My Very Educated Guess On Why You Can’t Get Rid Of Your Bad Reviews On Yelp September 14, 2014

My Very Educated Guess On Why You Can’t Get Rid Of Your Bad Reviews On Yelp

I get asked these questions all the time: Why don’t any of my positive reviews show up on my Yelp page? My customers leave real reviews, but why do they never show up? But it seems like every bad review that’s left is always posted on my Yelp page. Why?

Small business owners continue to be angry at Yelp because it seems to them, and myself included, that it’s much easier to get bad reviews to stick on a business’ Yelp page than positive reviews. And they’re angry because it hurts their business.

Some small business owners have had experiences of Yelp sales reps seemingly telling them that if they pay for Yelp advertising, that it might help in getting the bad reviews to go away. Some have tried to sue Yelp, like this case in California.

I have no evidence. I have no inside information. Yelp is very secretive on how their website works in deciding which positive reviews show up and which negative reviews show up. The following is my educated guessing.

Yelp needs bad reviews to show up on it’s website. Yelp’s value to a consumer, is that with Yelp’s website, you can discern and figure out which businesses are good and which are bad.

If almost all the businesses on Yelp had good reviews, the website would be worthless. The consumer wouldn’t know which business to call if they all had 5 star reviews.

However, when lots of businesses on Yelp have bad reviews, now all of a sudden, there’s a value in the website. With Yelp, you’ll know which businesses are good and which are bad.

Theory or not, the irrefutable fact is that Yelp’s business model can not survive without bad reviews. Some businesses have to have bad reviews in order for Yelp to provide value to it’s website visitors.

So there you have it. This is most likely why it’s way easier for bad reviews to show up on your Yelp page than positive reviews.

Yelp needs some businesses to look bad so Yelp can make money.

Is there anything you can do about it?

Customwave’s current strategy in helping clients with bad reviews on Yelp is to get their Yelp listing off the 1st page of Google when someone searches for your business’ name.

Most people don’t go to www.yelp.com directly. They find Yelp through Google. So if you can get the Yelp listing off Google, almost nobody will be seeing the Yelp listing.

 

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People Do Not Like Stalker Ads June 11, 2014

People Do Not Like Stalker Ads

Have you ever gone to a website, leave the website, then see banner ads popping up all over the place for that website you’ve been on before? That happening is a new marketing technique called remarketing, which is great both for advertisers and consumers alike. I mean, if a consumer is going to have to look at ads anyway, better they look at ads that actually interest them, right?

Unfortunately, some marketers abuse this technique. Have you ever gone to a website, leave the website, then see banner ads popping up all over the place for that website you’ve been on before? And then see the same banner ad pop up 10 times a day? 20 times a day? Feeling as if the ad is stalking you, following you on every website you go on?

Yes, that happening is what is known in the industry as “stalker ads”.

Surprise! People do not like stalker ads.

So here’s the lesson: If you’re a marketer, do not run stalker ads. It will actually hurt your client’s brand and cause consumers to not like your client. I mean, businesses’ aren’t paying you to ruin their brand, right?

So here’s what you do! There’s a setting known as a frequency cap. It can set a max of how many times a day each person sees your banner ad. Perfect!

At Customwave, we usually set our frequency cap at 2 views per day. This way, our client’s banner ads blend in with everyone else’s banner ads and it just looks like the client advertises a lot, which is good for the brand!

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How To Market If Customers You’re Targeting Don’t Have Money June 10, 2014

How To Market If Customers You’re Targeting Don’t Have Money

From time to time people ask me what’s the biggest problem in internet marketing today in 2014. My response is that our client’s customers are broke and don’t have money.

Now, it’s not like this in every industry. Business executives still need airport transportation. People still need important packages delivered ASAP. But other industries like home remodeling, sign makers and even lawyers are struggling.

Specifically, the two problems is that some businesses are in the “WANT” business. Where customers want your service, but dont “NEED” your service. Someone might really want to remodel their kitchen, but they don’t have the money right now and have other, higher priorities. For lawyers and other businesses that charge a lot for their products or services, the problem is that the cost is too high.

It’s important to keep the clients customers in mind when figuring out the marketing strategy.

For instance, if I’m talking to a client in the “WANT business” that has a marketing budget of say $500 a month, my advice on how best to spend the money will be using it to stay in touch with every person that visits the website.

Because if the money goes towards Google advertising, the Google ads will get people to the client’s website. It’ll get the client calls. But it won’t likely produce customers for the client with the customers likely not being ready for one reason or another.

So what do we do?

Start with remarketing. With remarketing, we have the ability to track and stay in touch with every single website visitor by serving them banner ads on different websites throughout the internet. For instance, have you ever gone on a website before and then later on, start seeing banner ads for that website all over the place? That’s what remarketing is.

So let’s say there’s 100 people going on your website each month. Every month that goes by, you’ll be tracking and serving banner ads to another 100 people each month. After 6 months, you’ll be advertising to 600 people that have been on your website before. After 1 year, you’ll be advertising to 1,200 people that have been on your website before. And so on.

