Reviews, Rewards, and Canadian Discrimination

If you're reading this, you're probably a regular computer user and occasionally buy stuff on Amazon, eBay, and other online shopping sites.

Question: When you find a product you're thinking about buying on Amazon or a similar site, what is the first thing you read (besides the price)?

Is it:

a) The Manufacturer's Propaganda Sales Copy
b) The Technical Specifications (Voltage Requirements, etc.) or
c) The Reviews from Customers Who Already Bought One

If you answered "C", you are in the great majority. The customer reviews are often the first and only thing I read before clicking on "Add to Cart". If you're nodding your head in agreement, I have another question for you: What have you done to facilitate getting your customers to write reviews of your product or service?

Your stunned silence is very reassuring...

While that settles, let me shift gears just a little - My family and I just returned from a five day Carnival Cruise last week. About three days after we returned from our cruise, I received an email from Carnival asking me to complete an online customer satisfaction survey about our cruise experience.

In exchange for filling out the survey, they entered me in a monthly drawing for a free seven-day cruise for two! After diligently completing the survey, I clicked through to the contest rules just to see how the monthly drawing works. Apparently, Carnival holds a drawing on the fifth of every month and gives away one free cruise for two people every month in exchange for completing a survey.

That is smart marketing folks! If you own a business, you should know that getting real-life feedback from real-life customers is the nectar of the marketing gods, and you should be seeking it out, asking begging your customers for it, and compensating them for taking the time to share their experience.

(Note: It doesn't have to be a seven day Carribbean Cruise! We offer our Florida beach wedding business clients a free 8 x 10 print of one of their wedding pictures, and that seems to work just fine!).

Of course, once you have the feedback, you want to use it and act on it to improve your business.

You also want to share it with your potential new customers. One of the easiest ways to do this is to collect the reviews in a place that is visible to both your existing customers and potential new ones (remember those Amazon reviews we talked about?).

Luckily, of all the problems that businesses have, this is one of the easiest to solve. Depending on what industry you're in, there are lots of easy (and free) places to aggregate customer feedback:

• Google Places has a "Write a Review" feature that will work for just about anyone.
• Yelp! is a popular review platform for restaurants, shopping, nightlife, and entertainment.
• Angie's List is a popular subscription-based review service for home service contractors. 
• OneWed and WeddingWire are popular for wedding vendors and photographers.

The list goes on and on (if you know of another good one, please leave a comment). Do a quick Google search for "Your Industry" + Reviews and you might be surprised by what you find. The point is, Don't Do Nothing!

As they say, failing to plan is planning to fail, and that certainly holds true for getting customer feedback. So go out there and 1) find an appropriate platform for collecting and sharing customer feedback, and 2) send your customers an email after they complete a sale asking them to review your product or service, provide specific instructions on how to do so, and offer them a reward for completing the task.

Over time, you will collect an assortment of reviews that paint a picture of the quality of your product or service and speak for themselves!

One final tip - when planning your customer feedback strategy, try not to discrimate against the Canadians! As I was reading through the aforementioned contest rules for Carnival's monthly cruise drawing, I came across this paragraph, cut and pasted verbatim:

Drawing and Skill-Testing Question for Canadian Residents: If selected entrant is a Canadian resident, in order to win the Prize, the selected entrant must first correctly answer unaided a time-limited, mathematical skill-testing question by telephone at a predetermined mutually agreeable time. In the event that the selected entrant is unable to correctly answer the skill-testing question, the Sponsor shall have the right to randomly draw another eligible entrant, and the Sponsor shall be fully and completely released and discharged from any liability or responsibility in this regard.

What is the square root of 237?

This is just too hilarious and bizarre not to share! Apparently, if you live in Canada, and you happen to win Carnival's monthly cruise drawing, you have to take a timed math test over the phone before you can claim your free cruise!

Kinda strange, ay? If anyone can explain this to me, or even if you just have a good theory please drop me a line - I'm stumped!

Till next time,


Jeff Copeland
Tampa Bay Search

Make them cry; Make them buy!

Just a quick thought on the importance of making an emotional connection with your prospects...

As many of you know, my wife and I own a beach wedding and photography business. Our online marketing efforts feature two important ingredients:

1. Pictures
2. Music

We get emails quite often from people who happened upon our website, and were captivated by the presentaion of our clients' wedding images. Sometimes these people aren't even potential new clients, they just enjoyed the pictures and slideshows on our website and beach wedding blog so much they felt compelled to write. Their comments almost always have one thing in common - they always say "the pictures on your website made me cry".

If your marketing efforts can make a stong enough emotional connection with your prospects to bring them to tears, you'll win more often than you lose!


I realize this may be harder to do if you're, say... a plumber or an electrician (though I have been known to cry over plumbing problems!). But I bet if you sit down, clear your mind, and think about it for ten minutes or so, you can come up with a clever new way to connect with your clients. Give it a try and then share your idea with the rest of us by leaving a comment below.

TGIF!

The Russia Effect

This post is intended for people in the Tampa Bay area. So if you live in Albuquerque, it may not be as relevant (to my knowledge, there is no Albuquerque in Russia), sorry!

But for you Floridians out there, I have an interesting experiement for you to try. Go to Google and search for st petersburg restaurants or st petersburg hotels. Go ahead - I'll wait...

Chances are, the map listings that come up in your search results looked something like this: Keen observers will note that every single listing is for St Petersburg, Russia! The organic listings seem to be a mix of Russia and Florida results. Muy interesante, no?

