Educational info and FAQ, about our marketing services
With more and more people thinking about adding blogs to their existing websites, or blogging regularly and wondering if it’s working, I thought we’d address the topic of “Does blogging add any value”? If it does, why does it work and how is it best to go about doing that?
So just what’s the right measure for managing someone who’s running Google Ads for you?
Getting these measures right is vital because if you set the wrong goals for people, you will drive behaviour you don’t want.
In this video, we will look at some approaches you can use to judge the success of your Google Ads campaign or manager. We focus on lead generation campaigns.
Should you be using review getting software or does your standard manual process work OK? And what are the pros and cons of the software?
In this video? I’m going to go through that and give you a recommendation at the end to suit specific circumstances in your business.
I’m Hendrik Vos from LeadFuse, a digital agency for home services businesses.
OK, so let’s get on and have a look at this.
The manual process has pros and cons like every other other process.
The pros basically are that it’s simple. You just basically send your customer a link at the end of the service exchange and the customer clicks on the link and can leave the review.
And it’s free. It just takes you some time to do and you have to remember to do it, obviously, as you get through your business. But that’s basically it.
The cons. There are a lot of cons around it and the net result of the cons – top line – you get fewer reviews from the review requests that you make.
Now, so a manual process is hard for customers to do. So let’s say you send the customer a link to your Google Business profile. The customer has an Apple phone with iOS 14, and they don’t have a Google account.
So what do they do? They click on it (the link). Google wants them to open an account to get started. It just doesn’t happen – they fall in a hole. Quite often that happens. And because you only send them one link, there’s no alternative.
It’s a manual process, so you have to remember to do it. And it’s no automation in the follow up.
So if you send out 10 review requests in a day from customers and you have to then go and remember to check for 10 reviews at the end of one or two or three days to see whether the customer’s actually done it if you want to follow it up.
If you don’t want to follow it up, that’s fine. But you know that following up is a critical part of this process.
There’s also a bunch of customers who actually are quite happy to give you feedback to your business, but don’t want to get their name out there on the web and don’t want to be part of the whole online review process. So they’ll give you feedback and it’ll go into your internal pot, and you can use that for for lots of purposes, which I’ll come to later on.
But in reality, you won’t get those if you do that in a manual link sending process because there’s only one place for it to go – on the Google Business listing probably.
You have a little bit of control over where you get reviews to go, you send them a link and they go to that link that you give them, but you don’t give them alternatives and you can’t give them three or four links because it creates confusion.
There’s no no alerts. So if you get a negative review or the reviews aren’t very good, you have to go looking for them. And those customers who aren’t happy don’t necessarily always go on the Google Business profile. They might go on to Facebook, they might go on Product Review, they might go on to True Local.
You don’t know that and you don’t have a process, but understanding when the new review is placed there.
And the process isn’t consistent. So as I said, the net result of it is that you end up with a suboptimal number of reviews from the process you use for sending out reviews to customers.
On the review software side;
It’s a lot simpler and there’s a standardised process. You enter the customer’s name, you enter their email address and probably their mobile number, and then it goes off and does whatever it needs to do in terms of the settings that you put into the software in the first place.
You can use SMS and/or email, and that works well because people open all their SMSs and also they are more likely to link to them these days.
The follow up is automated and that’s important. So if somebody doesn’t leave a review, the system follows up in a predetermined way one, two or three follow-ups.
If somebody gives you an internal review but doesn’t go and leave a review on Google, the system can follow up and again, in a pre-determined way, with messages to ask them to go online and leave that same review.
It also collects internal reviews. People just want to give you some feedback but don’t want to go online. You get those reviews in the bucket and you can use them on your website, and you can use them to market your business reputation to prospective customers.
You can easily direct them to a number of review sites. So quite often you send them to Google Business, Facebook and perhaps True Local, and they can choose which ever one works. And it’s a lot easier for customers to do because they get the link that goes straight to the right place. They open it and off it goes.
It makes it much easier to market your reputation on your website because you can stream the reviews on a particular page and also on a widget that floats around on the website.
And you can market those individual reviews and the good reviews on Facebook and on Google Business and other local places. And it makes it easy to do that.
So it’s a much, much more effective process.
There are downsides. It’s cost, it’s a bit more costly. And but I’d argue that that cost is not the issue. You need to get a lot of reviews because a lot of reviews help you a lot in all of your marketing and are the base case, but just about every online marketing situation.
And they can be a bit inflexible. If you’ve had a great discussion with somebody and you want to send them a review request, then the standard messages go, and it might not be perfect for the discussion you had with them.
Having said that, the best place to use software, the best times and situations to use software are these.
Firstly, if your business is new and you need to get a fast lump of reviews, you want to make sure that for every 10 jobs you get, you get as many reviews as possible and you need to give that as much chance as you can.
Sending review requests once and doing nothing else won’t get you there. You might get one or two out of 10. Using software you can get up to six out of 10. So you just build up the rump of your reviews much more quickly.
You also need to use it when all of your reviews are on Google because there’s a law of diminishing returns. If you’ve got 100 reviews and Google and nothing on Facebook or nothing on True Local or nothing on Yelp, then you want to start getting some over there as well. It helps you all over the place to do that.
So you can start asking for reviews in different places.
It also helps you when you want to easily market your reviews on your website and also on social media. So, for example, people who visited your website, you might want to remarket to them with your reviews so that they see that you are a great company, that you deliver great service and it will encourage them to become a customer of yours.
You also want to use it when your business has several crews or several locations. So that way you can reward the crews or the locations that deliver great service because you can actually measure it by crew or by location. And you can reward them for doing the right thing, and you can work with the people who aren’t doing as good a piece of work for your business to get them right.
