that kind of makes going places, it's adding this fun element to where you're playing this game, you're getting points.
And then lastly, like I started off the discussion of Foursquare with, you're encouraging loyalty. So if you create one of these specials that rewards people for coming back time and time again, you're going to encourage that repeat business. And not only that, but you can also actually encourage first visits. You can say, on your first visit here, you get 50% off. And that's going to gain interest with new customers, as well.
So what are the next steps? Well, I would like everyone in the webinar right now-- and you don't have to, there's no rush, we still have a little while-- but come up with a deal that you think is relevant to your business, and type it in the chat pane. So there's obviously a lot of restaurants and spas and whatnot out there, and it's very easy to think of a deal for that type of business. But I want everyone to try to think of a deal that would be relevant for their business.
Maggie Georgieva: And those of you who maybe have a Foursquare account and have tried it out, maybe you should share what you've done so far, and give ideas to our other attendees here.
Eric Vreeland: I like this one that just came in. Buy a pair of shoes, get a pair of free laces.
Maggie Georgieva: Nice! That's a really smart one. All right. So we'll review those later. But now we just wanted to talk about a really hot topic right now. Groupon. It became really popular recently, and it basically allows you to engage in group buying activities. And it's not actually Groupon, actually. This is a coupon-based service. You get it with Living Social, BuyWithMe, and some other ones out there. But these sites offer a relatively easy way for you to sift through the wide range of local deals out there and find what you want to do.
So here is a screenshot of a recent deal that I received. And as a consumer, I do enjoy getting these types of things, especially because it prompts me to be more social, and share that deal with friends. But I don't really care about any of these places that I see advertised. I mean, I trust Groupon, because I know them. But those businesses that I see are very unfamiliar.
So if I'm interested in the discount, if I'm interested in the coupon. what I'm going to do, is go ahead and research the service. So if I wanted to buy that spa service that I'm showing on slide 43, I'm going to go ahead and do my research. If the website of the company is not very reliable, most likely, I'm not going to make the purchase.
And this is just to illustrate the importance of your business presence online. You cannot simply rely on Groupon to bring you business. This is a short-term solution that's cool to experiment with, but it might get pretty expensive. Instead, you should focus on developing assets that bring you long term success. For example, your blog posts, your videos, and some other remarkable content.
As I mentioned earlier, ongoing keyword optimization is one of them. In fact, we were just wondering if you really have optimized your site for local search well. And to find that out, we wanted to talk about long tail keywords real quick. So long tail keywords is basically making a keyword really specific and niche.
So instead of, as you can see on slide 45, instead of me searching for bakery, I was searching for bakery Cambridge. Or instead of me searching for spa, I'm going to search for spa deal New York. So that's a very specific long tail keyword. And if you optimize for those right keywords, you're going to show up really in search engines.
And that's where you want to be. You want to use them in your company description when you do your Google Places listing. You want to use them across your website, in the page URL, in the metatags, when you're describing your images.
And just to see if you guys really have those in place, we wanted to have another quick exercise. HubSpot has this free tool called Website Grader, and we've run over 3 million websites on here. It will run a report for you and tell you how well you're performing in the eyes of search engines, and what you need to improve upon.
So go ahead and go to websitegrader.com, rank your website, and tell us how well you're doing.
Eric Vreeland: Yeah. So why doesn't everyone go to websitegrader.com really quick. If you haven't done it before, put in your URL, and then put your grade into the chat pane right here. 87, 95.
Maggie Georgieva: That's good!
Eric Vreeland: Really good.
Maggie Georgieva: Excellent.
Eric Vreeland: 97. 96. 100!
Maggie Georgieva: We have some winners in there.
Eric Vreeland: We have smart followers. Well, keep those scores coming in. And I guess that's the end of our presentation. Looks like we have about seven minutes for Q&A.
Maggie Georgieva: We're just going to take a few questions from you guys.
Eric Vreeland: Yeah. If you guys have any questions, please don't type them more than once. If you just type in the questions one time, I'll be able to see them, and I'll relay them to Maggie, or I'll answer them myself.
Yes, this will be available online later. We're going to send the recording out to all the registrants. For those of you that were having audio issues, hopefully we will have taken care of the audio issues in the recording so that it will come through a little bit quicker.
How does a Facebook fan page compare to Facebook Places?
Maggie Georgieva: All right. So this is a great question. I think the way you should think about it, is really that they complement each other. As I mentioned earlier, you should not develop only one asset. But when you're thinking about your Facebook presence, think about it as a whole. Think about it as something to develop a holistic approach. So if you have a Facebook Place page, which is basically pretty similar to your Facebook fan page, but it has checkins, an people are able to check in through their mobile devices, that's great.
But people will want to see that you're active on your Facebook fan page. So they will go there, and if they don't see any interaction there, if they only see your information, basic information, no fans, no life, action, that's the new term that they use, they might be discouraged to go ahead and check out your physical location and check in.
So as I mentioned, they complement each other. If you are going to try out Facebook places, I encourage you to first start with your interaction on the main Facebook fan page, and then branch out to more advanced features that Facebook offers.
Eric Vreeland: OK. So one of the questions was, we mentioned that there's about 50 sites to register on for the local directories, but you only listed six. Where can we find a list of all of those sites?
Well, that's an interesting question, and I have a good answer for you. Last week, I actually wrote a blog post called-- I forgot.
Maggie Georgieva: The Ultimate List.
Eric Vreeland: The Ultimate List, 50 Local Business Directories. And I'm going to post the URL in the chat right now. Oh, and someone already did. [? FletchMonster's ?] way ahead of me. He already has the blog post. But there you go.
Let me see, let me pull up some more questions here. Hold on. Oh, that one's a good one. How could you use local marketing channels for home-based businesses?
Maggie Georgieva: Oh, that's an interesting question.
Eric Vreeland: That is very interesting. So you don't actually need a physical location. I mean, although you would probably want to put the address of your home, if you were a home-based business. If you don't want people to visit you all the time, you probably want to put, instead of your business hours, you'd probably put, like, if interested, please call. Don't put that you're open from 9 to 5 if you don't want people showing up at your house all the time. But home-based businesses can work very similar to those with an actual, physical brick and mortar presence.
Maggie Georgieva: Right. And will still have to, for example, go to Google Places and list your business there. Include that address, the company description. If you want to highlight any photos or videos, you can do that. So again, as Eric said, it's pretty much the same approach. Just think about-- you're probably going to encounter that when you're creating your account. Questions such as, when you're open, any instructions about how to get there, and maybe more sensitive questions. And you will encounter those, and I'm sure they're going to be easy to figure out.