This is an interesting Google quirk, but perfectly understandable when you consider that St Petersburg, Florida has around 250,000 residents, and St Petersburg, Russia has almost 5 million, or about 20 times the population of our beloved little Sunshine City!

Taking this one step further, I've found that this "Russia Effect" has caused an interesting impact on search behavior. Even though the cities of Tampa and St Petersburg are roughly the same size, and have similar infrastructures and economies, users of Google and other search engines use "Tampa" as a geographic modifier far (like 10 times!) more often that "St Petersburg". Here are a couple of examples:


Term (#Monthly Phrase-Matched Searches on Google)

insurance tampa (18,000)
insurance st petersburg (1,600)
photography tampa (6,600)
photography st petersburg (720)

(Note: I suspect another contributing factor to this phenomenon is tourism - people from other areas of the country have been conditioned to think of this entire area as "Tampa" or "Tampa Bay" - but that's another blog post!)

Alas, we come to my point...What does this all mean for you as a local small business owner and internet marketer? A few thoughts come to mind:

1. If your business targets the entire Tampa Bay area, be sure your are using "Tampa" or "Tampa Bay" in your web content, title and meta tags, and other ad copy. You need not exclude other local references like St Petersburg, Clearwater, etc. - just don't make them your primary focus.

2. If your business markets specifically and only to St Petersburg, Florida, be sure to append "FL" or "Florida" to St Petersburg throughout your content, so that search engines and human visitors alike know which city you're in. Otherwise they may assume you're wearing one of those fuzzy hats and drinking vodka for breakfast!
3. If you have the opportunity to do so legitimately (i.e. you have an address and/or phone number in Tampa that can be tied to your business), consider setting up a seperate Google Places (Maps) listing with a Tampa address and phone number - you might be surprised how much more business it generates than a St Petersburg listing.

Until next time, Do svidaniya my friends!

SEO Like It's 1999

As I was sitting in my office this morning, I glanced over at my bookshelf. On a whim, I picked up my old college marketing textbook, Contemporary Marketing by Boone & Kurtz (1999).

I intended to look up "search engine optimization" in the glossary and see how things have changed. The term was not even listed.

So I looked for "website" or "websites"...again, nothing in the glossary.

I did find a reference to "search engines", and quickly turned to the respective page. The information presented on search engines was in a chapter titled Marketing Research and Decision Support Systems, and was buried in a graphic titled "Online Sources of Secondary Data". Below is the 740 page marketing textbook's reference to search engines in it's entirety:

Search Engines

These search engines can help track down online information on a variety of topics:

• Search.com (http://www.search.com) - This site gives access to over 300 specialized indexes and search engines.
• Metacrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com) - This tool submits your query to nine of the top search engines at once.
• Altavista (http://altavista.digital.com) - This service provides one of the largest search indexes on the web.
• Infoseek Guide (http://www.infoseek.com) - This search index includes millions of listings.
• Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) - This useful search index divides reference sites into logical groups.

So there you have it - everything a marketer needed to know about search engines in 1999!

A couple of questions come to mind:

• Do you notice any big names missing from the list above?
• What (and who) do you think we'll be talking about in 2019?

Organizing the Unorganized (by Seth Godin)

I came across a recent post on Seth Godin's blog titled Organizing the Unorganized, and I thought I'd share it with you. Check it out, and then come back. I'll wait...


Well, what did you think? Great idea, right?

For the record, that is exactly what Tampa Bay Search is trying to here in the Tampa Bay Area - connect local small businesses who need each other. So get on board, and Get Found with Tampa Bay Search!

Until next time,


Jeff

The Sod Father

Naming the business is a challenge every small business owner faces. And while a business can certainly overcome a poorly chosen name, having the right name from the get-go can propel a business to success.

There are entire companies that do nothing but come up with product and business names, and this is not a rant about how to name your business. I say don't overanalyze it, keep it simple, make it easy to spell, and most importantly, make it memorable. And I want to point out it doesn't take an expensive ad agency to do this.

Case in point:


What a perfect name for a sod and landscaping company! It made me chuckle, and I'll never forget it. If your business name can do those two things, you win. Period.

So, if you live in the Tampa Bay area and need a landscaper or a new lawn, call The Sod Father at 813-758-9896. And remember you heard it from me. Because some day, and that day may never come, I may call upon you to do a service for me!

The Right Way to Wrap a Boston Whaler

How many times have you seen a tractor-trailer drive past on the interstate carrying a load of new boats or cars (or at least something vaguely shaped like boats or cars) wrapped in protective white plastic?

You probably don't recall. And that is precisely my point!

This truck drove past me in I-275 in Tampa the other day:


Not only do I remember it, I took a picture of it and I'm sharing it with you! Why? Because some genious at the Boston Whaler factory had the good sense to put their brand name on every single one of their boat wraps!

So instead seeing a truckload of imaginary Sea Rays in my mind's eye, there was no doubt that these were Boston Whalers. Better still, the closest Boston Whaler factory is over 100 miles away on the East Coast of Florida. How many motorists do you think were exposed to the Boston Whaler brand on this one trip? Now multiply that nationwide, and you can see the power of one simple idea.

So, I salute you, Boston Whaler wrapper idea guy!

The lesson here is: Never pass up an opportunity for mobile outdoor advertising. How many of you own company vehicles that have no advertising on them? Shame on you!
The one-time and relatively low fixed cost of vehicle wraps and signs can pay dividends for years. Don't let those impressions go to waste!

Until next time,


Jeff Copeland
Tampa Bay Search - Solutions for Small Business

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