My sister lives in Brooklyn NY. She lives in Williamsburg, an up and coming area. I went to visit her recently and we decided to explore a new part of town.
It was a beautiful day, so we decided to go on a long bike ride to explore new areas.
After a couple hours and going down many side streets we were a little lost and tired. If you know anything about my sister, she’s terrible with directions. And if you confront her about it, she turns into a fire breathing dragon.
I didn’t want to get her too worked up so, as it wouldn’t help anything, we decided it would be good to grab a bite to eat.
We didn’t know the area, so we did a search on our phones for a good restaurant. On the right is a screenshot of the results I pulled up.
These are the local search results on Google. The results with the pushpin markers next to them. This listing was about half way down the page. This wasn’t even the top result, but this cafe had 1,870 reviews and the closest competitor had nearly 200.
Can you guess which restaurant I checked out first on my phone?
When we got to the restaurant, I instantly knew what they had so many reviews.
As soon as you walked in there was a big picture with a pushpin marker that said, “we’re on the map! Leave a review.” And underneath that there was a bar code you scan with your phone which takes you to a website to leave a review.
We finally get seated, and have a great lunch. The food was amazing, and I notice how packed the restaurant was.
When the waitress came over to give us our check, she said, “Would you two liked to be entered into our monthly drawing of a free bottle of wine and dinner.” We said, “wow that’s great what do we have to do.”
All we had to do was give her our email addresses so she could send us a link to leave a review of our lunch that day.
Before she came back for me to sign the check, we both received an email and left a review on their Google places page.
This café knew that peer reviews were becoming popular, and people were using them to make decisions before making a purchase. And it worked like crazy because the place was packed.
This is something you need to embrace in your senior living community or home care agency.
Everyone reading this is given a free listing on the search engines, where you can encourage people to leave peer reviews.
Getting reviews of your community, is the most important action you can take with internet marketing if you’re doing it yourself. Embracing this one concept, can mean the difference between being the business that gets clicked on to learn more, or the business that doesn’t attract any clicks.
About Kevin Williams