Eric Vreeland: Yes. And so I just wanted to remind everyone, we're also going to be, along with the slides and the audio, which hopefully we've cleaned up, we're also going to be providing a transcript of this webinar, as well. So we'll be sending that out, in similar to an e-book format, for you guys to read at your leisure, if you'd like.
Any good ideas on how to get customers to review your business? Well, like I said, there is some debate over whether you should really offer monetary incentives or whatever for reviews. And I don't think that that's probably the best solution. I think, like I said before, there are a lot of times when people will express their happiness with your service with you.
I know when, for instance, I was getting my cable installed at my new apartment, the cable guy showed up like right away. And really wanted to watch football. So we were really, really excited. We're like, oh, we called yesterday and we though we were going to have to wait like two weeks, and he came the next day. And so we hold him how ecstatic we were that he came. And he didn't ask us for a review or anything. But things like that. If someone is showing a lot of enthusiasm towards your service or towards your product, just simply ask them. I mean, I would have been more than willing to take ten, fifteen minutes out of my day to write how happy I was that I got this prompt service.
Maggie Georgieva: And a few other suggestions. I've heard this a lot. Have you tried asking people for reviews on the receipts that you give them? That's one option. That's a very physical way of doing it. But you can make it fun. Maybe you can include that smiley face or something to make it smart. And I'm sure people will be willing to go online and do it, if they were happy with your service.
And lastly, just monitor social media and the conversations happening. And if someone is already saying that you're happy, you just might give them that nudge to go on a specific site like Yelp and write one or two sentences about how happy they are.
Eric Vreeland: We'll wrap it up with one last question, and then we will have to end the demo. So before I answer the last question, I want to let everyone know whose question we didn't get to, that you have the ability to schedule a live custom demonstration of HubSpot, and in that demonstration, your inbound marketing specialist will be able to address any of the specific questions that you have. So we try to answer the questions that are going to be relevant for everyone, but we know there's a lot of questions that are specific to your niche. And because of that, our inbound marketing specialists are very qualified to answer those very specific questions, and it's completely free. No obligation whatsoever. You can sign up for a demo at www.hubspot.com/demo, and we'll have one of our inbound marketing specialists call you back as quickly as possible. They can take a look at your website, take a look at some things you can do to drive more traffic to it, get more leads, and hopefully get more sales. Because that's what it's all about at the end of the day.
And then the last question I wanted to answer, because I thought that this fits in perfectly with what we're doing right now in marketing, is how you make your business more social when you are a manufacturing company, not terribly social or Facebook to begin with? Or do we just need to come to grips with the fact that we will never be as cool as, say, a coffee shop or Nike?
Well, you know what, actually, we think that you're pretty cool. Because we just launched our manufacturing, marketing for manufacturers, website.
Maggie Georgieva: If you go to manufacturing.hubspot.com, you'll see how we built that website. And what we did, basically, is start with a blog. And I think that's a really great approach for everyone who is starting off, and is looking for ways to engage with their target audience. Start writing about things that you've encountered within your organization. Not necessarily your product, but look for ways to bring interesting correlations about industry trends, about the insights that you have collected, and that type of content is going to attract a lot of people. And then you can start having conversations in the comments section. You can start including social media buttons for your blog posts. And that way, you'll gradually develop your social media presence as well.
And actually, we have some data to back up how better companies that blog perform on social media. And that is no coincidence . Basically, when you share remarkable content that you have created, and that doesn't exist elsewhere, because you have a really unique perspective as a local businesses, then people are going to find it, and they're going to read it, and eventually turn into leads and customers.
Eric Vreeland: Yep. So that was great. Unfortunately, we're a couple of minutes over. So if anyone still has questions, we're going to have to send you to the demo. Remember, once again, that's www.hubspot.com/demo. And they will answer all of your questions there.
Thank you very much, guys. Hope you had a great time.
Maggie Georgieva: Thank you. And yes, look forward to another webinar with you. Great crowd.
Eric Vreeland: So we've prepared a couple questions that we'd like you guys to answer, right in the chat. And I really like this, that everyone can see what everyone else is saying.
So is everyone here familiar with what inbound marketing is? We're getting most mostly yeses, and a couple nos.
Maggie Georgieva: Great.
Eric Vreeland: OK. Well, really quickly, I'll just run through the idea of inbound marketing. Outbound marketing is focused on the idea of kind of in your face marketing. It's like television ads, radio ads, newspaper ads. The idea that you want to put your message in front of as many eyeballs as possible, with the hope that someone comes and buys your product or service.
And we've come to the conclusion here at HubSpot that people are getting very good at blocking out this message. We have TiVo now, we have caller ID. And people are kind of really good at ignoring this outbound marketing. And people are getting better and better at searching for products and services that they want to find, and finding the solution, the answer to that problem.
So you, as a marketer, have to put yourself in a position to make it as easy as possible for people to find you when they're finding the solution. And that's what we've referred to as inbound marketing.
Maggie Georgieva: Absolutely. Yeah. That's a great overview.
So the next interactive element that we have for you is, what tools are you currently using for online marketing? So if you could just put it in the chat pane again, so that we're all on the same page, that will be great.
Eric Vreeland: We've got some blogging, social media.
Maggie Georgieva: Nice. Great. Blogging is awesome.
Eric Vreeland: Google Places.
Maggie Georgieva: Yeah, we're definitely going to talk about that.
Eric Vreeland: AdWords, Facebook.
Maggie Georgieva: Great.
Eric Vreeland: Great. So it seems like we've got a wide variety of marketing experience here. And we'll definitely touch on a lot of those tools. Specifically the tools that are going to help you focus on global marketing.
Maggie Georgieva: Definitely. And what about some specific tools? Have you guys experimented with Google Places. I know someone already mentioned that. But what about Yahoo Local? What about Groupon? We've heard a lot about Groupon recently. Wondering what you guys think about it.
Eric Vreeland: We've got a Yelp is awesome, we've got a lot of Google Places, Yelp, Living Social. OK. Great. And then some people haven't even heard of any of these. So this is going to be a great overview, and then we've also compiled some more detailed information. So if you already kind of have the basics down, you're going to be able to dive in there, and maybe look to take more advantage of some of the advanced features.
Maggie Georgieva: Totally. That's great. I love it. All right. So why inbound marketing, Eric?
