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Tag: customer reviews

  • What is Earned Media & What is its Value

    The entirety of the media rests on three main pillars – Earned Media, Paid Media, and Owned Media. Paid media refers to digital and analog advertising that includes social media, newspapers, and billboards. Owned media is any material that is published directly by the brand either as the company’s blog or through its social media channels. Earned Media is a term that refers to the publicity that is gained through efforts that are promotional in nature. The material is usually filtered through third parties like journalists, bloggers or end consumers.

    Examples of Earned Media in the offline space include news media coverage, ratings and reviews in traditional media outlets, consumer-to-consumer conversations about products including advice and referrals, or product demonstrations by consumers to other consumers. Online earned media include publicity mentions in digital media outlets, online WOM (word of mouth) referrals, posting on online communities or social networks, and online ratings and reviews.

    Benefits of Earned Media
    Challenges of Earned Media
    Earned Media Value(EMV) and Why it Matters
    EMV Calculation
    Effective Usage of Earned Media Value
    Conclusion

    Benefits of Earned Media

    There are many considerable benefits of earned media. Some key advantages include –

    Brand Exposure

    Earned media can boost organic brand exposure through word-of-mouth communication, cross-channel engagement, further research through search engines or social media, and last but not least conversion. Earned media has the added advantage of converting a customer even after the passage of time after consuming content.

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    Brand Loyalty

    Existing customers of a brand feel an enhanced connection with it after reading positive coverage and reviews thus converting them to organic ambassadors that further endorse the brand.

    Brand Credibility

    Positive reviews, organic brand endorsements, and brand representation in authoritative outlets lend further credibility and trustworthiness to it. It legitimizes the brand’s position in the market

    SEO Advantage

    The search engine rankings of the brand receive a substantial boost as brands earn backlinks on credible sites with a high domain or page authority.

    Earned Media: What Is It and How Do You Get It?

    Challenges of Earned Media

    The many advantages of earned media are also peppered with a few challenges. There is ample traffic on the web, hence making it difficult to cut through the noise with a compelling brand-centric story that contributes in terms of ROI (Return of Interest). Secondly, it becomes difficult to track the individual sentiments of each reader without conducting in-depth interviews to understand their takeaway from the PR material. Hence, quantitative results for earned media are difficult to demonstrate.

    Earned Media Value(EMV) and Why it Matters

    Earned Media Value or EMV is a metric that helps brands to quantify the monetary value of their marketing and PR activity. It also helps companies to evaluate the effectiveness of their earned media initiatives. This evaluation considers users’ social interaction with brands, including shares, likes, and comments on social media, blog posts, and ratings on review sites.

    EMV Calculation

    There is no standardized way to calculate earned media value. However, one common method to calculate EMV is to apply the formula that multiplies the total number of impressions by the average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) by an adjustable variable like recall rate or the number of likes and shares. The word ‘impressions’ refers to when a user sees the campaign. Hence the formula for calculating the earned media value would be –

    💡EMV = Impressions x CPM x Adjustable Variable

    Effective Usage of Earned Media Value

    Earned media value is an important KPI when tracked along with other metrics like influencer community size and share of voice. It can be used by marketers to benchmark the impact of individual posts, influencers, products, and campaigns on brand awareness and reputation. It is the single most established metric for performance benchmarking within the creator economy and the social media marketing space. Earned Media Value provides companies and brands with invaluable data that helps in making business decisions that improve strategy and approach contributing to lasting growth.

    Conclusion

    Although considered by many as a vanity metric, earned media value is especially important to brands because it captures all earned media and all content that is not created by the brand itself. Earned media has the capacity to increase trust among consumers and drive serious sales conversions. In addition, the creator economy is growing and so is the importance of influencer marketing. Robust influencer programs seem to be the most effective way to increase the volume of earned media, subsequently increasing the earned media value.

    FAQs

    What is earned media, and how does it differ from owned and paid media?

    Earned media is unpaid publicity, owned media is content a brand controls, and paid media refers to digital and analog advertising.

    What are some examples of earned media?

    Some examples of earned media include:

    • Media coverage
    • Social media mentions or shares of a brand
    • Featuring reviews or photos on social media
    • Influencer endorsements
    • Word-of-mouth referrals or recommendations from satisfied customers or clients

    What role does social media play in earned media?

    Social media enables users to share opinions and experiences about a brand, which can lead to earned media.

    How can you measure the effectiveness of earned media?

