Marketing Matrix: Google Places Reviews: Getting Offline Online

Friday, December 23, 2011

Google Places Reviews: Getting Offline Online

by Dave Cosper

For most business categories, Google uses customer reviews as a critical metric, among other things, to influence how listings rank in Maps -- essentially determining how locally "prominent" the business is. There is also rising importance of Google's own Places reviews as a ranking factor. Coincidentally, as review citations from third party sites have recently become less visibly significant.

Building citations has always been the most important off-site factor for local rankings...now it seems citations AND reviews are equally important...and its not just review volume. Google's first actions seems to be "rank businesses with the most reviews first", and then order those results by positive sentiment. --Jeff Gold (Local Search Ranking Factors Vol. 4, 2011)

More reviews = better rankings. Better reviews = more conversions.

It's also important to note that Google's Local Algo incorporates additional factors when it comes to Place Page reviews:

1) Volume: more > less
2) Quality: positive > negative
3) Authenticity: unique local user > contrived
4) Velocity: sustained > sporadic
5) Relevance: keywords > generic copy

But motivating customers to go online, find your Google listing, and leave a positive review is a pain in the @$$!

The challenge is putting in place a practical system that works; turning your offline customer interactions into online evangelism with as little friction as possible. Enter QR Codes. If you're unfamiliar with QR Codes, they are already pretty commonplace and anyone with a smartphone can use the technology.

Using Offline QR Codes to Generate Online Customer Reviews

Last week I was browsing wine at the grocery store and noticed a clever QR Code wrapped around the neck of a bottle of malbec -- it was on sale and the clever marketing drew my attention. I got home, scanned the code with my phone (using a generic "barcode scanner" app), and up popped a cooking video creatively matching the wine with a tapas recipe. I remember thinking, "this is pretty sweet."

My point here is that you can easily harness this same technology to drive customer reviews for any of your products or services on Google. You can incorporate this right at the point-of-sale where customers are most likely to take action, and it's relatively easy to put into place.

The idea is to create a QR Code-driven marketing piece to hand out or display at the point of sale and solicit positive reviews from happy customers.

Here's how to do it:

1) Copy the link from your Google Places page.

Search Maps for your business. Do not use the URL at the top of the browser. Click on the link icon that appears at the far right of the page (Copy this URL).

Separately, use the Google URL Shortener to create a truncated version of your Place Page link. This will serve as a secondary option to the QR Code on your marketing piece (see Step 3).

2) Convert link into a QR Code.

Fortunately, there are a number of free QR Code generation tools like Kaywa and QRStuff that make this part easy.

Generate your QR Code (Short Code URL), and download the image.

goo.gl.url-app.png

Note: If you're a Chrome user, I recommend installing the goo.gl URL shortener app.

3) Create Your QR Code Promo Piece.

Because you are using a website destination, the the display size of the QR Code itself needs to be at least 1.25"x1.25" (excluding the "quiet zone" border area).

You can design any kind of promotional piece you want - 3"x3" works well in my opinion -- business card-sized works too. Any simple image-editing software will help you create this piece. Aviary has a free online editing application that works nicely for this. The important thing is that you include both the QR Code image at a readable size as well as the Short URL (truncated "goo.gl" link) along with a simple and straight-forward call to action.

Test it out.

When a customer has completed their purchase; ask them about their experience. If the response is positive request that they take five minutes to post a review on your Google Places page. Reward the customer with a discount voucher of some sort.

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