Eric Vreeland: Yep, that's the big question. And this is a local marketing webinar. So like I said before, when I was talking about inbound marketing in general, traditional marketing techniques, specifically traditional local advertising techniques have gone stale. They've become ineffective. And newspapers and magazines are losing their readers. Direct mail is getting thrown in the trash. Yellow pages are being more commonly used as booster seats than to find local businesses. And I can't tell you the last time that I've seen one of those sign-holding guys on the street and decided, hey, I don't need to go see mom, I need a new cell phone. So I'm going to turn off and go to this store right now.
I'm sure you guys have the same feeling as I do that these techniques are not working. Not only that, but these techniques are incredibly hard to measure how effective they're being. It's very hard to measure your return on investment.
And traditional media is actually going to discourage your measurement, because they don't want you to know how ineffective it is. They want you to keep spending your money on these traditional advertising techniques, because that's how they make their money. And they realize that if you start turning toward these platforms that are more easily measurable you're going to actually be like, well, you know what, that Facebook Places campaign, that actually got me 20 new customers last month. That worked out really well.
So that's kind of the reason we want to step away from the traditional local advertising and to the more relevant inbound marketing.
So if you look here, you'll see kind of what makes up inbound marketing. It's all about blogging, it's all about SEO, it's all about social media, and the idea that people are searching for your products and services every day. And the real question is, whether they're finding your website, or whether they're finding your competition's website.
So there are hundreds of millions of searches every day. People are reading blogs and tapping their social networks to find the answers to questions, solutions, and even product recommendations. And inbound marketing is about making it really easy for people to find your site and what you have to offer online.
One thing that I do want to explain right now really quickly is the idea of an inbound link. Is everyone here familiar with what an inbound link is? Yes, yes, no. Mostly yeses, but we got a couple nos. Let's go over it really quickly.
So how your website ranks in a search engine is determined by-- well, Google's algorithm, or a web search engine algorithm. And it kind of varies. No one knows the exact equation or algorithm. But what we do know is that inbound links play a very large role in this.
And what an inbound link is, is say Maggie has her own personal website, and I find one of her articles very interesting. I might link to it from my website. And that's considered an inbound link.
And something interesting about inbound links is, they're not all considered equal. An inbound link from, let's say, the New York Times or a dot edu address is going to be considered more authoritative than an inbound link from, let's say, a teenage blogger. And because of that, that website is going to be given more credibility.
Now, in the scheme of things, all inbound links are considered good. But not all inbound links are considered equal. So you should always be working to get more inbound links, and you should specifically be trying to get inbound links from authoritative sources. But we're going to talk about some ways during this webinar that you can get those inbound links, because that's going to help with your overall inbound marketing strategy, and help you show up higher in search engines.
Maggie Georgieva: And another way people have been referring to inbound links is calling them the currency of the internet. So just notice that term is very powerful.
Eric Vreeland: Yeah. So we talked about what you have to do as far as inbound marketing is concerned, and the broad overview. But what we really want to get into for you guys, and what we think you're interested in is, how does this change if you're a small, local business?
Maggie Georgieva: Great. That's fantastic. Thank you, Eric. This was a great illustration of what our vision is for this webinar. And I'm sure it got us all on the same page.
So moving on, we just wanted to share with you the four keys we have identified for local marketing success. So they include some tactics and some incentives to leverage for customer acquisition. We're also going to tell you a story about rewarding loyalty among your regular customers. And we're going to talk about ways in which you can build a community using different local marketing channels online.
Last but not least, we will touch upon the notion of bridging your offline marketing efforts with your online presence. So these keys are going to be present in every pattern that we discuss today. And let's just get to the meat of the presentation.
All right. Starting with Google Places-- you have probably already heard a lot about Google Places. One of the leading platforms for local marketing online. This is a tool you should really get familiar with, because it allows you to rank high in Google. On the first page of Google, actually.
So if you go to places.google.com, you will be able to create your Google Places listing. So let's see what that listing might look like for you. Here's a sample one. Here is a screenshot that I took recently. And I was looking for a moving company near Cambridge, Massachusetts, and those are the results that showed up. As you can see, I only typed in "moving company." I did not type in Cambridge. The words that are in bold are the ones I searched for. But because search engines are getting so smart, they can tell that I'm searching from Cambridge. They can tell where my location is, and what's going to be relevant for me. So they're not going to just return results in Colorado or Las Vegas. They're going to tell me what's nearby, so I can really take advantage of that.
And this is a page where you should start ranking when you list your site with Google Places. So let's see how we actually do that. What's the importance. The importance is getting your site to the first page of the search engine results. And your result is going to show among seven other listings. If you go back to slide 13, you're going to see how there is seven listings that showed up. When you submit your site, one of those results is going to be you, basically. And that's where you want to be. So first page of Google Guides, that's exactly where you want to be.
What other benefits does Google Places offer? So you will gain more visibility by being listed on the first page of Google, that's for sure. But because you're going to get that visibility, in turn, you will get more traffic to your website.
So that's all great. But here's something else that you might have not necessarily thought about earlier. You will also be able to level the playing field and beat the competition for companies that might have been around online for a really long time. So again, if you check out that screenshot on slide thirteen, you will see that the local results appeared before, 123movers.com, which is a pretty primary site for moving resources. And you can be that. You can be those people.
So this is all free, and you should definitely take advantage of this cost-effective way to bring about more customers to your business.
Great. So moving on to, next steps for your business. So as we mentioned earlier, we really want to make this practical, this session is all for you, and we want to make sure that you have some tangible takeaways.
So after this presentation, I want you all to go to places.google.com and create your listing. It's a pretty straightforward process. But here's some things that you need to consider while you're doing this. Make sure that you have optimized for keywords, images, and video in your listings. Collect as many customer reviews as possible. And this is something that we'll talk about later, as well. But we cannot really emphasize that enough. And also, make sure that those customer reviews are positive. It's great to see good feedback from people, and good comments.
If you have already listed your site with Google Places-- I know a few of you said that earlier today-- there is something else that you might take advantage of. And that's the so-called Google Tags platform, which is associated with Google Places. So as part of Google Places, businesses have access to this new ad platform which allows you to highlight information that you want your customers to see. It highlights your company with a special symbol, and you can see that on slide 17, we've highlighted it. It costs $25 a month. And for example, you can tag and highlight a coupon for new customers. You can tag a video about your store, or even a link to your menu.
So again, if you go to slide number 13, you can see how it looks like with other listings, and you can see what the advantage of this is. You basically stand out from the other ones. This symbol, this tag, allows you to stand out from the crowd, and really highlight what you have to offer.
