Presence management: the tool to keep an eye on for businesses with point of sales

Service providers and product integrators know all about time consuming tasks. When a new feature is requested, we often question whether we should prioritize it in the roadmap?  What are the resources needed to develop it efficiently but at the lowest cost? How quickly will the benefits from the solution cover the development cost? 

In a previous article ‘The 10 benefits of licensing plug & play products’ we discussed how businesses with a star product start considering expanding their service or product line, and the benefits of licensing. Today we speak about an easy to sell solution that can be implemented by service providers and product integrators in any vertical or industry and that is a hot topic these days: online presence. 

So what is local online presence? 

In addition to the traditional offline methods, it is no news that local businesses and brands market their POI’s (points of interest) online. However, this doesn’t mean that they are accurately portrayed, potentially missing out on new customers. 

Local presence management enhances a brand as a whole by optimizing all their locations’ information in their respective markets. These solutions manage their digital fingerprint unique to each business location, improving local search ranking and giving the target audience the correct information to interact with the brand.

This includes monitoring a business’, address, phone number,  business hours, events, posts, reviews and more on publishers such as directories, data aggregators, online review sites and map listings. If they are physical stores, it is specially important considering 75%+ consumers will look at these channels before putting their shoes on for a visit. 

Now, all service providers and product integrators can benefit from offering this solution, but developing it and integrating all the available channels will take time, effort and resources of a technical team.  So if we had to choose one channel to optimize for ourselves,  our networks, and our clients which would it be? 

The Google Business Profile

28 times more searches happen on platforms than websites and if we consider that 80%+ users begin their search online; and of these searches 80% will happen on a Google browser, and 93% of the time, Google Business Profiles will be displayed, we start seeing a pattern. 

Has your business taken advantage of this opportunity and offered a presence management solution to your customers with connection to Google my Business (now Google Business Profile)? Let’s be real, business owners want to stand out from the competition but they don’t want to have to manage their GBP or spend hours updating all their online platforms. 

How to decrease churn and earn ancillary revenue? 

As you know, to successfully reach the first page on Google, we have to consider distance, data completion, use of GBP features and listing ratings.  While distance is fixed, you can optimize customers GBP for little effort but big return. Here are the steps:  

Boost customers local SEO: ‍

1. Help your customers take control of their Google Business Profile and optimize it to see immediate return on investment. You can do this by making sure they have completed and updated all information, this includes contact details, opening hours, categories, attributes, and photos of the place or their products. This should only take about 15 minutes, regardless, thinking about login-in and reviewing a GBP 1 by 1 isn’t ideal, the good news? 

You can manage multiple locations at time by integrating online presence into your offer.  All you need is to be a Google Business Profile partner. 

Obtain traffic results immediately: 

2. Contrary to social platforms that don’t want users leaving, Google will appreciate the redirection links to websites, and other services such as reservation and ordering systems. Depending on your industry, some features might be more interesting than others. For the automotive industry, a virtual tour of a car dealership might be handy, for a store in a mall, being listed in the mall’s catalog might be essential and for a hairdresser, accepting appointments.

Have you created a landing page for your customers? Or have a backend interface for them to manage their profiles? This is the time to shoot 2 birds with one stone. Increase the prominence of your customers GBP and increase traffic and conversion rate to the services you provide.

Decrease their time spent on administrative tasks:

3. To become the go-to-service provider, you will need to help them decrease their time spent on admin. How can you achieve this? By actively broadcasting updated information about their business on various platforms aside from Google. By doing that, you can increase their visibility and improve the chances of potential customers finding your own services as well. 

However, managing multiple platforms simultaneously may require additional time and effort on their part or from your team.

Thankfully, there are solutions in the market that have already integrated publishing platforms such as search engines, social media, maps and navigators and even voice assistants, so that a change in information can be broadcasted in 25+ online locations in a click. Here’s an example

Help them stand out from competitors:

4. Finally, GBP takes into account the rating of the business, and how active a business is in answering its reviews, sharing posts, and events. Using PowerAPI’s presence management tool, you can offer a tool to manage all this with a single API integration and also show your customers their progress, because what gets measured gets managed.

If you want to know more about how to make your customers see the benefit in a review management solution to understand customer sentiment, outweigh negative reviews and boost their SEO. Read more about it here. 

What’s in it for me?…

We have previously listed the benefits of licensing plug & play solutions, including reduce the churn of your business, increase your basket size and add competitive value to your offers. Also, reduce your time and effort spent on research, development, testing and maintenance of such products. 

We hope these tips were useful. Online management can seem like a big feat to tackle with all the separate platforms, lingos, and relevance, but garnering more insight and knowledge about the benefits of a presence management tool and putting it to use will bring benefits in both short and long term. Remember the better the visibility of your merchants, networks, franchises or clients, the better your brand recognition and return. If you see the value in including a presence management feature into your business offers but aren’t sure where to start. Book a free consultation with us today.

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