    There are several ways to measure the effectiveness of earned media:

    • Media coverage
    • Social media mentions
    • Website traffic
    • SEO performance
    • Brand reputation
    • Sales or conversions

  • Things to Consider for Creating a Good Survey Form

    While surveys can be a very effective tool to obtain data and analyse them, it can be challenging to get people to complete your service, especially on an online platform. There is always a risk of the respondent leaving the survey midway.

    Although the probability of such an incident cannot be nullified, it can be significantly reduced by making the survey forms more attractive. Today, there are lot of software and tools to make your service precise and attractive. Here are a few nuances that you should keep in your mind while making a survey form.

    Things to Consider While Making a Survey Form

    Conceptual Clarity

    While you may be sure about the overall requirements of your company and its various wings, it is vital to have a proper plan with regard to the surveys as well. Brainstorm on the things that you should ask the respondents and in what ways they should reply. Keep in mind the possible feedback that you would receive and how you would take action on it.

    Choosing the Right Software

    SurveyMonkey Survey forms for different requirement
    SurveyMonkey Survey forms for different requirement

    The overall look and structure of the survey play a very important role in getting more respondents. Depending on the kind of questions that you plan to ask, have a clear idea about the platform you will use to formulate the whole survey form.

    There are many websites like the Type Form available for the same purpose. Another alternative of type form websites is Survey Monkey, WordPress, Paper Form, etc.

    While each of them has its own pros and cons, it is clearly up to the curator of the survey form to decide the platform through which the entire thing should be made.

    Here is a brief insight into making survey forms in WordPress.

    Making Surveys Through Word Press

    Finding the right tool for a survey is the basic tenet of making a survey form in WordPress. While many third-party surveys allow you to create survey forms, they also store a lot of your data. At this juncture, WPForms becomes one of the best options available in the world. It is very safe and user-friendly. These forms only need to be dropped into the WordPress form builder, enabling you to create any forms. There is also a survey forms addon which makes the entire process easier and gives you beautiful Survey reports. To make use of this, you need to have WPForms pro. These WP forms have redesigned survey templates that significantly reduce the initiation time of curating a survey. All you need to do is to drag and drop the required template to kickstart your process.

    They also help you adopt different innovative survey feels like multiple-choice, Likert scale etc. You can also have survey reports inclusive of charts, tables and graphs. These survey results can also be curated beautifully in the WP forms and can be exported in PDF, print or JPEG format. There is no doubt that WordPress forms are a single-stop solution to all types of survey forms or any other forms that one will ever meet. The diversity that they provide saves you from the trouble of using multiple plug-ins.

    The steps involved are as follows

    1. Creating a survey form with the installation and activation of the WPForms plug-in on the WordPress site
    2. Customising their survey form depending upon your requirements
    3. Configuration of the survey form settings to edit various variables like name, form description et cetera
    4. Addition of the survey form to the concerned website using facilities like embed, add a form, or by using WB forms widget
    5. You can start viewing the survey form reports after people fill the survey by visiting WP forms.

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    Brevity and Simplicity

    There is absolutely no doubt that the beauty of a survey form lies in its brevity and simplicity. The more brief your survey is, the more attempted it becomes. People will not make an effort to attend a survey form that is elaborate and complex.

    Customisation For Target Audience

    Depending upon your target audience, you can make changes to the entire structure of the survey form. For example, you can add visual illustrations when necessary if the surveys or for children. The same technique can be applied to the surveys meant for the adults if you think such visual representations will make the questions more straightforward and more engaging.

    Conclusion

    Survey forms are meant to be informative and not entertaining. One needs to ensure that all the questions are right to the point and elicit independent answers. The questions have to be carefully framed to prevent any personal bias from entering into the form. While using the available websites, make sure you go through their privacy policies and be aware of the data that might be in their hand. Amidst the chaos, WordPress is a safer option. There are other websites to which can be used after careful observation. However, there is no tool that is perfect. The most important thing is to get around the drawbacks and find a solution for them as ideally as possible. Surveys being a very important component that determines the future endeavours of a company should be considered seriously, and every nuance of the survey forms should be carefully addressed.

    FAQs

    What is a survey form?

    A survey form is a set of questions designed to gather information about customers’ feedback, preferences, and requirements.

    What are different types of Surveys?

    Different Types of surveys are:

    • Online surveys
    • Paper surveys
    • Telephonic Surveys
    • One-to-One interviews

    Survey Monkey is the most popular online survey tool.

    What are the free online survey tools?

    Free online survey tools are:

    • Google Forms.
    • SurveyMonkey
    • SoGoSurvey
    • SurveyPlanet
    • Zoho Survey
    • Crowdsignal
    • Typeform
    • Jotform

    What are the features of a good Survey form?