And actually, Small Business Shift reported that tags increase the percentage of people taking action on Google Maps by 84%. That's really an interesting trend that you might want to take advantage of.
So we recommend you to try out tags soon, and take advantage of them before they become too common. Because if a lot of people start using them, right, Eric?
Eric Vreeland: Yeah, so we're getting some mixed feedback in the chat room right now. Some people are saying, tags are a waste of money. Some people are saying that tags are great, tags are cheap. And so we're not really advocating one way or another. There's not a set solution. Every business is different.
If every business in your category is using tags, then you're really not going to stand out. You're going to get lost in the crowd. But let's say that you're in a very specific niche, and you're using a tag, it's definitely a way that you can stand out amongst the crowd and get found. And like some people said, it's not that expensive. So you can try it out for a couple months.
But one of the important things is here, here at HubSpot we are very into data. And so we would recommend, see how many customers or how many leads you're getting from your listing before you add the tag, and then see how many leads and customers you're getting after you add the tag, and compare the two.
And we just got a remark in here that said, we tried it for four months, and we didn't get any results. Well, then that's, you know, at least you tried it out, you found out it didn't work, and so now you can move on to some of the other local marketing platforms out there.
Maggie Georgieva: In general, we feel like you should be investing in more long term strategies. And that's something that we wanted to emphasize HubSpot can help you with. We have, as you might know, an inbound marketing software that's an integrated tool, and includes a bunch of different elements that help you get found online. And one of the two that we have is called Keyword Grader. And that lets you enter certain keywords, and see what the monthly searches are for these keywords, evaluate the difficulty to rank for them, and it can do much more. So this is one way in which you can create a strategy around your keyword optimization. And then after you have identified the right keywords, the keywords that your target audience is looking for and not what you think they're looking for, so you need to double-check that information.
So once you've identified those, you can then go to Google Places and really optimize your description that we talked about. You can highlight-- if you decide to experiment with the tags-- you can highlight the tags that you think are going to be important. So really take advantage of this long term strategy of optimization.
Eric Vreeland: And so we're actually getting some questions about Keyword Grader right now, which is great. And one of the questions is, is Keyword Grader free? No, it's actually part of the HubSpot software package, but we do offer a free 30 day trial. So if anyone wanted to try out Keyword Grader, then they could just sign up for the free 30 day trial at www.hubspot.com/free-trial, and then you'd have access to Keyword Grader for 30 days, so.
Maggie Georgieva: And throughout this presentation, we're just going to illustrate a few tools that we have. So when you sign up for that free trial, you can use them all, and see if they really help you, and how that works.
So this is what I wanted to tell you about Google Places. And now we're going to move on to illustrate the importance of another platform that's really hot as well.
Eric Vreeland: Yeah. So you guys might have heard of a little company called Yahoo. And they have probably one of the more popular local business directories. And if you go to listings.local.yahoo.com, you can add your basic business listing for free. So everyone that's talking about, no, this costs money. well, this is something that you can try for free. You should definitely take advantage of. Starting your business listing is very easy. But it's basically as straightforward as filling out your business information.
There's a couple options that I wanted to mention that I think are very important that you might not think of. So one of the options is to have the reviews of your business sent to you automatically. And this is very important. We're going to talk about reviews a lot. Because similarly to inbound links, reviews-- as far as these local directories-- are kind of the currency of local business directories. And so if you have the reviews sent directly to you, you'll not only be able to stay on top of the positive reviews, but you'll also be able to stay on top of the negative reviews. And staying on top of those things is very important.
You can fill out your hours of operation, as well as your payment methods that you accept. And this is very good for maintaining happy customers. No one likes showing up at a business venue and finding out that it's closed, that the hours they thought it was open were incorrect, or to find out that the business only accepts cash when all they have is a Visa.
So those are some of the basic listing options that I would definitely check out. And similarly to tags, there's also the enhanced listing that I might try out if I was feeling comfortable. I wanted to maybe do a test and see how much more leads and customers I got from doing the enhanced listing.
And some of the advantages of doing the enhanced listing are that you get to add your company logo, tagline, 10 photos, and a more detailed business description. And all of these aspects are supposed to be more engaging for people that come to your listing, and potentially get people to click on your listing more. So that might also be something that I would consider.
Now why is this all important? Well, this is important because a lot of people, especially when they're searching for local solutions, are going to these local online business directories.
And here I've pulled up an example of a Yahoo Local search for a locksmith in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And over here, we'll see the map on the right, and the sponsored listings at the top and the right, and then the organic results in the middle. And as well as being able to manage your reviews, which is why I have the number of reviews here highlighted with these arrows, you'll also have the option of getting a sponsored listing.
Now, sponsored listings are very interesting, in that they show up on the search results page as highlighted listings when your keywords match the search initiated within 25 to 100 miles of your location. And you're only charged when someone clicks on your listing's link.
Now you might be saying to yourself, well, Eric. On a previous HubSpot webinar, you guys said that over 75% of the clicks are on the organic ad. Why would I want to pay for a sponsored listing?
Well, to address the first question, a lot of people do click on the organic results first. But if they're unable to find that they're looking for within a few clicks, they often resort to clicking on the paid link.
And another good thing about these sponsored listings is that you only pay when someone actually clicks on your listing. So if you do a good job aligning your title and your description, and you don't misrepresent your company or what you have to offer, the majority of these clicks on your sponsored listing are going to be very high quality leads.
And then again, coming back to the reviews. I want to point out the importance of getting reviews for your business. In the example search here for locksmith, you'll see that the first one has 804 reviews, whereas the second one only has two.
Now, even though the second listing has a five star rating, and the first one has a four star rating, I'm still very inclined to choose the first one, after I read a number of glowing reviews. And that's simply because the fact that the company was able to attract so many reviews definitely speaks to the quality of their business.
So we're going to talk a little bit more about this later. But learning how to encourage your customers to leave reviews for you is definitely something that's very important for a local business. And we'll talk about that in more detail later.
Maggie Georgieva: So what are the benefits of using Yahoo Local?
Eric Vreeland: So there's a few benefits. The first, as I pointed out, that map, is that the map emphasizes location. So people who may be limited by not being able to drive far, or just want to find a solution that's was right around the corner, it really makes it easy for them to see where business is located in relation to them. It allows you to monitor these reviews. And like I said, you can get those reviews sent directly to you, so you don't have to worry about checking in all the time. Once again, it's free. And then there's also this potential to upgrade to the enhanced listing and the sponsored listings once you feel comfortable with just the maybe a basic listing.
