The bottom line of any marketing campaign is increased revenue and happy clients.
As per Pareto’s principle, 20% of the efforts will give 80% results and how this underutilized FREE tool that can give you up to 80% results
I’ll share my research backed by DATA and STATS, and why GMB is even more important in 2020.
Why Social Media may be a wrong horse to put your money on?
Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities.
Should social media marketing be a focus area for your marketing strategy in 2020? The answer depends on who your customers is.
If you are an online shop selling items less than $50 and/or catering to an impulse buyer then Social media is a good place to invest your time and resources. If someone sees an Ad for a fancy looking earrings that costs $15, they might not think a lot about it to buy the same.
BUT if you are serving a local area or getting most of your paying clients from search/ someone searching, then don’t put all your bets on the wrong horse.
Let us first understand how the sales cycle in any business works and especially in service-oriented businesses.
If Someone is already aware of the problem and the solution and has the intent to buy (means a buyer ready to buy with a credit card in his hand) then you do not need to spend your time and resources majorly in the upper stages of the funnel.
This is the stage where a prospective buyer is looking for someone to solve their problem. It can be someone looking for a lawn moving company to help them with the maintenance of their lawn or a patient looking for a dentist for dental Implant.
FOCUS ON THE INTENT SECTION OF THE FUNNEL, WHEN A BUYER IS READY FOR PURCHASE
For this, you need to understand where you can get the most traffic, and if you can get with a FREE and super powerful tool.
Where can you find majority of your paying clients?
In this age when almost everyone is carrying a smartphone and internet has become an indispensable part of our lives, Every search starts with the internet.
As in the above chart (Ref: Sparktoro), Google clearly rules the web search. They have over 90% of the search market share in the US and over 95% globally.
Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average (Ref: InternetLiveStats), which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day
Around one-third of these searches are local queries.
Approximately half of those consumers who performed a local search visited the store within 24 hours.
What is Google up to and why it is doing so?
Google knows it has got the traffic. But it is trying to keep the users on its platform and not send it to your website unless it don’t need to!!
The data, provided by marketing analytics firm Jumpshot, prove that zero-click searches on Google have gone up over the past three years. During the first quarter of 2019, 48.96% of all Google searches in the U.S. Google ended without a click ( Data Ref: Jumpshot)
Zero-click searches mean a user remains on Google-owned platforms such as Google.com, Google Images, Google Maps, and YouTube rather than going to a third-party website from an organic search result.
Did you noticed, what you see in the search when you look for weather, flights, hotels etc in Google. You Do not need to leave Google as see the information you need right there.
“If you’re in a field Google has decided to enter, like travel, hotels, flights, lyrics, etc., the search giant is almost certainly cannibalizing your market and removing a ton of opportunity” – Rand Fishkin CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz
In the fields that Google is not competing, it wants you to pay for Ads for you to appear on the top of the search results.
Big corporations like Dell have to pay for ads to Google to show up on the top of search results ( search results will differ where you are searching for and whether dell wants to show pay and show ads in that area) but you get the point.
Why is GMB so important?
Google is the market leader and wants to remain on the top and it can only remain it it gives its users what they want.
After the release of Google Local in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, (which were merged later), Google Place Pages for Maps in 2009, and Google + in 2011 which was a complete failure, Google Came up with Google my Business (GMB) in 2014.
It replaced Google Places for Business and Google+ Local dashboards, and things finally started making sense.
GMB is a free tool that lets you manage how your business appears on Google Search and Maps. That includes adding your business name, location, and hours; monitoring and replying to customer reviews; adding photos; learning where and how people are searching for you, and more
GMB made it so that users could control their business information in one place, instead of, you know, 52 different places. It gave businesses the power to be more consistent online and get a better grasp of how they appear in the search engine and Maps.
But Why is GMB so important especially to your local business?
I will let you decide by presenting some Data Research from Think with Google
- A 500% increase in “near me” mobile searches that also have “can I buy” or “to buy” variants.
- 150+% growth in mobile searches for “___ near me now” (e.g., “food near me now,” “gas station near me now,” and “delivery near me open now“.)
- 900+% growth in mobile searches for “___ near me today/tonight” (e.g., “five-star hotels near me tonight,” “open houses near me today.”)
- 200+% growth in mobile searches for “Open” + “now” + “near me” (i.e., “restaurants near me open now,“)
- Search interest in “open now” has tripled in the past two years.
- Search volume for local places, without the qualifier “near me,” has grown by 150%.
- 8.6% of searcher clicks go to featured snippets. Another 19.6% goes to the first organic search results.
- 35% of product searches begin on Google.
- 3 in 4 smartphone owners turn to search first to address their immediate needs.
- 150% growth on mobile, travel-related searches for “tonight” and “today.“
- Mobile search queries related to “same-day shipping” have grown over 120% since 2015.
How you can take Advantage of this FREE Tool?
Needless to say here, the first thing is to claim your GMB listing.
GMB has proven to be an impact full tool to:
- Find you address or to Call you
- Get directions to your location
- Send message to you
- Send people to your website/business.
- Manage your online reputation.
- Ask Questions
- Learn how people are finding you online.
- Communicate with customers and potential customers.
- Create Posts
- Create offers, updates, and events
Get In Touch with us to Optimize your GMB listing and take the benefit of this super powerful tool.