Google My Business, it's a roadmap for customers to your business and mine.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Speak PR Podcast. My name is Jim James, and I'm talking to you from a pretty wet England today. I'm here joined by Binky, my beagle. So I'd like to share with you today about the, the issue that we've got around bringing traffic to our websites or going out and finding it. The reason I'm talking about this today is because I have been working in the last month now to get people to come to my website through a combination of, you know, really proactive marketing with a newsletter, with this podcast, with social media. And I've had some 855 people visit my website and about 1,100 sessions. So I'm making some good traction, but what I haven't been getting is any leads, any inquiries to my business. Just one, but not as many as I would have hoped for that much traffic. And I'm not sure If this is a function of COVID or if it's a function of my getting my marketing wrong. So one of the things that I'm looking at now is if I'm doing all this content marketing and people say they like it when I publish it, how do I start to grow the audience that's seeing it? And how do I make sure that it's targeted more clearly? So I got to thinking about something whilst I was walking Binky, my beagle, in the in the woods here. I was listening to the Russell Brunson. ClickFunnels Marketing Secrets podcast that he does. And Russell Brunson, as you may know, is the founder of ClickFunnels and now has become quite a celebrity in his own right as an entrepreneur and as a social media expert. But Russell Brunson was talking about the need to find your audience rather than to, you know, gather the audience. And It struck me, of course, that I've been doing it, you know, some part right but some part wrong when it comes to the public relations. I've been creating content and sending it out, but what I've been doing is the equivalent of, if you like, sort of organizing a nice party at the house and then ask— and then saying to everyone, I'm having a party, and hoping that they, that they all come. When actually, if you're looking for friends, you don't just start to invite everyone to your house at the beginning. You go out and find friends where they are. And this is, of course, what— whether it's nightclubs or sports centers or whatever— the function they fulfill. So thanks to Russell Brunson for, you know, really switching the light bulb on for me. Um, so I started to think about joining LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, uh, and looking at going and joining communities where entrepreneurs and people in PR are gathered already. And working to offer what I know so that I can help them with, with my experience, rather than just sending out generally through LinkedIn to people that I've met over the last number of years information that I think may or may not be of interest to them. So starting to be proactive in going out and targeting those people that are actually going to be receptive to the Speak PR methodology that I've developed. This is the Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and Know. So the, the decision I've taken then is to go out proactively. But what I also realized when I was looking at my Zoho Social Media Planner was that it had the option of connecting with my Google My Business account. Now, because I've been away for 25 years, the last 15 of which were in China. Google, Twitter, Facebook are for me something of a revelation. I'm having to really get stuck in after these, these platforms have already had 10 to 15 years of head start on me. So the Google My Business I stumbled on and found— of course, I've got an East West PR Google My Business registered in Singapore, but it's actually been left rather fallow. What's slightly embarrassing is that I've had 1,766 views in the last 28 days. In other words, I've had more views on a, on a passive Google listing than I have on my hard-worked website. So what I did today then was to spend some time looking at Google My Business, and you can find it just by going to Google and go to Google My Business. And if you haven't registered yours already, it's a very simple login. Add your company name, add the details, and if you're not verified already, they will ask to send you a postcard to your registered company address within 4 days for you to fill that in to prove that you really are a company and really are the company owner. So you claim that company, and what I did today was to claim the UK company because I have one already Singapore, and I was able to add the British company within the same account as a second office for the same company name. So once I've done that, I'm able to add in my logo, picture of the team, a 360-degree video of the interior, although I don't have a facility or an office to do that for, I can add in some pictures of my work. So what was also very good about this Google My Business is that I can add in my hours of operation. I can also put in there if I've got busy hours or slack hours. I can add in directions. Unfortunately, the street view that they're using of Purvis Street, where my Singapore office is, has an old Hyundai car parked outside the office, so that's not so great. But We can't control everything, but also what's interesting is that they have, for example, a call now button for mobile users. Now I'm reminded of that being useful because just the other day I went with Binky, my beagle, to pick up his medicine, and we had to ring the vet when we were on the way because we're not allowed into the clinic during COVID times. So when we were 5 minutes away, we were able to use the Google search and get the phone number for the veterinary clinic here in Bath and ring ahead using the hands-free. So mobility and location-based search are obviously key trends that we can all take advantage of when it comes to our PR, and Google My Business is a platform that enables us to use those 2 trends to our favor. Now the other thing that the Google My Business does is it enables you to offer customers reviews. So you can invite customers to leave reviews by sending them an email afterwards, for example, or on your Facebook. Now the cool thing about this, of course, is that we've looked at reviews and we know that people buy from trusted vendors. So if we can start to have customers leave reviews not only do you know yourself what people think of your company and how it can be improved, but also your other consumers and customers can, can rate and benchmark that they should come to you. So having tried Trustpilot, which we've signed up for, is also very powerful. The issue with Trustpilot, of course, is that it's not next to your business listing and your business location, whereas Google My Business the maps on the browser, you then see all of the businesses ranked both by geography, so by location, but also by, by rankings. So this will become increasingly