Maggie Georgieva: Yeah. That makes sense.
Eric Vreeland: Now, as far as next steps. I talked a lot about Yahoo Local right now. And here we just had a comment, Yahoo was hot in the beginning of the internet, not so much now. OK, let's talk about Google Places and whatever.
But you know what? That fits in perfectly with what I wanted to talk about right now. Is that you might think, oh, I have to list in Yahoo Global, oh, I have to list in Google Places. But it's really important that you actually list in all of the local directories out there. Not just the big ones. It's very important that you should link your site to as many of the local directories out there as possible.
And the reason for this, when I talk to people about this is, I like to use the analogy that submitting your website to a local directory, is like-- let's think of your website as a marble, and a local directory is a stack of marbles. Now, someone coming and searching for a solution gets to pick out a couple marbles from that stack and then pick their favorite one.
Now, we know that not all people are picking out of the same stack. There's actually over 50, 50 to 100, different local directories out there. And some of them are very specialized in specific verticals, and some of them are broader. So you really want to make sure that you're putting yourself in a position to get found, no matter where people are searching for your products and services.
And here I've just mentioned a few. We see the Business Journal, Citysearch, Local.com, Yellowpages. com. And we'll talk about ways in a little bit. So making sure that your business is submitted to all the search engines is important. But then making sure that your result stands out as well is also important.
So I wanted to highlight a company that probably not many you have heard of called Yeck, and that is found at www.yeck.com, that addresses both of these issues, making your marble stand out, and getting your marble into all the stacks out there.
The first is Yeck's Tags, and that's very similar to Google Tags, so I don't need to talk about it too much. But pretty much how Google Tags allows you to create this tag on Google, Yeck's Tags allows you to create these tags on superpages.com, mapquest.com, Citysearch, et cetera. And once again, you know, it's not for everyone, but it's a way to maybe highlight that search result, and possibly get found.
And then the second thing I wanted to talk about is a product they offer that's completely free called Yeck's Rep. And what Yeck's Rep is, is they've established partnerships with all these local search directories out there, and they allow you to manage your listings in one place. So you can go and claim your venues on Yeck, and connect your account with all these other directories, and then you have one central hub where you can go and update your local listing, and it's going to go out and it's going to update that for you in all of the listings that they're partnered with.
Maggie Georgieva: Right. And that's basically to accumulate more inbound links, right?
Eric Vreeland: So that product, Yeck's Rep, is actually free. So I would definitely take advantage of that. And Yeck's Tags has a seven day trial where you can try out the tags for free, too. So if you wanted to go and test that out, that would be cool.
Now, how can HubSpot help you with this? Well, we've been talking a lot how importance of links, and figuring out who is linking to you, and also the quality of links. And HubSpot has another tool called Link Grader that will show you not only how many inbound links you have, but it's going to grade these links for you. So that let's say you get a link of a particularly high grade. You might want to reach out to that person and ask them to write a review for your business, or something like that. So that's just another tool in HubSpot software that can help you with that local marketing.
Maggie Georgieva: It's definitely powerful to know where your links are coming from, and how you can further engage with those people. Thank you, Eric.
Moving on to another really hot tool, is Facebook Places. So Facebook is clearly one of the most popular platforms for local marketing. And you might be wondering, why is that? So we think it's that popular because it is a channel that's not only local, but is also social and targeted. And that's a really winning, winning combination.
So while there are other channels out there, they don't include as much data about your target audience as you would find on Facebook. For example, on Facebook, you can see people's interests, you can see their preferences, their demographics, their location. And this data is really valuable, and it's much harder to find elsewhere. So you should definitely take advantage of its availability here.
So you might have have also heard about the recent launch of Facebook Places. And we just wanted to showcase this tool and show you how it can benefit your business.
So here is how a simple Facebook Places page would look like. And this is on slide twenty seven. So it's pretty much like your regular Facebook page, but it includes check in below that profile image. And this is actually a screenshot from a place that a lot of my friends are visiting, so it's always showing up with my news feed. And that's something you should be aware of. When you are using a Facebook Places page, your'e pretty much gaining free advertising on Facebook, because they're exposing your brand to a lot of people.
So imagine that you visit a new town, and you want to go out for Sunday brunch. So traditionally, you might call your friends who are located in that area, and ask them for recommendations. Where should you go? But if they have already checked in to that restaurant, and if they liked it, that's pretty much the same type of statement. That's pretty much them saying, I've been there. I put it up on Facebook, because I had a good time. And you should check it out, too. In other words, that's, as I already mentioned, free advertising on Facebook, and you should totally take advantage of it.
All right. Let's talk about why this is so important. It's an awesome combination. Targeted, local, and social. Facebook users have 130 friends on average, which means that if someone checks in to your business, and you're offering a deal, their friends have the opportunity to hear about it through word of mouth marketing that's generated so naturally on Facebook.
Lastly. over 200 million people use Facebook on their mobile devices. And they're looking to discover what's happening here by opening their smartphones and seeing what's available nearby, are there any deals. So my offering a deal, you give these new potential customers great reasons to stop by your business.
And here's some practical next steps for you. Actually I think we skipped a slide. Yeah.
We wanted to just talk about the benefits as well. They seem pretty clear. I just went over them. But really wanted to demonstrate the value of Facebook for local marketing. It allows you to gain access to a larger network, to reach people through mobile, to spread deals, and really advertise for free.
And so let's look at a time next steps for you. Actually, Facebook is the best resource to look for those next steps. They have included a pdf about how you can go about creating a Facebook Places page. And you can go ahead and take it out. There are some detailed instructions.
But I just wanted to give you some quick tips here. First of all, you can choose from four types of deals that you can run. There is individual deals, there is friend deals, loyalty deals, and charity deals. And each of them highlight the specific element that you might tie back into your business.
For example, the friend deal is great for up to eight people, so you might really take advantage of that group buying activity. The charity deal, on the other hand, is great for you to highlight the human element of your business, and just showcase some interesting stories that might be relevant.
And when you're creating your Facebook Places page, he's just a few quick tips. First of all, start by offering a lot of value. Facebook has found that offering 10% to 50% discounts or gifts with purchase perform really well. So those are a couple of ideas or deals that you might want to try out.
The second tip is, write simple copy. Don't write lengthy descriptions, but stick to simple language that explains your deal in very straightforward ways.