    Features of a good survey form are:

    • It should be clear and Concise
    • It should be simple
    • It should be relevant to the requirement

  • How To Build A SaaS Referral Program? – A Stepwise Guide

    SaaS referral programs are interesting to build and at the same time some amount of effort is also required. However, there is a way to build a SaaS referral program which you can follow. But, before moving on to building programs one should be thorough about the basics of it.

    With the simple process given below, you can try building a SaaS program for yourself. Whether it is a business or for any other purpose it will make your work much easier.

    Steps To Build A SaaS Referral Program?
    Step 1. Customers Should Be Motivated To Share Your Product Or Service
    Step 2. Know What Your SaaS Referral Program Should Be About
    Step 3. Decide Your Incentive
    Step 4. Choosing The Right Referral Tool
    Step 5. Outlining Terms and Conditions
    Step 6. Promoting Your SaaS Referral Program
    Step 7. Track Your Results
    Conclusion
    FAQs

    Building a Referral Programs Effectively

    Steps To Build A SaaS Referral Program?

    Step 1. Customers Should Be Motivated To Share Your Product Or Service

    Satisfied and Happy Customers
    Satisfied and Happy Customers

    Satisfied customers are the reason for a business or a service to sustain and flourish in the market. So, your business or your service should satisfy them and let them share about your business with others. But, how does this contribute to building a successful SaaS referral program?

    Well, you should have the perfect business to attract customers and customers should be happy with your service. Incentives and rewards do attract customers but customers will not refer your SaaS product to their personal network until and unless they are satisfied with your service.

    You can start by conducting research or online reviews so that you gain some data about what customers think about your product. By doing this you will be able to gain in-depth data and accordingly, you can take necessary actions.

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    Step 2. Know What Your SaaS Referral Program Should Be About

    Do not be confused because this is something almost similar to an elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is something that you propose an idea in front of someone within 20-30 seconds. Similarly, your referral program should be something that should grab the attention of the customers.

    However, you should try to keep your referral messaging short and to the point. Given below are some examples that you can try out.

    • Try to get 16 GB of free space by inviting your friends to Dropbox
    • Also do not forget to invite friends on Evernote
    • Refer as many friends as possible so that you can earn rewards

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    –

    Step 3. Decide Your Incentive

    Provide incentive to customers to make them happy
    Provide incentive to customers to make them happy

    Businessmen would want customers to share their products with as many people as possible. But, this does not happen in the real world. This is when you decide to give incentives that will make your referral program much easier.

    Do not go for incentives that will make the customers uninterested and boring but try to bring something new and catchy to make customers share your product. Given below are some ideas that you can try out.

    • 50% discount on your next bill
    • Free upgrade (premium version)
    • Cash credits (example $50 to offset next bill when a friend signs up)

    Step 4. Choosing The Right Referral Tool

    There are several tools that you may come across for referral marketing. Most of these tools are great but you should find out the most suitable one for you. Tools are used to set up programs manually and this helps a lot. But, in order to track down the effectiveness of your program tools are necessary for doing the job. Some tools that you can try considering are Growsurf, ReferralHero, and Viral Loops.


    Try Impact for Your SaaS Referral Program

    Step 5. Outlining Terms and Conditions

    Terms and conditions for SaaS referral program
    Terms and conditions for SaaS referral program

    It is important to make certain conditions while creating a SaaS referral program so that bases are covered. Customers will be looking at it and they will see whether you are ready to make referral bonuses. If a referral done by a person has been done successfully then the person can turn into a customer.

    Other than these you would also want to make sure to specify the people who are eligible for referral bonuses. People should know beforehand about the offers that you want to make to them.

    Step 6. Promoting Your SaaS Referral Program

    Building a SaaS referral program successfully is not the end of it. There is something that you need to do and that is ‘PROMOTIONS’. You can take the help of social media to promote your referral program so that a large number of people will know about it.

    There are several ways you can promote your referral program. For example, given below are some methods you can use.

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    Step 7. Track Your Results

    Without tracking the results you will not be able to judge your growth. Therefore, it is important to track and as well as to measure your results. First of all, you have to think about how you can track your results. You can take the help of some popular metrics systems for tracking.

    Some of the most popular metrics include the following things.

    • Percentage of people who have become referrers
    • The percentage of the numbers of referrals sent
    • Conversion rates like conversion of sign-ups through referrals

    There are many more metrics that you should be able to think of based on your goals and targets. Make sure that your goals and target are met because that is what you have been working for.

