A prospective client contacted me a number of weeks back regarding his business. He had been operating for nearly 30 years and was running his business purely on referrals and looking to expand his online presence. These types of client prospects excite me the most when it comes to executing internet marketing services that drive results. They are already winners, successful at what they do, and need to take advantage of what they already have built and translate that into the online world. If you are one of those business, listen up because in this post I’m going to cover what you need to focus on to take that offline marketing success to your online presence. Let’s get started.

Online Reviews

I’m rather amazed when I come across prospects like I just mentioned with great offline success and then find out their google my business or website does not a single review. In the case of this prospect, he had worked with several high profile companies in the metro area and has a number of small business clients. They all love the work he does, which explains his offline success from referrals, but no one is leaving reviews.

When it comes to establishing trust online, you cannot go wrong with online reviews. This is where reputation management comes into play. Only his existing clients and their friends know about his work and now we need to take it further so that strangers to his business find out how great he is. We need to create a review funnel to generate these reviews.

What Is A Review Funnel?

A review funnel is a system designed to minimize obstacles that get in the way of a customer or client leaving a review. It is a known fact at a customer or client who wants to write a review will not do so if it is too hard or complicated to do so. In fact, the more steps it takes, the higher the likelihood they won’t bother or they may forget to write a review. An optimized review funnel should therefore:

  • Make writing reviews easier
  • Remind customers about writing reviews

Let’s take an example business here to illustrate. Say we have a local business that has face-to-face transactions like a dentist’s office. In this case, the best place to start would be printed takeaway cards with a friendly message to remind the patient for their feedback.

Now that we have their attention, where do we tell them to go? A dedicated landing page on the business website can work and that page should highlight the review sites that matters (usually your google my business and/or secondary review site like an Angie’s list or Yelp). You can also enhance the card with an easy to remember URL or provide an QR code that can be scanned for the customer to leave a review. The last step is to provide a way for upset customers to get out of your funnel before posting a review - such as prompt to contact the business directly. This last step is the most difficult to bootstrap with what is outlined here. It is best to consider a review funnel solution to automate and monitor as much of the review funnel process as possible. I have provided a couple of examples below.

Examples of Review Funnel Providers:

Grade.Us

GetFiveStars

Video Promotion

So you have been working that review funnel and getting some good review traction. Now let’s talk about taking that further by getting a video created with testimonials from the customers that love you most. Video is everything in the online world. An engaging video will drive awareness and conversions to your website. The main issue is that video production tends to be expensive and local people can be hard to find unless you start looking for an film production agency (which again means more $$$). So the best way to do this would be to hire a freelancer and that’s where I’m going to let you in on a secret.

You may have gone to Yelp review pages or maybe have been called by a Yelp representative about Yelp ads. In some of the ad packages, they offer video creation and hosting. These videos actually tend to be pretty good for using on a website, but the problem is that you have to usually commit for a year’s worth of advertising and Yelp will remove the video as soon as you stop paying for ads.

You may be wondering now why I even mentioned Yelp. Well, when you pay Yelp for a video, they subcontract the video to a freelancer using a site called Smartshoot. This site is a hub for photo and video freelancers. The price for these services are affordable and the quality is usually pretty good. For every project I have created on Smartshoot, I usually get a half a dozen pitches. If you need a video (or even just professional photos for your google my business or website), you should check out SmartShoot and see what the local freelancers can do for you.

Examples of Local Video Creation Marketplaces:

Smartshoot - https://www.smartshoot.com/

Media Mentions

If you are a Company that already has offline marketing success, this can be a shoe-in for you. Let’s go back to my prospect who had been in business for nearly 30 years. Well, their anniversary is coming up so what better way to promote the business then to contact a journalist at a local newspaper to cover them. 30 years in business is a huge accomplishment and every city has a newspaper that would be happy to cover you. I call these hyperlocal news sites. Examples of such sites would be Builtin, Business Journal, The San Mateo Daily Journal, The Marietta Daily Journal, and many more. For niches like restaurants, there are often hyper local food focused sites that you can target for reviews or interviews.

These newspapers and sites are focused on your local community and can be pretty impactful to your business and your local rankings.

Ad Enhancements

Pay Per Click campaigns can be enhanced with Media mentions. Not only can you use these media mentions as social proof in your videos and website, but you can also use quotes from your media mentions to enhance Adwords campaigns. Within the adwords campaign builder there are extensions you can use to enhance your ad. These extensions add extra information onto your ad and with enough extensions you can take over more real estate on the front page of search results. One enhancement you can take advantage of in adwords is the Review Extension. This extension allows you to add reviews from these media and niche focused websites and cite the sources. This adds additional trust to your ad. Let’s look at the example below from We Work:   

Now imagine if you have one of those juicy review quotes from your hyper local or hyper niche site. It builds instant credibility in the ad copy. Review extensions can sometimes be finicky to get approved so I’m going to drop a guide from PPC Hero that goes over this in more detail below.

Further Reading:

Review Extensions - http://www.ppchero.com/review-extensions-adwords-mythical-monster/

Local Event Promotion

Successful offline marketing campaigns are generally active in the community. Whether it is within their local business group like a BNI, Chamber of Commerce, or local community I tend to notice they have this locked down. The main thing that is not going on is they are not using these sponsorships or events to help promote themselves online. I have a coworking space client and one of the the ways we get backlinks is by sponsoring local meetup groups, events, and hyper local business groups. With them, it’s about sponsorship and with you it is about offering to be a speaker at such events. These are great ways to promote your brand, your expertise, get links and referral traffic to your site, and ultimately generate leads for your business.

Local event promotion is about selecting the right event to sponsor. Think about the following when selecting what event to sponsor:

  • Which events will actually have consumers of my product or service?
  • Which events will my target audience be attending?
  • Will you have access to the registrant's contact information?
  • Do the other sponsors lift your profile?
  • Weigh cost of the various events
  • Know your story - Having something inspirational will engage your audience

Further Reading:

Simon Sinek - Know Your Why https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action

Website Enhancements

So you have the google reviews, the testimonial videos, the media mentions, and have a good community presence. Let’s put that all together on your website. Google reviews are great for a website as you can use plugins like rich plugins and embed these reviews like the photo below:

These reviews are directly from your google my business and pull real profile pictures. They look more authentic then writing up testimonials on your website from clients.

Next, embed that lovely video you created on your main target site (this would usually be your home page or location page). Finally, drop in your media mentions or niche site reviews. Now you have lots of credibility, an engaging video, and social proof on your target page for your site visitors to view.

What Other Strategies Have Worked For You?

Did I miss anything? What has worked for you? Tell us your story below in the comments section and let us know what has been successful for you in the past.