Getting Started Guide to Google My Business

To stay alive and visible in the local search results you have to face a lot of competition. This takes in a series of continuous efforts in a hyper-local setting. You need to continuously explore and invent ways to reach out to your audiences and engage with your customers.

This is where you can leverage Google posts to connect with your audiences in a specific geographical location. Google My Business (GMB) helps you work around your local strategy and reach out to high intent audiences and win over purchase-ready customers in the targeted area.

While you plan to get started with your Google My Business posting and promotion, learn more about the platform and the practicing trends around it.

Starting With The Very Obvious and Significant Question – Is Google My Business Worth Your Effort?

Well, the one-word answer for this is Yes! If you think of it as an opportunity to advertise with Google on a platform dedicated to local targeting you get to relate with its value. As you implement GMB postings in your local marketing strategy you get to work around a whole new vent of advertising facility across Google’s network of searches that offers great local exposure to your business.

How To Go About Posting on Google My Business?

Posting on GMB is a very simple process and just takes few sorted steps without needing any expert help. Here are the steps you need to follow to get it posted right on GMB.

1. Optimize Your GMB Profile

Keep your profile information up-to-date. Put all the required information and keep your account 100% complete with details including business name, phone number, address, website, working hours, description, etc. This is important for your customers to know whom they have reached out to and interacting with and identify your business entity among other options available.

2. Go with a posting plan serving your audience engagement goal

Each business has an operating niche and an underlying communication objective to serve. Based on the purpose of engagement and the type of audiences you are targeting; you need to work on your Google posts. While you do this, you have many posting segments and formats to cover.

What’s New:

With What’s New posts you can share recent updates and developments happening in and around your business. Pass on the information about customer programs, announce product version updates, share press releases and testimonials, post the latest news, blogs, and editorials from the website. As you do this you can add different CTAs to the What’s New posts:

• Book
• Buy
• Sign Up
• Order Online
• Call Now
• Learn More
• Sign Up
• Add a Button (Optional)

Event Posts:

Promote any business event that you are organizing physically or virtually. Add the date, time, venue, program, and access details. This gets your event easily visible to your audiences and they can book their slots or permits and enquire for any details reaching out to you on the shared contact details. To get the best results with this, keep your event title short and easy to grab, describing it completely within 4 to 5 words. Following this, you can add these action buttons to your event posts:

• Book
• Buy
• Sign up
• Order Online
• Call Now
• Learn More
• Sign Up
• Add a Button (Optional)

Offer Posts:

With Offer Posts, you can promote any ongoing offer, season discount, or flash sale sharing special coupons and privilege access on selective products and the entire range. You can keep these offers exclusive to your GMB profile or link your web and digital profiles to it. As you create an offer post on your GMB profile it will be shown as a bright yellow tag. You can add start and end date to your offer posts along with these CTAs:

• Terms & Conditions
• Coupon code (optional)
• Redeem offer (optional)

Products:

Display your products and let your users know the current stock you have. These products would be listed under the Product tab that appears at the top of your Google My Business profile. You need not feature all your products in this tab and just share selective ones to get your customers the idea of the range of products you have. Here you get your customers to take action through these event triggers:

• Buy
• Order Online
• Get Offer
• Learn More

COVID-19 Update:

Google My Business has added an option for COVID-19 Update for businesses to share pandemic-related business updates. This can be about a temporary halt, changed business hours, COVID guidelines, safety protocols, policy updates, or any COVID-related news.

3. Create your post and set it live

Now is the time to create your post. You can do this through the GMB dashboard accessing it through your desktop browser or the GMB app. Get your creatives and captions created going with precise, relevant, and engaging communication ideas. While you do this try to keep your communication direct and to the point to get your users the grab it effortlessly. As you do this you have to keep it under 1500 characters. There is no need to add hashtags as they don’t make any difference to Google posts.

Also, if your post needs photos or videos, get the one created to best support your theme of communication and idea of promotion. Also, avoid picking any random artwork from Google and fall into copyright trouble.

As you create these posts, make sure you preview one before putting it live. This will save you from going wrong with your posts. Once you check it thoroughly for accuracy and consistency, hit the ‘Publish’ button to post it live.

You are allowed to put up to 10 photos or videos cumulatively under different post sections. These can appear in a different order on different devices and platforms.

4. Track your performance

You should have performance monitoring and tracking as an integral part of your GMB strategy. This is how you will get to know what’s working for you. This way you will be able to appraise and validate your post creation ideas and promotional tactics and get to work on improved and optimized posts.

While you do this try to work around variations and split test your creatives. Test-run your ads and see through the data insights and trends across timelines. This will get you to finetune your GMB post strategy to reveal the best performance and get you the most response from your campaigns.

Wrap up

Google My Business is a great way to drive local customers to your business. It is one great social posting option that every brand should include in their online media promotions strategy.

While you plan your activities on GMB make sure you do it following a proper structure and agenda going with a content calendar followed by a thorough assessment and tracking plan. Here, planned and consistent efforts can get you great online response and growth in traffic and acquisition for your business. And you are going to find integrated search optimization worth for your local business as your profile claims higher search value, better online reach, and significant brand presence.

To know more about Google My Business posts and get help with anything about Social Media Marketing, get in touch with experts at ESage Digital.