    Conclusion

    In the end, you need to make sure that the referral program that you created is a success. Success should be in any senses not just focussing only on one thing. The next thing after building a SaaS referral program you should try out advanced level techniques for referring your services and products.

    FAQs

    What are the four elements that I should consider while building a referral program?

    The four elements that you should consider are:

    • Offers
    • Communication
    • Execution
    • Supportive Programming

    How to create an effective referral?

    There are various ways that you can create a referral quite effectively. Focus on what the customers would want and accordingly, you can drive them to make your referrals effective.

    What are the examples of SaaS referral programs?

    Some of tools for SaaS referral programs are:

    • Dropbox
    • Evernote
    • Shoeboxed
    • Notion
    • Drift

  • How to Deal with Negative Customer reviews in 2021

    The perception of your company among the customers is one of the most important things determining the firm’s integrity and values. In such a scenario, the reachability of a bad review can be manifold when compared to positive reviews. It is widely known among entrepreneurs that while a happy customer talks about your company to 3 people, a disappointed one can talk about it to at least 15 people.

    With the platforms of sharing reviews going online, these numbers now extend over hundreds of millions. Hence it is crucial to address negative reviews in an appropriate manner to ensure that they don’t hamper your organisation’s image in any way.

    An appropriate handling of negative reviews can compensate for the damage that is inflicted by a negative review. Here are a few things that you should keep in mind and practice while responding to negative customer reviews.

    Apologising is the key
    Addressing the Customer
    Acknowledge their Concerns
    Assurance is of Utmost Importance
    Compensate Appropriately
    Letting Go
    FAQ

    Apologising is the key

    In the case of many reviews, you may feel that the customer is being unreasonable and unaware of the reality. No matter what the issue is, it is important that you begin by apologising for the difficulties that the customer faced for the sake of your future customers.

    You can start your response by stating that “we are extremely sorry that we didn’t reach up to your expectations”, or “we are so sorry to hear that” et cetera.

    Addressing the Customer

    As automation and bot responses became more common, personalised responses became very important to ensure authenticity and maintain excellent customer relationships. Addressing the customer by name will make them feel that their concerns are not answered by a robot but by people who are genuinely willing to cater to their issues.

    Acknowledge their Concerns

    This is one of the most important parts of handling negative reviews. No matter what their concerns are, acknowledge their issue and empathise with them. Let them know that you are with them. This will give the person who wrote the review and the customers who will read the reviews in future a deep sense of confidence in you.

    You can use sentences like “We understand how bad you must have felt” etc.

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    Assurance is of Utmost Importance

    In most of the cases acknowledging and apologising for the unpleasant experiences of the customer is not enough. It is important to assure them that you are working on the issue and are sure that the issue will not happen again.

    While you make this promise to the customer, ensure that you are doing the needful to practice what you promise. Such an assurance aids not only the customer but also ensure the improvement of the firm. It will also help you look into the issues that you would never have gone through, like the behaviour of the staff, delays in shipment, discrepancies in packaging et cetera.

    You can tell the person something like this “We have contacted the store manager to look into the issue”, “We have asked for a detailed investigation on the issue” and so on.

    Compensate Appropriately

    You should be able to analyse the issues of the customer and offer them deserving compensation. This compensation is also a form of asking the customer for a second chance.

    While such a favour or a return gift can give you a good image, it is also an excellent method to retain a disappointed customer. This compensation can be in the form of a refund, replacement, discount, free shipping, et cetera, depending on the nature of your business. You only need to offer such compensation if the issue is not fixable.

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    Letting Go

    You cannot help a person whose problem is not related to their experience but themselves. If somebody has decided to hate your firm you cannot do anything about it.

    You must be able to identify such cases and let them be. If necessary, you may acknowledge or even apologise for it without even bothering any further action. This is an essential yet difficult thing to do. Always remember that the most important thing is to focus on positive reviews and improve with the negative ones.

    Conclusion

    Customers are the most important component that drives your business forward. Their experiences should be of utmost importance to you, and hence the firm should continue to work on enhancing the experiences of valuable customers. It will also be beneficial if you have multiple customer satisfaction metrics which you can use depending on the issues of the people.

    After you acknowledge, address and solve the issue, you may even ask the person who put up the review to take them down. Always remember that gracefulness and empathy are the most important tools you have to use while handling negative reviews.

    FAQ

    Should you respond to negative Google reviews?

    Yes, you should respond to negative reviews publicly as it shows your customers that you are attentive.

    Can you review on Google anonymously?

    No, Google does not allow to review anonymously.

    Does Google remove negative reviews?

    Google only removes reviews that violates its policy.

