TRY THIS
Open Google in your browser and search for "Home care" + "name of your city." Study these results for a minute and see if this is what you find: two or three ads at the top, paid for by one of your competitors, followed by a list of local agencies, arranged in what appears to be random order.
Looking more closely, you may notice that the order is not actually random. Some listings may include a link to “read reviews.” You should read a few of these; some will lavish praise, others will complain. People are like that.
Listings that have received at least five reviews also display Google star ratings. Those with mostly positive reviews get more stars; those with poor reviews get fewer. Five-star companies tend to appear at the top of the results list, immediately under the paid listings. The top three listings are readily visible; others require the visitor click to see them.
Your goal is to be one of the three. But positive reviews are rarely spontaneous. Companies that make the top three have made concerted efforts to encourage their happy customers to write reviews.
This is why you need to start paying attention to this. Getting at least five reviews does not just happen. Even if you have fewer than five reviews and are not eligible to have your stars displayed, your place on the results list is largely determined by your positive and negative reviews. If you only have one review and it is a bad one, chances are you will find your listing lower on the list.
Don’t say ‘so what?’
This new way in which the Internet encroaches into your established, familiar marketing plans cannot be ignored. Suppose you pay for a large Yellow Pages ad or even a recurring TV spot. Even if these have your phone number prominently displayed, research has found that 87 percent of people will still look you up online before they call you up.
When they google you, if they find one bad review and no positive ones, 87 percent of the money you spent on those ads goes to waste. Remember the line you’ve heard so often, “The Internet Changes Everything?” One of the things it has changed is human behavior, particularly when that human is in the persona of a consumer. For reasons no one can completely explain, people trust the online comments of perfect strangers.
Therefore, if you have always had a word-of-mouth marketing strategy, know that Google reviews is where word-of-mouth happens today, not the corner barber shop. For this reason, you must keep track of your online reviews. When you find a bad one, you have to spring into action. Ignoring them does not make them go away.
NOW TRY THIS
To get some perspective, take a peek into how other industries are way ahead of us. Open Google in your browser. This time, instead of searching for “Home Care,” search for "Home Cleaning Services" + "the name of your city." You will find local companies with dozens of reviews and star ratings. If you need further proof, search for auto mechanics, Chinese restaurants, or dentists.
As this experiment should show you, other industries have discovered how to take advantage of the billion dollar infrastructure Google has created for us. Home care has not yet, but the time has come for us to learn what others already know:
There is probably no room in your marketing budget to hire someone to keep a 24/7 eye on Google, much less to urge every client or patient to write a review. Fortunately, there are services available, usually for less than $200 per month, which will automate the process. The two questions you have to answer are whether it is worth a couple thousand dollars per year to avoid wasting most of the rest of your marketing budget; and, since readers of this newsletter are the first to learn about this secret weapon, should I jump on it before my competitors, becoming the only local agency with five Google stars and at the top of every search list?
The publisher of Home Care Technology Report, Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., (RowanResources.com) is going to sponsor just such a service. It will be released before the end of the year. Keep watching this space for details. Subscribers will be able to use the service for substantially less than $200 per month.
Next issue: we will give you the low-down on Yelp, which may ultimately be more helpful — or damaging — than Google can be.
©2015 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Tim Rowan's Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com