How To Maximize Google’s Free Advertising

Google My Business Listing

 

Typically, when you think of advertising and marketing, you think of spending money. But before you carefully plan out a marketing budget, make sure you are fully utilizing the free marketing options available to you! 

One of the most effective free marketing options available is the Google My Business Listing. When you search for a business on Google, results will display address, map, phone number, website, photos, reviews, business hours, and more. With 5 billion searches on Google for restaurants, 3 billion searches for hotels, 1 billion searches for clothing stores, 600 million searches for hair and beauty salons, and 5 million searches for coffee shops, as a business owner, you need to have control over this information. An unflattering photo of your location coupled with incorrect business hours is not a good combination for a potential customer!

You can strengthen your local search result rankings by ensuring that your business profile is complete and updated. High ranking local searches reassure customers that you are a legitimate and relevant business. By posting photos, up-to-date offers, temporary business hours, and other appropriate information to your profile, you instantly boost the visibility of your business to your customers. 

Don’t overlook the simplest details. Take your city and state as an example. If you’re a tree service in Jackson, Tennessee, you don’t want to waste your day receiving phone calls from customers in Jackson, Mississippi. 

And consider your business hours. Are you closed on Mondays? Be sure to include that information! Few things are more frustrating to a customer than showing up at your location and discovering it’s closed. Since most of them googled you first, be sure to include an accurate listing of your hours of operation.

The Google My Business listing is 100% free – so if you haven’t claimed your business listing, drop everything and claim yours by visiting https://business.google.com/ or by finding your location on Google Maps. You won’t regret taking the time to set this up properly. 


Are you ready to conquer even more aspects of digital marketing? Click below to schedule a meeting with one of our experts at Adelsberger Marketing.

 

Client Spotlight: West Tennessee State Fair

West Tennessee State Fair

The West Tennessee State Fair just concluded and we had the pleasure of helping them promote the Fair! We attacked promotions on a few fronts: video, photography, and social media.

Since we were not able to film at the last Fair, we recorded the first night of the Fair and released two videos on the following afternoon. Here they are:

 

We headed back on other nights to get additional photos and videos to use in the future. This will allow us to augment the videos from this year to use prior to the next Fair. Here are a few of those photos:

 

 

We also leveraged the things people love about the Fair as content for social media. We promoted each band that played and encouraged people to tell us what is their favorite Fair food. People love Fair food. We garnered 41 comments on this post.

How we got 7k organic reach…over night.

Great content is the king of the internet. But by defining it as great means that it is rare. Do not expect to make great content everyday but be ready to take advantage when you do.

Making great content is hard to do and it can be even more difficult depending on your industry. This video started with an amazing story and we put the time into make it a professional production to create a huge PR coup for a small non-profit. Madison County CASA is a charity that I support and I was recently hired through a grant to create a new website and video for them.

Lets take a look at a breakdown of the stats:

The video did really well initially on its own. The organic reach was great! People were sharing, liking, and commenting organically. The key was amazing content that gets people emotionally invested. Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 11.03.26 AMIn the first 24 hours the organic reach went up to 7,721! What amazing reach for a Facebook page with only 647 fans(before the video was posted). When I felt like the organic reach was starting to come off its highest point, I activated a $25 boost to fans and friends of fans of the CASA page.  As you can see below, as the organic reach dropped I used the boost to help increase its reach to the community.

Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 11.03.21 AM

The result were 16,838 total reach with 6,753 of those being paid. Thats amazing! The difference: amazing content people wanted to see! Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 11.00.29 AM

Now lets dig into the video statistics. Of that 16,838 people who saw the post there were 7,052 people who watched the video. 17% of those reached with the post watched some of the video. Now we can see through the audience retention panel that very few made it very far into the video. But the vast majority that made it 45 seconds in, made it to the end of the video. 7.15% of the 7,052 people who watched it at all is: 504. 504 people watched the entire video!

Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 11.04.47 AM

Now in our context, the video was nearly 6 minutes long. It was a time investment for our audience to watch. This video was designed more for presentations than social media viewing. The story was too long to fit into an ideal :30-1:30 video. I feel like the 504 is a great number for completing the video.

We can also learn from the Facebook stats that the average watch time was 42 seconds. I also know that that if they made it 1 minute in, almost all of those watchers made it the rest of the way through the video.

Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 11.06.30 AM




What other measurable things did we get? The page gained 32 new likes and the post had 418 likes in total. 101 on the pages post and 317 on the shares of the original post. This is an impressive number. There were also 63 shares. People loved the content. The content is king!

All of these measurable point to a marketing win for a small nonprofit that just had the chance to get in front of 16,800 people for a very small amount of money!

 

Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 11.06.56 AM

 

 

Customer* Spotlight: Madison Co CASA

Customer is not the right word here because all the work for I do for Madison County CASA is done pro bono. (Which I have always used but what does it really mean? I guess it doesn’t have anything to do with Sonny and Cher or that guy from U2 after all)

The mission of Madison County CASA is to advocate for safe permanent nurturing homes for a abused and neglected children by providing specially selected and trained community volunteers.

I was recently elected to the board and will be helping them by providing marketing services. So this post has two purposes: 1. To show some of my work. 2. Let you know about some upcoming events that you could attend to help CASA.

1. Eat Outback for CASA.

On November 7 you can eat lunch at the Outback in Jackson for $20. Almost half of the money from each meal ends up in CASA’s hands. That means you get an amazing lunch put on by the great manger and staff at Jackson’s Outback. By eating lunch you get to help a great cause in CASA. In every sense of the phrase this event is a WIN-WIN! Here is the link to the Facebook event.

Eat Outback for CASA!

2. Breakfast with Santa

Thanks to sponsorships from Leaders Credit Union and the Barn at Snider Farms CASA will be hosting its first ever Breakfast with Santa on December 6. For $5 come and have breakfast and take pictures with Santa. If you have children this would be a great way to avoid the creepy mall Santas and still get your children’s annual picture with Santa.

Breakfast with Santa

 

Keep an eye out for more opportunities to help CASA as they serve children who really need our help.