  • Why is the UK competition watchdog planning a probe against Amazon and Google?

    The Competition and Market Authority is a regulator for competition related to the business in the United Kingdom. The Authority was founded in the year 2013 and has its headquarters in London. The organization is responsible for preventing and reducing the anti competitive activities and for strengthening the business competition. The CMA has accused Google and Amazon of fake reviews and in this article let’s look at further information regarding it.

    United Kingdom Regulators – Latest News
    UK Regulators Investigation against Amazon Google Fake Reviews
    Response from Amazon and Google on its Fake Reviews
    FAQ

    United Kingdom Regulators – Latest News

    The United Kingdom Watch Dog has accused the biggest tech companies Amazon and Google in relation to fake reviews on their platform for the goods and services. The UK regulators had stated on 2 July 2021 that they are looking into Amazon and Google in relation to it.

    The regulatory has said that online giants are not taking enough steps or putting the required efforts in order to stop the fake reviewing of products and services on their platform.

    The CMA has also conveyed that they had conducted an initial inquiry last year and had raised a lot of concerns in relation to whether the companies had been doing the required amount of work in order to detect the fake reviews for their products and services on their platforms and removing them quickly from their websites.

    UK Regulators Investigation against Amazon Google Fake Reviews

    The UK Regulators have conveyed to have started an investigation into Google and Amazon in relation to the fake review on the products and services. The Competition and Markets Authority has said that they have started a formal investigation in order to analyze whether the major tech giants have broken the consumer law of the UK by failing to protect their customers or shoppers.

    It is reported that in the previous year amidst the boom in the e-commerce industry due to the pandemic the UK regulators had looked into some top e-commerce platforms in relation to fake reviews without identifying any specific ones.

    Andrea Coscelli who is the Chief Executive of the Regulatory Authority of UK said in a press statement that the only worry of the regulator is about the consumer who would mislead by looking at the fake review and would purchase the product by spending their hard-earned money and later realize that it was not worth it.

    The Chief Executive also added that it is equally not fair that certain businesses can go against the laws and provide 5 star reviews on their products and services making them stand out and in the meanwhile, the businesses that follow the laws and regulations would lose out.

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    Response from Amazon and Google on its Fake Reviews

    Both the companies Google and Amazon have said that they would work together and provide the support to the UK Regulators with their investigation.

    Google has conveyed that the strict policies of the company have a clear statement that the reviews provided on the services and products should be based on real experiences and genuine ones and added that the company would soon take action and remove the abusive contents to even disabling the user accounts if they find any policy violators.

    Amazon also stated that even the company focuses on removing the fake reviews from their e-commerce websites and also avoid fake and incentivized reviews from appearing on their store as it would help in earning the trust of their customers.

    Conclusion

    Amazon has already been accused in the past of fake reviews on their products. The company has also taken specific measures in relation to it with certain Chinese products and companies. However, we will have to wait for the investigation in order to get much more clarity into it.

    FAQ

    Does Google take down fake reviews?

    Google only remove reviews that it sees to be in direct violation of their policies. It may be that there is insufficient evidence to determine whether the review is legitimate or not.

    What percent of Amazon reviews are fake?

    According to the December 2018 findings, the supplements category had the highest share of fake product reviews on Amazon, with a reported 64 percent of reviews being considered fake.

    Are fake Amazon reviews illegal?

    In several countries, paying people to conduct fake reviews is an illegal practice that damages the rights of consumers.

  • Yelp Business Model: How Does It Make Money

    Every small startup requires has needed an opportunity that benefits them in the long term. Every startup needs to utilize any resources that they have in order to get more exposure and attract more customers to their businesses online. Similarly, Yelp is known to be a brand of its own and was created to enable people to access more businesses online. Yelp has been recognized as a verified and accountable entity in which people can place their trust and access good local businesses.

    Company Name Yelp
    Headquaters San Francisco, California, USA
    Founded On 2004
    CEO Jeremy Stoppelman
    Employees 6030 (as of 2018)
    Annual Revenue $942 Million (as of 2018)
    Products & Services Yelp Deals, Home Services, Beauty & Spa services, Food, Health and Medical

    Yelp users can not only search and review businesses but can also create a profile or become friends other users, chat on different online forums and can go for meet ups offline.  According to a report by the wall street journal, Yelp has set a price for their IPO which will sell at 7.15 million shares at a price of $12 to $14. That would value the company at $838.6 million at the high end of that range. The company has known grown because of getting users to write reviews of businesses, engaging them through social networking features and through search engine traffic.