The third one is, be mindful of the number of deals you're running. Right now we are flooded with coupons and deals, and maybe if you were having that same approach, your target audience might feel overwhelmed. So just keep in mind how many deals you want to run, if that's really smart, and how you should pace those.
The fourth tip we had for you is, Facebook presence overall is something that you should think about when you want to bring business to your website through that channel. Not only your Facebook Places page, or not only Facebook deals. Think about it in a more holistic approach. Because when people want to take advantage of your deal, or like your business, they're most likely going to visit your Facebook page and see if you are active. So make sure you have some comments, you have some photos, videos, you're generating a dialogue. It's something to think about.
And another tip when you're engaging on Facebook and when you're running deals, is to market those deals well. So instead of just launching the deal, think about ways in which you expand its reach. And some ways in which you could do that is updating your status, for example. If you're active on other social media channels, you might want to feature that deal there, too. Just gain as much exposure as possible.
And the last bit is, make sure you're monitoring these strategies. As we already heard from a lot of you, some things are working for your business, some are not. So you need to be constantly tracking the results, and see how your reach is evolving.
And again, this is something that HubSpot is passionate about, and we have included in our info marketing software. We have our social media reach tool, which keeps track of how many people you can reach on different channels. So right now, on slide thirty one, you're looking at our own, HubSpot's, reach on a bunch of channels. They include YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, our blog, and how many leads we're generating from those platforms. And that's ultimately what you care about. Seeing how many leads you get from those channels, and seeing how we can improve your strategy to generate even more leads, right?
Eric Vreeland: That's great.
Maggie Georgieva: All right. So what's another channel that we haven't talked about yet?
Eric Vreeland: Well, we had some interest in Yelp at the beginning of the webinar. And so now I'm excited to finally have gone to this, and we can talk about this. But so what's the main reason that Yelp is important? And it's because Yelp offers a way for people to connect with great local businesses.
And the way that these local business are judged is through reviews written by its users. And Yelp allows people to friend each other, so they can follow their friends, who they probably respect their opinions a little bit more than just random strangers, which is another way that these reviews are kind of judged.
But it makes it very easy for a business to, first of all, claim its business, and make sure that your business information is correct, and keep track of your reviews.
And why is keeping track of your reviews so important? It's because it allows you to see what your customers are saying about you. What you're doing right, what you're doing wrong. And hopefully, all your reviews are going to be positive, but most likely they're not. And most likely, you're going to have some negative reviews. And it allows you to take the time to address them, which could ultimately have a positive impact on your business. And we're going to talk about that in a little bit.
So if we look for it and we say, OK. Well, why is this important? I want to do a little exercise. And I stole this from our social media scientist here at HubSpot. He does this in one of his presentations. But why don't you guys take a look at the two restaurants that I've put up on slide 33, and tell me which one you would go and eat at.
OK. We got mostly left, one neither.
Maggie Georgieva: I understand that comment, actually.
Eric Vreeland: OK. So we got mostly left. And that's what I was going to expect. And the reason for this is because people don't like to take risks. Whether in real life, they're walking and choosing a restaurant that they want eat at, or they're online, trying to choose where they're going to go to their car serviced, or to purchase maybe some plumbing equipment. You're going to listen to other people, because they've have that problem before. And this kind of acts as a signaling effect. And this is called the wisdom of the crowds.
And I want to tell you guys that you don't need to completely be at the mercy of the crowd to determine whether or not your business is perceived as busy. Because most happy customers are willing to write a review or rate a business highly if they're just asked nicely. So making sure that you're engaging with your community is important on all platforms that provide avenues of engagement. But this particular example that I want to hit on today is Yelp.
And what are some of the benefits of Yelp? Well, Yelp, like some of the other platforms that we talked about, allows you to easily manage your reviews. It allows you to encourage word of mouth marketing through this social networking that I kind of talked about earlier. Someone leaves a positive review, Maggie leaves a positive review, I'm going to respect Maggie's positive review. That's kind of like her passing it on to me. Although she might not be just physically telling me what she thought of her dinner that she had last night, I'm still following her on Yelp, and so I'm going to see that she had a great experience.
And lastly, it's not only this idea of managing reviews, but they also have the ability to create special offers and events, which is bridging the online and offline gap that we kind of talked about before.
Maggie Georgieva: Yeah. Definitely the value of Yelp is amazing. And it's so great to see what people are saying about your brand. It's delightful to receive positive reviews, but sometimes, you're going to receive negative feedback.
Eric Vreeland: And actually, we've gotten already some requests that say, how do you manage bad reviews?
Maggie Georgieva: Perfect! Well, here is how not to do it, actually. This is a case study that I encountered last summer. And it's basically the story of this person who went and visited this baking company in Arizona. And he went there, and he was not happy with the product. He was not happy with the service. He was not treated well by the waitress. So he left as an unhappy customer.
And what he did after he left the place, was he went on Yelp and he wrote a review based on his experience. He said he was not going back there, he didn't like that baking company, he didn't like the service, he justified his entire region why he's not going to return.
And what the response that he got was just absurd. The baking company came back to him and called him a loser, a moron. They accused him of working for the competition. So it's just really inappropriate comments. And as you can imagine, the other comments that followed in that thread from customers were not happy, either. Because who is going to visit a business that has such a negative attitude, even if it's towards their customers who are not happy?
So here's an advice for you. Just stay respectful, no matter what. Other people are also going to read the responses that you're getting, so make sure that whatever you want to say is respectful, nice. Maybe engaging and funny. Be apologetic if you have to.
But our recommendation for responding to negative comments is to leave it in the public domain. Don't take it to a private platform. Because when other people visit that Yelp page, for example, they're going to see your response. And if it's a good response, they're going to think, well, maybe it wasn't the fault of the company. Maybe that customer was just too picky, or something. So they're not going to be as turned off by the initial negative review, and they will give you a chance.
So just think about it this way. Respond in public and be respectful. It's common sense, to an extent.
Eric Vreeland: And so what are some of the next steps we can take? Well, I want you guys right now to either think about some customers that you've had that have been extremely happy recently, or just think, next time you're working, if someone comes up to you and says, I had such a great experience here, I found exactly what I was looking for, your salespeople were very helpful, helping me find the product that I wanted, I just wanted to thank you for that.
Don't feel like it's inappropriate to ask someone for a review. I know there were a couple people in the chat that said, is it bad practice to ask someone to write a review for your company? Not at all. If someone doesn't feel like they have something nice to say about you, if they didn't have a horrible experience, they're probably going to still say, yeah, sure, and then just not do it. They're not going to write a review for you unless they actually truly feel that they had a good experience.