The value in this is that sooner or later, your former website visitors will be ready to do business with someone. Might be 2 weeks. Or 2 months. Or 6 months. But a lot will be ready at some point. In the meantime, you’re advertising your brand everyday to them. Reminding them. Building top of the mind awareness. And then the day will come when that former website visitor clicks on the banner ad and likely not only calls you, but becomes your customer too.

What else can you do?

Email marketing. There are ways we can collect email addresses from some of the people that go to your website by offering them discounts or free amenities if they submit their email address. So sending out an email blast every couple weeks is another way to stay in touch with people until their ready.

Regular display banner ads on different websites throughout the internet is a low cost and effective way of getting lots of people to your website and also increasing brand awareness. This will help too.

And finally, having a good reputation is important too. Like if you go to Google and type in your company name, it’s important no bad reviews or customer complaints pop up. If potential customers find bad reviews about your company, this can cause potential customers decide to not do business with you.

But vice-versa, positive reviews for your company can help lead to someone to be more likely to become your customers.

One of the most important things to remember about reputation management is that there’s tons of review websites out there, but the only way someone will ever go on any of them is if they show up in Google if someone types in your company name. So the main thing is to make sure is to focus on the review websites in the first 5 pages of Google when you search your company name. And if you have the budget, make sure you have no bad reviews in Bing and Yahoo as well.

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Taco Bell Creates Best Ad Campaign I’ve Seen In Awhile March 31, 2014

Taco Bell Creates Best Ad Campaign I’ve Seen In Awhile

People love drama. It’s one of the main things that attracts us to movies and TV. We love watching conflict. This Taco Bell advertisement does all this in their latest ad campaign.

When watching the commercial, I’m first thinking how clever Taco Bell was at finding people named Ronald McDonald. Then I wondered if it was even legal to do what they were doing, copyright speaking. Then I wondered if these people’s real names were actually Ronald McDonald. Then I saw McDonald’s response on Twitter and thought, wow, what a lazy response. There is for sure 3 big lessons to be learned here.

First off, what is Taco Bell’s purpose in this ad campaign? It’s to build awareness that they now have a breakfast menu. That’s it. They want people to know. With this ad campaign, they’ve done that. One of the best ways to attract attention is to create controversy and that’s what they’ve done targeting McDonald’s.

Second, McDonald’s had a chance to leach attention off of Taco Bell’s ad dollars. They had a chance to create awareness for something new they were doing. Maybe even to say their breakfast menu was better and that the Egg McMuffin is famous or something. But all McDonald’s could muster was, “Ronald still prefers McDonald’s.” What a wasted opportunity. It’s like they were either lazy or just flat out caught off guard.

But lastly, the big lesson here for small business is that the number one goal of advertising is to create awareness. But a close second, is that you want to leave a positive impression with your targeted audience. My main point is that lots of ad dollars and blanket advertising and big audience reach numbers are nice, but there is definitely a value in ad creative as we’ve seen with Taco Bell.

When creative ad messaging can be advertised in big numbers, there’s a chance to hit a real home run.

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US Senator Trying to Ban .sucks GTL Domains March 23, 2014

US Senator Trying to Ban .sucks GTL Domains

If you haven’t heard, ICANN, the organization which is in charge of domain related stuff, has been creating what they call generic top level domains. So in other words, you can now buy domain names like customwave.cool or customwave.successful or customwave.online.

However, there’s a few GTL domains that have people wary and one of them is .sucks. Yes, lol as of now, you can buy customwave.sucks. So West Virginia’s senator Jay Rockefeller is out to try and ban it saying that there will be online trolls using the .sucks domains to shake down businesses. Building websites saying ___ company sucks and unless the business pays up, it’s going to remain up.

I think the intention is noble, but the senator won’t be successful in the long run. The internet is not big on censorship and even when it tries to be, there’s too many workarounds.

My best advice is for small businesses to be proactive in protecting their reputations and asking customers to leave positive reviews to combat negative reviews and .sucks websites and others like it.

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I Think People Underestimate How Many People Are On The Internet March 23, 2014

I Think People Underestimate How Many People Are On The Internet

What I’m about to say is more theory on my part than actual fact. I think when people think of reaching an enormous amount of people, they think of TV.

I’m just here to share how many people have been on entertainment related websites in January 2014. Nielsen says that the number is 167 million people in the United States. YouTube alone got a little over 110 million people in that one month with each person averaging 12 visits throughout the month.

Overall, there were 198 million Americans online in January 2014. Average time each person spent online throughout the month? 29 hours and 43 minutes.

