Tech Tips for Small Businesses: Get the Word Out

If you’ve been following our series on using tech to promote your local business, then you’ve already got a website, a Twitter account, and an active Facebook fan page. While you’re probably sick of signing up for various services, there are still a few more things you should do to promote your business on the internet.

Yelp lets businesses set up free listings, and they offer customers the opportunity to rate those businesses, and share their experiences with other Yelp users.  With 53 million active users, it’s a safe bet that you can reach a sizeable number of potential customers by listing your business on Yelp.

There’s one extremely important thing to remember when setting up your Yelp listing; sooner or later you’re going to get a negative review. You can’t make everyone happy, and sooner or later, an unhappy customer is going to share their experience on Yelp, and there’s not a single thing you can do about that.

When you get a bad Yelp review, it’s extremely important not to panic. Don’t email Yelp demanding that the review be taken down, don’t threaten to sue the angry customer for badmouthing your company, and don’t attempt to get your company entirely delisted from Yelp. Those might all sound like overreactions (and they are) but they’re all courses of action that other business owners have taken.

If a customer posts a negative experience on Yelp, reach out to them and see if there’s anything you can do to make it up to them. If you feel like their negative review was unfair, well, that doesn’t matter; what matters is that the customer feels mistreated. 

By reaching out to them, and doing everything in your power to solve their problem, or make up for the bad experience they had, you might just convince them to delete, or revise their review. If nothing else, they’re likely to tell their friends about the lengths you went to in order to correct the situation, and that’s always good for business.

Yelp also allows you to create special promotions for Yelp users. Setting up a Yelp-centric discount will get people on Yelp talking about your business, and sharing it with other Yelp users.

Something as simple as a 10% discount can help you to draw in a lot of new customers. Just make sure you’re clear about all of the terms and conditions that apply to the discount – you don’t want a promotion designed to generate positive attention to yield negative reviews.

Once you’ve committed to a panic-free relationship with your Yelp customers, it’s time to move on to Google Places. By putting your business on Google Places, you can make your way to the top of search results, even if you’re in an extremely competitive industry.

Here’s how it works: Google displays local Google Places entries at the top of search results. So, if you run a pizza place, whenever a Galloway resident searches the word “pizza” on Google, one of the first things they’ll see is your Google Places entry, even if your website isn’t on the first page of search results.

Like Yelp, Google also offers users the chance to review your business. I’ve already said this, but it bears repeating – don’t panic over a bad review. Reach out to negative reviewers and try to solve their problem, and you’ll do just fine on Google Places.

Both Yelp and Google Places will help you spread the word about your business. It’s important to remember that they’re both tools to help you reach out to your customers rather than venues for shameless self promotion. By using them to interact with your customers in a meaningful way, you’ll be sure to see a boost in business from them.