    The logo of Yelp.
    The logo of Yelp

    Yelp is now known to have 66 million different monthly visitors and more than 5.7 million mobile devices and has collected a total of 25 million reviews since it came out in 2004. As of Dec 31, 2018, Yelp has a total of 177.4 million reviews of local businesses.It also generates almost all of its revenue from advertisements like for example in the year of 2011, 91.4% of its revenue came from advertising.

    Not only that, it generates its revenue from two different kinds off advertising. First is the local advertising from businesses that want to be featured on yelp which is 76.8% of total revenue and the second one being Brand advertising that displays ads on yelp.com in order to get more traffic from search engine.

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    Yelp Business Model

    Yelp has an average of 28 million mobile application visitors, 74 million unique mobile web visitors and 83 million unique desktop visitors. The yelp business model is something you should definitely be aware of because it is online business directory which lists and makes local businesses visible to users it also differentiates itself with the crowd sourced reviews of those businesses on its platform. Furthermore the company has expanded its business model by adding reservation services and food delivery and take out services. The business model includes factors like:

    Customers prefer to use yelp to find local businesses
    Customers prefer to use yelp to find local businesses 

    Customers of Yelp

    Yelp has 3 customer segments or target audience which include Local business, user and content creators/contributors:

    • Local businesses are segmented on the basis of Location, Type of service, Restaurant Cuisine, Price point, hours of operations, food delivery and takeout.
    • Users are divided into demographics, location, interests and spending profile.
    • Content contributors include the community of active reviewers that are constantly engaged in fun social exchanges.
    The different ways Yelp helps a customers along with the local businesses
    The different ways Yelp helps a customers along with the local businesses

    Value preposition of Yelp

    • Local businesses – when it comes to local business yelp is a trusted platform because it gives them the opportunity to engage with a large audience and increases their visibility while also sourcing their target audience. It gives the businesses an opportunity to increase their revenue, provide them business data and take care of reservation and wait list management.
    • Users – the platform helps uses by giving them an opportunity to browse local businesses, discover new places, save time and money, see pictures and videos, compare prices, read reviews and make better choices.
    • For the content creators – Yelp invests a lot in engaging and fun content which makes it easier for the users and businesses to interact with each other but when it comes to content creators it company offers them recognition in yelp elite and they can also get invited to special events and more.

    Customer service done by Yelp

    The high quality customer service is also one of the reasons why Yep business model is so successful as it offers services like:

    • Self-service platform, which makes it possible for its users to serve themselves anytime easily and effectively.
    • Yelp is also transparent when it comes to reviews, rating, tips, photos and ensuring that it is always easily accessible to its customers online.
    • Build a brand reputation for your local businesses and also makes considerable efforts in managing their brand image.
    • Yelp allows its users to place food orders directly without leaving the platform.
    • Yelp allows businesses to interact with their customers in a friendly and approachable manner with features like Request A Quote, a direct response to reviews, Yelp reservation, etc.
    • Yelp is successful when it comes to establishing a flourishing community of users, content contributors and other local business that interact with each other.

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    How does Yelp make Money

    The company makes most of its money through service programs which can be both self-service and full service. The other money making strategy is invested in its advertising and profile enhancement services that benefit the businesses greatly. The categories are as follows:

    Yelp provides businesses with both paid and free advertising products. It also utilizes its website and mobile app to deliver targeted search advertising to a broader audience. In 2018, 97% of its revenue was generated because it was dependent on advertisement. All the advertising products sold by their partners and business listings are recognized as yelp advertising revenue. It offers services that come under the umbrella of advertising, which are:

    The breakdown of Yelp Reviews
    The breakdown of Yelp Reviews
    • Enhanced – The purpose of this product is in order to prevent other business ads from appearing on the business listing pages of enhanced profile business customers.
    • Branded Profile – This feature is a business’s purchase a branded profile program to ensure that they are provided with premium features to increase their business listings. This allows the businesses to choose their preferred method advertising  done by videos or images which are best suited to portray their portray their slideshow feature or simply updating their listing information.
    • Yelp verified license – In this feature the yelp business listing page offers a paid upgrade license which appears like a badge. It is specifically only for the licensed advertisers and their local or home services category.
    • Ad Re-sales – Yelp can also resell some of its advertising products to generate more revenue and is done through their partnership with certain agencies like DexYP. It has also launched its yelp ads certified partners programs in 2018 to allow its collaborative agencies so they can manage to sell ad campaigns at the behalf of their business clients.

