How to use Google Business Profile to engage and attract new customers

Google Business Profile is a free listing tool ​​in which businesses register information about their products and services. When you list your business on Google, it will appear in Google Search and Google Maps. If you know how to optimize this tool, you can engage and attract new customers to your business. Let’s go through how. 

3 practical ways to leverage your Google Business Profile

1. Keep an up-to-date profile 

According to Google, customers are 2.7 times more likely to trust a business with a complete business profile and customers are 70% more likely to visit a business with a business profile. 

As a start, check your business information, category, store address, contact details and website link to make sure all of them are correct and updated. This by itself increases your odds of being discovered by your potential customers.

Once you have provided your basic business information, you need to add your company logo, cover image and photos. Businesses with images receive more request for directions and website clicks than those without. So, it is important to:

• Have a cover image and brand logo makes you more recognizable 
• Add photos about your services and products to highlight your business
• Add videos to showcase your in-store ambience

It is a no-brainer that a visually pleasing profile boosts your chances of standing out from the competition. Even so, it helps you show a more personal, humane side of your business. 

2. Use it as a free marketing tool

Google Business Profile lets you connect with your customers as you would do in any other social media channel. With this tool, you can engage with your customers to promote your business in multiple ways:

• Post special offers or deals on your products & services
• Share important news, updates about your business
• Share in-store vibes & ambience via videos 

Given that Google accounts for more than 92% percent of all online searches, with over 5 billion searches per day, promoting your brand on Google Business Profile is just as important, if not more so, than promoting it on social media. 

3. Monitor and respond to reviews 

Your customers ask questions and leave reviews to your business profile continuously. Answering online reviews and questions is a great way to show you care about your customers’ experiences, establish trust and positive word of mouth. 

In fact, 90% of users read online reviews before a purchase decision, which means that negative reviews can be a dealbreaker for your business. 

Among all these three, the third one—staying on top of reviews—is the most important one to engage with current customers and attract new ones. Your ranking in Google Search results depends directly on the number of reviews and how many stars your brand has received.

We are here to help you leverage them for success.

Leverage your Google reviews with Brandwatch to engage and attract new customers 

Manage Google reviews at scale with Brandwatch’s Social Media Management Suite

Brandwatch’s Social Media Management provides you with the ultimate platform to manage all your social media activities from one place, including Google Reviews. Within this platform, the Engage tool lets you monitor your reviews at scale, helping you build social proof and positive relationships with your customers. Engage also functions as an inbox for all your social media channels, thereby acting as a central hub for your relationship with the customer, equipping you with powerful message response and collaboration tools to manage your social inbox. 

1.Manage reviews from multiple locations in one dashboard 

Whether you are in the retail or hospitality business with one shop or multiple branches, you can manage all reviews from all locations in one place. You can monitor reviews across different locations by setting up a feed for each location, so you have full visibility of every review across all locations.

Besides, you can manage them alongside your social media conversations from the same dashboard, so you are on top of online conversations about your brand, you save time and maintain consistent and on-brand messaging with your customers. 

2.Handle high volume of reviews with our automation and collaboration capabilities 

Our solution also lets you manage a high volume of customer reviews through automated response templates. You can create custom templates to address most common review responses, which will reduce your response time and increase your customer service teams’ efficiency. 

Furthermore, you can assign reviews to your team members or add notes for collaboration. This way, you involve the right people who can provide customers with the most accurate business information. So, you can clarify misunderstandings and build more positive relationships with your customers. 

Unlock powerful insights about your customers with Brandwatch Reviews 

Brandwatch also offers a powerful standalone application called Brandwatch Reviews. Brandwatch Reviews uses features such as sentiment analysis and entity mapping to help you identify trends and insights across your reviews. Brandwatch Reviews can scrape and analyze reviews from over +230 sites including Google reviews.

1. Find your strengths and weaknesses

Core to both maintaining and improving your reviews is finding out what your customers like about you, what can be improved, and where your unique strengths lie.

Entity mapping in Brandwatch Reviews lets you do exactly that. Create custom segmentations to dig into product/service characteristics.

By finding out what you do well and what you can improve on and understanding how frequently this appears in customer reviews, you can now draw up a plan of action to improve.

2. Understand how reviews change as a result of your activities

Has your summer promotion improved the quality of reviews? Have the increased staff vacancies affected customer experience? Has the email reminder increased the quantity of reviews? All this and more can be understood from Brandwatch Reviews.

Analyzing reviews and review-split over time can be combined with a deep dive into negative and positive reviews to see how content is changing. You can also use Entity Mapping to follow the effect on key categories such as service or promotions.

3. How you compare to your competitors 

With Google making it so easy for users to directly compare your reviews to others’, understanding the competitor review landscape has never been more important. 

Brandwatch Reviews makes this easier than ever, allowing users to compare themselves against competitors using Entity maps or the Dashboard function that puts you side-by-side. 

The work doesn’t end there though, engaging empathetically with negative reviews and taking business actions to tackle your weakness whilst maintaining or even improving your strengths is key.

Google Reviews presents an exciting opportunity to show the world just how great you really are and with the steps in this guide, you’ve got the blueprint for success. Brandwatch offers two products for helping you get the edge on your Google Review competitors.1- Engage enables you to monitor and handle reviews at scale across your business locations, 2- Brandwatch Reviews is specifically designed for deep diving into Review insights, competitor comparison and more!