At Pubcon 2015 in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to chat with Casey Markee of MediaWYSE and Pierre Zarokian of Submit Express about the rise of hyperlocal marketing. Specifically, we discussed the roles that beacon technology and online reviews play in local marketing.
Casey shares his experience with beacons and how they’re giving businesses an edge, while Pierre shares his expertise on local reviews.
Learn both tactics can help you succeed in local marketing in the videos below.
Here are some key takeaways from the videos:
Casey Markee on Beacon Technology:
- Casey contends that if bluetooth enabled beacon technology isn’t on your business’s radar, it really should be.
- Beacon technology allows businesses to send highly targeted offers direct to the smartphones of people within range of the beacon.
- Messages are relayed from beacons to smartphones via bluetooth, which means only people with their bluetooth turned on will be able to receive the messages.
- With beacon technology, the idea is not to overwhelm people with notifications — it’s to fulfill a need at a time when a customer may be most responsive. Achieving success with beacon technology is all about sending out timely and relevant notifications.
Pierre Zarokian on Reputation Management:
- Negative reviews are always a concern — but if someone outright lies in a review, and you can prove it, it’s possible to get those malicious reviews removed.
- Respond to reviews, both positive and negative. In addition to the relationship building aspects of responding to positive reviews, adding a response allows you the opportunity to insert more keywords on your review page.
- An effective way to encourage customer reviews is to send out surveys asking how satisfied customers are with your service. You can leave it completely objective, or with certain software you can set it so only the happy customers are asked to write reviews afterward.
- In addition to the giants like Yelp and TripAdvisor, another other local review site businesses should be monitoring is Angie’s List, which is often overlooked.
Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.
Category
Local Search