So definitely take the time and remember how important these reviews are, and try to go out of your way to encourage your happy customers to do this for you.
Maggie Georgieva: Yeah. And just think about that social media monitoring as an ongoing strategy. And again, this is something HubSpot can help you with. We are offering this social media monitoring tool as part of our integrated software. And what it does, is it goes to different platforms, and it searches for conversations that you told it to search for.
So for instance, the screenshot that you see on slide thirty seven is our personal HubSpot account. And you can see that we've searched for lead generation, keyword, social CRN. Those are relevant for our B2B business, and LinkedIn is a great channel for that. But you can do a similar type of thing by going onto Twitter, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, industry blogs. And that's just a really effective way of searching, who's talking about your brand, who is talking about things that you might want to engage in.
Eric Vreeland: OK. So next we're going to talk about Foursquare. And I'm sure a lot of you guys have heard about Foursquare. It's one of the more popular location-based services that's coming up right now. Foursquare has over 6 million users, over 383,000 checkins, and even a checkin from space. So if you're looking to start your local business on Mars, you might want to check out Foursquare.
And one of the reasons that Foursquare is important is because it promotes this idea of brand loyalty. Now, we know that it's important to acquire new customers, but it's also really important to keep your existing customers coming back. And how Foursquare does is, is by offering a variety of different specials that you can use. And I'm not going to highlight them all, but I'm going to talk about one specific example called the mayor special.
Now, the mayor in Foursquare is the visitor who comes your venue the most over a 60 day period. And you can reward this person by offering them some sort of incentive. So you say, the mayor will get a free drink every day of his reign. And not only is this going to encourage this mayor to coming back, but it's going to encourage those people who come back to your business often, they're going to be competing for that mayorship, because they wanted. So it really promotes that loyalty.
And another reason that this is important, because more and more people are moving to mobile phones. Less and less people are-- we kind of talked about this shift from yellow pages to the computer, but now we're even experiencing another shift that's kind of going from the computer to the mobile device. People are no longer Googling something before they go out. They're Googling something on their phone, when they're out.
And Foursquare is just another example of this. People are checking in, or people are looking at venues around them. And if you have a special, it's going to be highlighted in all of these screens, and you right here, on Foursquare.
Now, what are some of the benefits? Well, like I just said, the number one benefit is reaching that mobile audience. Another benefit is that you make visiting your business fun. So Foursquare is built on this kind of gaming platform. You check in, you get badges, you compete for this mayorship. And that kind of makes going places, it's adding this fun element to where you're playing this game, you're getting points.
And then lastly, like I started off the discussion of Foursquare with, you're encouraging loyalty. So if you create one of these specials that rewards people for coming back time and time again, you're going to encourage that repeat business. And not only that, but you can also actually encourage first visits. You can say, on your first visit here, you get 50% off. And that's going to gain interest with new customers, as well.
So what are the next steps? Well, I would like everyone in the webinar right now-- and you don't have to, there's no rush, we still have a little while-- but come up with a deal that you think is relevant to your business, and type it in the chat pane. So there's obviously a lot of restaurants and spas and whatnot out there, and it's very easy to think of a deal for that type of business. But I want everyone to try to think of a deal that would be relevant for their business.
Maggie Georgieva: And those of you who maybe have a Foursquare account and have tried it out, maybe you should share what you've done so far, and give ideas to our other attendees here.
Eric Vreeland: I like this one that just came in. Buy a pair of shoes, get a pair of free laces.
Maggie Georgieva: Nice! That's a really smart one. All right. So we'll review those later. But now we just wanted to talk about a really hot topic right now. Groupon. It became really popular recently, and it basically allows you to engage in group buying activities. And it's not actually Groupon, actually. This is a coupon-based service. You get it with Living Social, BuyWithMe, and some other ones out there. But these sites offer a relatively easy way for you to sift through the wide range of local deals out there and find what you want to do.
So here is a screenshot of a recent deal that I received. And as a consumer, I do enjoy getting these types of things, especially because it prompts me to be more social, and share that deal with friends. But I don't really care about any of these places that I see advertised. I mean, I trust Groupon, because I know them. But those businesses that I see are very unfamiliar.
So if I'm interested in the discount, if I'm interested in the coupon. what I'm going to do, is go ahead and research the service. So if I wanted to buy that spa service that I'm showing on slide 43, I'm going to go ahead and do my research. If the website of the company is not very reliable, most likely, I'm not going to make the purchase.
And this is just to illustrate the importance of your business presence online. You cannot simply rely on Groupon to bring you business. This is a short-term solution that's cool to experiment with, but it might get pretty expensive. Instead, you should focus on developing assets that bring you long term success. For example, your blog posts, your videos, and some other remarkable content.
As I mentioned earlier, ongoing keyword optimization is one of them. In fact, we were just wondering if you really have optimized your site for local search well. And to find that out, we wanted to talk about long tail keywords real quick. So long tail keywords is basically making a keyword really specific and niche.
So instead of, as you can see on slide 45, instead of me searching for bakery, I was searching for bakery Cambridge. Or instead of me searching for spa, I'm going to search for spa deal New York. So that's a very specific long tail keyword. And if you optimize for those right keywords, you're going to show up really in search engines.
And that's where you want to be. You want to use them in your company description when you do your Google Places listing. You want to use them across your website, in the page URL, in the metatags, when you're describing your images.
And just to see if you guys really have those in place, we wanted to have another quick exercise. HubSpot has this free tool called Website Grader, and we've run over 3 million websites on here. It will run a report for you and tell you how well you're performing in the eyes of search engines, and what you need to improve upon.
So go ahead and go to websitegrader.com, rank your website, and tell us how well you're doing.
Eric Vreeland: Yeah. So why doesn't everyone go to websitegrader.com really quick. If you haven't done it before, put in your URL, and then put your grade into the chat pane right here. 87, 95.
Maggie Georgieva: That's good!
Eric Vreeland: Really good.
Maggie Georgieva: Excellent.
Eric Vreeland: 97. 96. 100!
Maggie Georgieva: We have some winners in there.
Eric Vreeland: We have smart followers. Well, keep those scores coming in. And I guess that's the end of our presentation. Looks like we have about seven minutes for Q&A.
Maggie Georgieva: We're just going to take a few questions from you guys.
Eric Vreeland: Yeah. If you guys have any questions, please don't type them more than once. If you just type in the questions one time, I'll be able to see them, and I'll relay them to Maggie, or I'll answer them myself.