    Transaction revenue

    Yelp has come with other tools and features such as ensuring transactions between their consumers and businesses which are facilitated appropriately. This features accounts to 1% of yelps total revenue. These include services like:

    Revenue Dec 2018 (in million) % of revenue
    Advertising $907.49 97%
    Transactions $13.69 1%
    Other Servives $21.59 2%
    Total Revenue $942.77 100%

    • Yelp Platform – Through partner integration, the company enables its consumers to proceed with their transactions on the yelp website or app. Consumer can order any products they want in the ranging from show tickets to flowers.
    • Grubhub Partnership – The Company generates substantial revenue from their yelp Eat24 business. They did this by placing their orders through yelp Eat24 in which restaurants own arrangements with respective business and are paid a commission percentage fee.  Yelp sold this platform in 2018 and now offer the user to select from a wide range of restaurants.
    • Yelp Deals – This product has now created a large revenue for yelp especially when it allows the business owners to promote its services and products on the platform but at discounted rates.
    • Gift Certificates – The business owners can now sell gift certificates at a full price to the consumers that have yelp gift certificate products. The cost of this service however ranges from $10 up to $500.

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    Full service Program

    Yelp Full service program provide all Yelp free tools and self-service program tools plus targeted Yelp ads, upgraded business page features and dedicated support. The business who buy full service program get:

    • All the free tools – all the tools of the free suite to showcase the business and connect with the yelp community.
    • Video Production and hosting – Yelp sends a videographer to produce a professional video for the yelp business page on which businesses buy full service program.
    • All the self service program tools – it includes online shopping, reservations, profile enhancements and the deals and gift certificate
    • Dedicated Support – businesses which buy full service program are entitled to dedicate support by yelp staff.

  • How to Use Twitter for Business in 2020 | Twitter best practices 2020

    Twitter is a social media for microblogging. With 330 million active users per month, Twitter is one of the most used Social media platform. If that’s not enough, a total of 5,786 tweets are sent each second, which makes it 500 million tweets every single day. According to a report, 75% of B2B and 65% of B2C businesses are marketing on Twitter, which is more than any major social media individually except Facebook. Marketers know the value of using Twitter for business.

    You also might be using Twitter from a long time but have you planned for using it to generate leads and grow your business? If not, this is the time to do so. Twitter can be used as a platform to interact with your customers and to find more cutomers to generate leads. Hence, can be beneficial for your business.

    Let’s see some of the best practices for twitter you can do to improve your brand value on Twitter.

    Best way to use Twitter for Business

    Create a Brand-Centric profile

    As a business, you need to create a business account on Twitter. Your business profile should contain all details, contacts and social media mentions of your brand. There should be pictures and tweets related to the product. The user reviews can also be a part of the profile. The Twitter profile benefits the company to create and maintain its brand image.

    Reply the queries

    You need to be attentive towards the customer queries regarding the product, they have tweeted you. This will create an image of an attentive and caring brand which replies it’s customers on time. Many times, you get to know a lot about your products down side from customer reviews.

    Grab Customers

    Find your potential customers by the tweets people post. Keep searching for the relevant tweets. If a person complains about your competitor’s service, grab the opportunity and promote your product there. To grab more followers, several tools can come in handy. These tools can provide a good rate of followers to the account, grabbing more attention of potential customers. Some of such tools are- Crowdfire, Tweepsi, Socialboss, etc. These tools will be helpful in finding the potential followers and will eventually benefit the company.

    Twitter Analytics

    Twitter provides a tool called Twitter Analytics. With Twitter Analytics you can analyse the performance of your tweets. You can track your customer’s interest, occupation, gender, status, buying behavior, etc. With that data, you can modify your product or business/marketing strategy. Analysing Twitter data can be the best practise for your business.

    Retweet

    Retweet is to reshare any tweet on Twitter. So, if your customer is happy, they can retweet your tweets. However you need to ask your best customer to retweet your promotional tweet through tweets or messages.

    Customer Service

    You can ask people to tweet their problems on Twitter. Solve their problem if it is possible to do that in the comments only. Moreover, tell them that you will look into their problem ASAP if you can’t solve their problems by just explaining it. This is one of the biggest benefit of Twitter, as not only it will solve your customers’ problems, but it show others how much you care about your customers.

    Watching the Competitors

    You can keep an eye on the activity of your competitors with the help of Twitter. Analyse their marketing strategy, customer service, customer’s problems, etc. After that, you can create your strategy to beat your competitors. Analysing competitor’s strategy can be the most effective way of using Twitter for business.

    Trends can provide a boost to the company online if done the right way. However, you need to do it in the right time because trends has time limit. Twitter can help you analyse and keep a track of the existing and upcoming social media trends. With the help of the trend, you can come up with better marketing plans and products. Also, you can post anything which is relevant to your product and to the trend. Your post can go viral if you did it good.

