Making Online Marketing work for you
Did you know that small to medium business enterprises can improve their overall business turnover by up to 80% by building a trustworthy and discoverable online presence.
On 17th February, the new Head of Google Thailand, Ben King presented his thoughts on the future of Google in Thailand to a group of business owners and professional online marketers in Bangkok.
He emphasised on the huge presence of mobile technology here in Thailand and the importance of making your business discoverable online. Many online searches are carried out on the spur of the moment from a mobile device and if your business can’t easily be discovered when users are searching, you will lose business – it’s as simple as that!
How to make your business more discoverable online
Google offers a service to help local businesses called ‘Google My Business’ this will enable you to create an online business profile which can show up as a map result when people search for related products or services in your area.
For example if you own a beauty salon, you can set your Google My Business account to display when people search for Beauty Salon in Chonburi.
In order to get started, you will need to register with google.com/mybusiness and get verified by way of receiveing a postcard with a PIN which you enter into your Google listing. Here in Thailand, the postcards can take longer to arrive and they have been known to take up to 8 weeks to arrive. If you are struggling to get your business verified on google.com/mybusiness you can contact the Google office in Bangkok who will help you to resolve the problem and identify alternative verification solutions if the postcard optiion is not working for you.
Once your business listing has been verified, then you need to make sure that it is as attractive as possible to your potential customers. Make sure that you fill out all of the information regarding opening hours and services offered and add images and videos to your listing wherever possible.
Google usually only shows three My Business listings for each search query, so it’s important that you ask your clients to leave reviews about your services, this will help to show Google that your business is trustworthy and has a good reputation. You can make this easy for your clients to do by sending a link to your My Business listing directly to their gmail (they must be logged into their gmail in order to leave a review)
If you have any questions regarding Google My Business or any other Google products you can visit https://support.google.com/?hl=en