important because if you've got a company that's in a competitive space, as I found in East West Public Relations in Singapore, there were about a dozen PR firms all listed on the same page. Some had got rankings, some had not. East West Public Relations didn't have any rankings, and that's something that I've endeavored that I'm going to change because now I'm on to this, I must capitalize on it. So now 1 in 3 searches are now location intent, apparently. So 1 in 3 searches are where people are looking for things that are close to them or near a place that they're going to, which means that Google My Business, in other words, tying the search to the location is only going to become more important. And as we know, with mobile devices, location-based advertising is growing in importance as well, because as people get closer to a location, then advertisers and PR people can send the messages that are relevant to their location. So these are all very important things that we can think about in PR, because what we see now is that if we know that visual content is becoming more important and more effective than text-based messaging, when we have PR messaging going out, we need to make sure that we're using infographics, for example, because they're shown to grow traffic 12 times or 12% faster than those messages that don't have infographics. So the infographic is simply the inclusion of both text and pictures together. So if you have infographics or you have videos, and you can add video to the Google My Business but only 30 seconds worth, then obviously these things all tie in together. And what's so beautiful and powerful, of course, about Google My Business is that it's tied in to the other aspects of Google. So your Google reviews and your Google content in Google My Business will then appear in the Google search. So as we work always to try and improve our organic search ratings by what we've included and links, and why— by what people say about us, obviously the authority of our website and our business, which is listed on Google My Business, will complement the contents of your website. So the Google Marketing Platform, which is this new holistic environment, has the advertising, the analytics, the Google My Business. It's becoming obviously a bigger and bigger platform for Google to integrate all of our, all of our marketing activities. So I started off really by sending out a press release today to announce the 25th anniversary of East West PR. And, and watching my traffic on my website to see what would happen. Of course, one can't expect traffic immediately, but readership from PR really often doesn't translate into a bump or a burst on our website or to a call to the customer hotlines. It's really a branding and an awareness exercise. So what we need to think about is the engagement activities that we can, we can use. And social media is great when it comes to, for example, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, but they're detached. They're detached from the location of the business. This Google My Business, of course, now it has posts, photographs, 360-degree video, It has the location, it has the phone number, it has the reviews. That's a very powerful customer journey that we need to be on with the customer as they're deciding to look for something, go leave their home, leave their office, leave their facility, and travel somewhere to pick up either takeaway, to sit in, to participate. And obviously they'll have choices along the way. And as we can see from the Google Map, it'll change the services according to how close you are to them. So our marketing material, your marketing material on the Google My Business be kept up to date with both direct effort into the Google My Business platform, which you can run on Android or on iOS as an app on your phone or your iPad, or— and this comes all the way back to myZoho— you can integrate Google My Business with some of these platforms that automate your content distribution. I use the Zoho Social platform, and Google My Business is one of the channels that I can automate my posts to. So once it's set up, when I've got my Singapore East West Public Relations and my East West Public Relations offices and materials all up to date and connected, then I'm in a position where when I add my content from one place one time, which is scheduled, don't forget I'll be confident that it's going out on my Facebook, on my LinkedIn, on my Twitter, my Instagram, and now also my Google My Business. That's very reassuring. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that I can stop doing the marketing and the hard work that I'm doing on the podcast, on the videos with Vimeo, on the search engine optimization. And on the sending out of press releases and stories about today, for example, how jumping out of a plane at 18 led me to a career in PR in Asia. We have to constantly be creating content that's compelling. Google My Business is another channel that we need to be issuing it out onto, and what's great about Google is that it has all these analytics tied into it. So as we finish for today, I'd like to share with you that often we think that PR is about bringing people to us, and it's sometimes about that and partly is about the outreach, but it's also about going out and being where the audience are. As Russell Brunson has said in one of his podcasts, it's about finding your top 100 customers or influencers, finding out where they are and being as close as you can to their environment. Now, if your customers are mobile, then the Google My Business could well be a brilliant and free and cost-effective way for you to reach out to them before they leave the home, the office, or wherever they are, and to make sure that once they've got to you they communicated with you, and also that they afterwards leave for you a customer review. And there's nothing more powerful in any business than a happy customer who leaves a testimonial. Speaking of testimonials, if you've enjoyed this podcast, I'd really appreciate it if you could leave a rating. You do that by finding the show on your device, and at the very bottom, especially on the iTunes at the bottom of the shows that you've downloaded is the rating section, and there you can click that. If you've entered your Apple ID, then it'll ask you and allow you to leave a rating. Obviously, a 5 would be nice if you feel you've got 5 stars worth of value today. If you'd like more, please do subscribe to our weekly newsletter called Cognition, and I will be back, uh, with this podcast again. I do 6 days a week to try and share information because I believe, especially at this time, Entrepreneurs around the world need as much support as they can to unlock the value in their business by using public relations. My name is Jim James. Thank you very much indeed for listening. Until the next time, I wish you good health, prosperous business, and that you keep on communicating.