    Keyword Research

    With the help of tools like Hootsuite or TweetDeck, you can monitor some keywords and identify the lead. For example, you can set 3 keywords say “gifts” “handmade” and “customized”. So, when anyone uses these keywords in your area, you can get in touch with them and pitch your product if you deal in handmade gifts.

    Pin Tweet

    You can pin tweets so that when anyone visits your profile, the first tweet they see is the one you want them to see. You can pin your best promotional tweet on your profile. This will help your potential customers to know about product or service.

    Influencer Marketing

    Influencers are the perfect wingman for the companies as they are going to match you up with the potential and the required customers for the brand. Hence, look for the people who are expert influencers in the respective field, that your business deals with and pay them to promote your brand. As they have the required market, your business will surely get the attention it requires.

    Regular update

    Don’t get away from your account for too long as it can wipe out the brand’s image. Hence, keep on regular posting about the products and other updates. This way you will be in the mind of the followers. Also, it shows how responsible you are towards your brand which is a good thing from the investor’s point of view.

    Hashtags

    Use the correct Twitter hashtags which are related to the content. Twitter hashtags makes your content available to the mass audience. Hashtags are a fun way to spread the brand across more audience. You can first do a research about the hashtag keywords which are trending and relevant. Twitter hashtags optimise the post, hence are a crucial factor for Twitter post.

    Run Ads on Twitter

    As you may feel little dip on organic reach on Twitter in 2020. Thus, you should run twitter ads to reach more people.  Twitter ads are comparatively cheap. There are different types of Twitter ads are like, promoted tweets, promoted accounts, promoted trends or website card to increase your website or blog traffic. You may run App card ads to boost the numbers of app download. It will help you to generate quality leads and conversions.

    Benefits of using twitter for marketing and brand promotion

    You might be thinking why should we use Twitter for social media marketing because there are very less active users. But here we have listed some of the benefits of using twitter for social media marketing.

    • Drive more traffic to your website
      Twitter is a platform from where you can drive a lot of traffic to your website because this is the ideal platform for audience engagement. The best thing about Twitter is that here people can engage with any type of content and there is no complex algorithm. But you have to work hard to drive traffic from Twitter. You have to update 10-12 tweets every day to get a large engagement on your content.

    If you’re not using social media to drive traffic and leads, then your brand is losing out “big time.” – Sam Hurley

    • Build your business network
      Do you want to build relation with big influencers or celebrities? If yes, then Twitter is the right platform for you, especially if you are a business. On Twitter, you will get all the high-profile from any industry. The biggest advantage of using Twitter is that here it is really easy to connect with anyone. It’s just like texting someone but here your tweets are public.

    Also read: Build Trust in Online Business

    • Generate leads easily
      It’s easy to generate leads on Twitter as compared to other social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. On Twitter when you tweet not only your targeted followers but also the public can see your tweet. So, here you have the opportunity to generate new leads and convert them into a customer. You just need to post quality content with Call-To-Action regularly. Because here you are not paying for ads so you have to put your efforts and time to get a better result.
    • Building reputation of your brand
      Twitter is a place where you can express about your brand. As Twitter is a pubic platform where your content is conveyed easily to the people. Twitter has allowed you to build the reputation of your brand by updating quality content. Even the high-profile industry believes that a brand is genuine if they interact with people a lot and they are always ready to express their feeling for the users.
    • Improve your SEO and grow organically
      Every social media platforms has a good relationship with Google. Especially twitter is the best friend of Google because your tweets are also visible on search results. So, here you have the opportunity to rank on your targeted keywords. It is the most cost-effective way to improve your online presence organically. But unlike paid ads here you have to work hard and smart.

    Conclusion

    Twitter is much more than you think. Companies know this, that is why they tweet you when you have any problems.

    In one case, a person was having a problem with the internet speed in Airtel connection, which is a reputable mobile network company in India. When he tweeted about it, Airtel didn’t respond so well. The person then tweeted “I don’t think Airtel is doing well these days, thinking of porting to Jio or Idea” (not the exact words, but something like that). Jio and Idea, the rivals, responded in minutes after that person tweeted it, asking for the personal details to register a SIM on his name. Do you know, what happened next? His Airtel internet speed boosted in just an hour or so. This shows that companies are taking Twitter so seriously.

    Hence, using Twitter for business can be proved very crucial tactic.

    So, use all the tips for Twitter mentioned above to interact with your audience, generate leads and grow your business.