Yes, this will be available online later. We're going to send the recording out to all the registrants. For those of you that were having audio issues, hopefully we will have taken care of the audio issues in the recording so that it will come through a little bit quicker.
How does a Facebook fan page compare to Facebook Places?
Maggie Georgieva: All right. So this is a great question. I think the way you should think about it, is really that they complement each other. As I mentioned earlier, you should not develop only one asset. But when you're thinking about your Facebook presence, think about it as a whole. Think about it as something to develop a holistic approach. So if you have a Facebook Place page, which is basically pretty similar to your Facebook fan page, but it has checkins, an people are able to check in through their mobile devices, that's great.
But people will want to see that you're active on your Facebook fan page. So they will go there, and if they don't see any interaction there, if they only see your information, basic information, no fans, no life, action, that's the new term that they use, they might be discouraged to go ahead and check out your physical location and check in.
So as I mentioned, they complement each other. If you are going to try out Facebook places, I encourage you to first start with your interaction on the main Facebook fan page, and then branch out to more advanced features that Facebook offers.
Eric Vreeland: OK. So one of the questions was, we mentioned that there's about 50 sites to register on for the local directories, but you only listed six. Where can we find a list of all of those sites?
Well, that's an interesting question, and I have a good answer for you. Last week, I actually wrote a blog post called-- I forgot.
Maggie Georgieva: The Ultimate List.
Eric Vreeland: The Ultimate List, 50 Local Business Directories. And I'm going to post the URL in the chat right now. Oh, and someone already did. [? FletchMonster's ?] way ahead of me. He already has the blog post. But there you go.
Let me see, let me pull up some more questions here. Hold on. Oh, that one's a good one. How could you use local marketing channels for home-based businesses?
Maggie Georgieva: Oh, that's an interesting question.
Eric Vreeland: That is very interesting. So you don't actually need a physical location. I mean, although you would probably want to put the address of your home, if you were a home-based business. If you don't want people to visit you all the time, you probably want to put, instead of your business hours, you'd probably put, like, if interested, please call. Don't put that you're open from 9 to 5 if you don't want people showing up at your house all the time. But home-based businesses can work very similar to those with an actual, physical brick and mortar presence.
Maggie Georgieva: Right. And will still have to, for example, go to Google Places and list your business there. Include that address, the company description. If you want to highlight any photos or videos, you can do that. So again, as Eric said, it's pretty much the same approach. Just think about-- you're probably going to encounter that when you're creating your account. Questions such as, when you're open, any instructions about how to get there, and maybe more sensitive questions. And you will encounter those, and I'm sure they're going to be easy to figure out.
Eric Vreeland: Yes. And so I just wanted to remind everyone, we're also going to be, along with the slides and the audio, which hopefully we've cleaned up, we're also going to be providing a transcript of this webinar, as well. So we'll be sending that out, in similar to an e-book format, for you guys to read at your leisure, if you'd like.
Any good ideas on how to get customers to review your business? Well, like I said, there is some debate over whether you should really offer monetary incentives or whatever for reviews. And I don't think that that's probably the best solution. I think, like I said before, there are a lot of times when people will express their happiness with your service with you.
I know when, for instance, I was getting my cable installed at my new apartment, the cable guy showed up like right away. And really wanted to watch football. So we were really, really excited. We're like, oh, we called yesterday and we though we were going to have to wait like two weeks, and he came the next day. And so we hold him how ecstatic we were that he came. And he didn't ask us for a review or anything. But things like that. If someone is showing a lot of enthusiasm towards your service or towards your product, just simply ask them. I mean, I would have been more than willing to take ten, fifteen minutes out of my day to write how happy I was that I got this prompt service.
Maggie Georgieva: And a few other suggestions. I've heard this a lot. Have you tried asking people for reviews on the receipts that you give them? That's one option. That's a very physical way of doing it. But you can make it fun. Maybe you can include that smiley face or something to make it smart. And I'm sure people will be willing to go online and do it, if they were happy with your service.
And lastly, just monitor social media and the conversations happening. And if someone is already saying that you're happy, you just might give them that nudge to go on a specific site like Yelp and write one or two sentences about how happy they are.
Eric Vreeland: We'll wrap it up with one last question, and then we will have to end the demo. So before I answer the last question, I want to let everyone know whose question we didn't get to, that you have the ability to schedule a live custom demonstration of HubSpot, and in that demonstration, your inbound marketing specialist will be able to address any of the specific questions that you have. So we try to answer the questions that are going to be relevant for everyone, but we know there's a lot of questions that are specific to your niche. And because of that, our inbound marketing specialists are very qualified to answer those very specific questions, and it's completely free. No obligation whatsoever. You can sign up for a demo at www.hubspot.com/demo, and we'll have one of our inbound marketing specialists call you back as quickly as possible. They can take a look at your website, take a look at some things you can do to drive more traffic to it, get more leads, and hopefully get more sales. Because that's what it's all about at the end of the day.
And then the last question I wanted to answer, because I thought that this fits in perfectly with what we're doing right now in marketing, is how you make your business more social when you are a manufacturing company, not terribly social or Facebook to begin with? Or do we just need to come to grips with the fact that we will never be as cool as, say, a coffee shop or Nike?
Well, you know what, actually, we think that you're pretty cool. Because we just launched our manufacturing, marketing for manufacturers, website.
Maggie Georgieva: If you go to manufacturing.hubspot.com, you'll see how we built that website. And what we did, basically, is start with a blog. And I think that's a really great approach for everyone who is starting off, and is looking for ways to engage with their target audience. Start writing about things that you've encountered within your organization. Not necessarily your product, but look for ways to bring interesting correlations about industry trends, about the insights that you have collected, and that type of content is going to attract a lot of people. And then you can start having conversations in the comments section. You can start including social media buttons for your blog posts. And that way, you'll gradually develop your social media presence as well.
And actually, we have some data to back up how better companies that blog perform on social media. And that is no coincidence . Basically, when you share remarkable content that you have created, and that doesn't exist elsewhere, because you have a really unique perspective as a local businesses, then people are going to find it, and they're going to read it, and eventually turn into leads and customers.
Eric Vreeland: Yep. So that was great. Unfortunately, we're a couple of minutes over. So if anyone still has questions, we're going to have to send you to the demo. Remember, once again, that's www.hubspot.com/demo. And they will answer all of your questions there.
Thank you very much, guys. Hope you had a great time.
Maggie Georgieva: Thank you. And yes, look forward to another webinar with you. Great crowd.
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