sorry for typos and bad grammar late at night and no time to fix!
OK. My first post on this community was all about what I wanted and how I was looking for a think tank. I still am by the way! If you are interested reach out to me to share ideas. But let me now, share one thing that has worked for me. Please forgive me if this has been discussed. I haven't had the time yet to go through what I am sure is a massive wealth of information!
I used to run an Internet marketing company and for you that have been around long enough, Infoseek used to be the search engine of choice and it was great because you could tweak your page and it would instantly be submitted. You would search your terms and if your result wasn't high enough, you would just tweak your page until you have what you wanted. Of course, everyone else was doing the same thing, so it was a moving target. But. That was then, this is now.
Google Plus. Do you use it? If you don't you are not being as effective as you can be. I am basically going to talk about how I started to minimize cost for myself in relation to this and Google Adwords. Google adwords has complimented my Internet presence. I bring the brunt of my business through referrals and Internet. I have basically eliminated print advertising because I just found it to be not nearly as effective as these methods. I may just be green in these areas! However, as a matter of principle, I just became tired of paying almost 20,000 in print ads to our popular print paper for real estate.
So I am going to assume you know what Google Plus is. It ties in your business with ratings and a profile and a bit of social media etc. You can not ignore this if you want to rank well on Google as most of you know. Hopefully, then you know to be collecting positive reviews on this service because it has a serious impact on your ranking in Google (although there are so many more factors).
Before I continue, if you are having trouble ranking well on Google, let me offer you this bit of general advice - be the best site you can be with information and blogs and community and service and they will figure it out. Gone are the days of tricks and gimmicks (and for those that exist they will figure them out and punish you for them) - focus on being the best site you can be etc. There, of course, is so much more.
Anyway, back to how customer service can help you. After you get over 5 or so 5 star reviews (which you have to earn by the way - if you use your cousin and brother they will probably figure it out and remove them best case scenario and punish you worst case - they are so stringent I have even lost legitimate reviews which to my knowledge there is no recourse as I have tried), the stars will show up on your local results, which believe me, makes a significant difference.
But better than this, they sometimes show up on your advertising as well (they don't always and when I asked Google for clarification on this they told me Google is organic and there are no definite results etc. etc. - i.e. it is Google's world we just live in it).
So, how does this impact you? Well, in the past I always made sure I was the number one result as that got me business - it sometimes cost me $70 per day but for that 2100 I received at least one deal per month. which in our market was around 10,000 per deal. It always made sense. However, now that we have so many positive reviews, what I have found is, we can be third on the paid results which costs us around 13$ per day and because people gravitate to the stars we are now spending less than $400 per month instead of 2000. More than this, I can now increase my budget to 800 and get twice the results.
Even more than this, because we have such a high number of five star reviews, there is far less selling during the phone call as the client is already on board because of all the reviews. The more reviews we get, the easier the call.
Hopefully this is of some help to someone and I'm sorry if it is redundant information. I think, in our experience, the better you become at your job, Google figures it out and rewards you for it. I hope this can help reduce your advertising costs and increase your business.
Sorry if this is a silly tip. I am new to this, but like a good poker game, the less money you put into a losing pot, the more you make at the end of the day. But, in the end, that is how better customer service will reduce your cost on Google Adwords!
Hamish
Hamish Ross Real Estate Team
White Rock Real Estate
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