And then the last reason for doing it is that if your business needs to standardise a process that you know it’s all over the place, some people ask, some people don’t. You can’t measure it or anything like that. Or that you’ve got somebody full time sitting there or spending hours a week sending out review requests, checking to see who’s done it. Following up with all of those.
So those situations where we need more reviews, you need to diversify your reviews. You want to market your reviews. You want to segment reviews. And you want to standardize or reduce the costs. Are all good cases for using software when you when you want to get reviews.
So if you want to find out more about that, contact me. Just start at Leadfuse.com.au and we can go from there.
So you can see there that manually getting reviews works. But there are lots of pros on the software that that make it beneficial and worth paying for, even if it’s only to start with. And and then you go back to the manual process in the long run, but I recommend that, you go with that approach.
I hope that’s been useful in helping you make a decision about whether you going to go manually or use software to gather reviews for your business. Thanks.
This post was first published on Leadfuse.com.au, an old website of mine and some of the logos are still in the graphics or videos. Despite this – the content is still relevant
Let’s talk about email hosting options for a minute and the three different options you’ve got, and how you can probably best configure your email for your business.
I’m Vossey from LeadFuse, and in this particular video, we are just going to talk about the three different email options you have for running your business.
So email is still essential to most businesses. I don’t know a business owner who doesn’t rely on email hosting. And there are essentially three different ways of running email for your small business.
So let’s just cut to the chase. We recommend option three, running your website in one place and your email on a proper hosted website solution in a different area.
I’ll go through the pros and cons of each of them, so you can understand why we make this recommendation.
First of all, running your website hosting at one place and then using Hotmail or Gmail or some other sort of email address that’s coming up as a separate thing. So not ending in your business domain name.
The Pros of that.
The email doesn’t mess with the hosting, the interfaces like Hotmail and Gmail in particular. I particularly like Outlook as well.
They have an excellent user interface, and you can easily use them on multiple devices. And they’re straightforward to set up and operate, and most of them allow for many integrations. So you can connect up calendars, you can connect up booking calendars and lots of stuff like that, and they all have very good security and manage spam very well.
But the cons are it just doesn’t look professional to have a domain name, e.g. my business over here, and then the email account george@gmail.com doesn’t work very well.
Yeah, it’s free, but it’s free at a cost because you’re the product. So, for example, if you’re using Gmail, Google can read everything that goes on in your Gmail. They don’t read it personally, but they scan through it and make that information available as a profile. And if you’re using Google Docs and all that other stuff, then it’s the same issue.
You end up being the product. They read your Google Docs and look at your Google photos and all that kind of stuff to get a profile of you. So it’s free, but it’s at a cost.
And also, they’re not around forever. I mean, Hotmail still exists. Yahoo mail is pretty much gone. Rocketmail’s gone.
Gmail is likely to be there for a while, but it’s rented ground. You don’t own it; you don’t have the rights to it. And someday, or rather, you’ll find that it ends up disappearing and that you have no longer have access to all the old emails.
The second option is to combine the two and run the website and the email on the hosting.
It’s the cheapest option in the short term. It looks professional because your email comes from the same place as your domain name, and you own it. You have control over it.
But there are lots of issues with doing it this way—the security issues for a start.
So email just about always email is the thing that gets hacked first. For example, it starts someone’s email account gets hacked because they have a weak password or they open some email, it’s a phishing email or whatever. Then that email gets hacked. Then they start spamming, and the website and the rest of the email accounts get taken down. So everything goes down at once, and you don’t have very many options there.
You get hacked website leads to hacked email. So you’ve got all sorts of issues around that. And the most significant single problem that I find we get is that a business owner will create a signature, and it’s got a little logo in it, or maybe even a bigger image with some stuff on it. And that constant sending (and receiving) of that little logo, that small image attached to their email over time, fills up the hosting space because it does become quite a lot of content in the thing.
And then you end up having to pay more for your hosting because your email space use is more extensive, and the boxes and the amount of email it takes.
Email on the server has poor deliverability. We regularly come across problems where clients say they’re not getting my invoices or not getting my emails.
And that kind of stuff happens because email or hosting is where spammers go. They buy a domain name, they buy a hosting account and run email spam. And anything that goes on on that hosting account, and generally, you’re on shared hosting, will impact on your deliverability.
So if somebody else is spamming and you happen to be on the same IP address or the same host, you have the same problem, your emails will get blacklisted, and the deliverability will go down.
You’ll get lots of spam because the spam filters and the interface for the web email aren’t very good, and you get lots of spam coming through to you.
And they’re a bit complicated to set up on email readers, and you have very few integrations. So it’s the cheapest option in the short term, but it’s not one I recommend that you go within the long run.
The third option is to run your website on your hosting and then run your email via your domain name but on a proper email solution.
So this means that the customers get your professional email address. The email doesn’t mess with your hosting account storage. You get an excellent user interface. It’s easy to set up like Gmail.
There are lots of integrations, excellent security, excellent spam filtering. It looks professional, and you get all the other benefits that you get from, say, Google workspace like Google Docs and Google Present and all the other things that come with Google Workspacelike Google Docs and Doc sharing and web conferencing and that kind of stuff.
The only real con is that it costs a bit more.
So we recommend that you keep your domain in one place and run your email on a professional email.
So then here are three that I recommend. I’m not very set on one or the other. Whatever works best for you.
I use Google Workspace, but you could use Google Workspace, Office 365 or Zohomail.
They all work well and give you the benefits of having a good email and your website hosting separately.
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