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Google Finally Unveils “Smart Watches” That Connect To Internet March 19, 2014

Google Finally Unveils “Smart Watches” That Connect To Internet

They’re finally here!! Google finally has unveiled it’s much anticipated “smart watch”. Watches that little display screens that act like mini computers. Even smaller than cell phones! We’ve already seen how much smart phones have taken off. So it’d be a wise assumption that the US consumers will adopt the watches in the same way. So for us marketers, making sure our websites are “smart watch” compatible and show up properly on watches will become a new part of the job description. To me, the more devices there are out there that connect to the internet, the more website traffic and online marketing opportunities there will be : )

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Marketers Win By Interpreting Change March 19, 2014

Marketers Win By Interpreting Change

Very thought provoking article on marketing: American Express CMO Jon Hayes explains that marketers win not by having best technology or knowing how to talk to consumers the best. He says marketers win when they’re able to best interpret changes in technology to figure out how best to use it. And interpreting changes in society to figure out how to tailor the message to consumers. Like its not about the ads themselves. It’s about figuring out the value of how to use the technology for marketing purposes. And how to custom fit the new process for each individual business. For instance, it’s key to understand with banner ads, the value is not in getting the clicks to produce immediate phone calls. The value is in branding in the area your potential customers are in.

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Internet Marketing Secrets Revealed. This Is How You Can Make Clients Money.

Too many internet marketing firms want to have plausible deniability when it comes to a client’s sales. Whether it’s search engine optimization, paying Google per click, too many in our industry want no accountability for the actual results. I actually used to be the same way, back in 2005, 2006, 2007,  just learning the ropes.

Most of the time, when internet marketing companies don’t have proper tracking in place to know what types of results they’re getting, it’s because they’re not confident in their abilities to increase a client’s sales. Therefore, they stick their heads in the sand not wanting to know the actual results. Again, when i was younger, I used to be the same way.

The thing I’ve learned is that it’s not enough to just advertise someone on the internet, specifically on Google. It’s not enough to just get someone phone calls. To really succeed in this industry, you need to help your client’s make more money. At the end of the day, that’s the only thing that matters.

Now someone might say, well, we can’t control whether a website visitor makes a decision to call the client. And that part is true. However, the thing you can control is the quality of the phone calls and email leads. Some months there will be a few more calls, some months there’ll be a few less, but as long as the quality of the calls are good,  the client should still be able to get new customers and make more money.

A lot of companies in our industry do a pretty good at client acquisition, landing new small business customers. But many of those same companies do a terrible job at client retention, keeping those small businesses for any longer than a year. The reason why companies like Reach Local and Go Daddy aren’t dominating even more than they are is because they constantly lose clients because they focus on advertising. They don’t focus on making the small business client money.

And how could they? This industry is so new and so young, there’s not enough people that know what they’re doing to take care of all the demand. Colleges are just getting around to starting to teach internet marketing, but because this industry is fluid and changes rapidly every year, their information is often times outdated and obsolete. Most small businesses that work with someone in a call center with limited experience, training, and knowledge have a bad experience. Therefore, the small business cancels after the contract is over.

So as internet marketers, what exactly can we do to help our clients make more money? How do we do that?

You have to focus on the quality of phone calls and sales leads. Decrease the junk leads as much as possible.

Every business is different. And for every business, they will want a specific type of customer. Find out what type of customer they want. Then get really specific on which keywords you target to make sure you get them the right type of call.

Find out the schedule of when they want to be advertised. If the client is getting clicks at 2am in the morning and doesn’t have anyone to pick up the phone at 2am, you don’t want to be advertising them at that time. Only advertise the client when they’re in a position to answer the phone or return email quickly.

Find out which devices they want to advertise on. Some businesses will find it more valuable to be advertised only on cell phones, versus all devices. Or only computers and not cell phones.

There’s a world of opportunity in our industry. The vast majority of internet marketers are not doing that great at their job because what we do is so brand new and we’re still trying to figure it out. But the people that will really succeed in the next 5-10 years will be the internet marketing companies that can RETAIN small business clients. KEEP them. Have them advertise with you for years and years. And the only way to do that is to help them make money from your work.

 

 

 

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Review Websites Going Extinct?

Seems like the reviews industry could have some problems. Nielsen recently raised red flags with their annual “trust in advertising” survey.

The most startling thing in the data was that over 40% of people said they were skeptical of online reviews. Even on “trusted” review websites like Trip Advisor and Yelp.

Seems like people in the mainstream are catching on to the fake review problem that’s out there. Where business owners will sometimes leave positive reviews for themselves and sometimes competitors will leave negative ones.

To me, there’s no real quick fix solution here. Even with Yelp, who has a “review filter” that is supposed “filter and remove fake reviews”, most people would say it’s not effective. Small businesses have famously cited Yelp for sometimes even filtering and removing real reviews left by real customers, while publishing and keeping fake negative reviews.

I think as more and more people in the mainstream become aware of this, review websites will lose their value. That if people don’t know which reviews are real and which are fake, what’s the point of visiting the website.

There is a real danger that these review websites that have sprung up and had success in the last 5 years or so will find themselves in serious peril and danger of going the way of the dinosaurs. They need to figure out a solution that will do a much better job of figuring out which reviews are legitimate and which ones aren’t.

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