Issue 9: Boost Business Growth With Fame Focus
Lead with your storytelling foot first and share your stories.
Fame Is Another Word For Brand
If the word branding sounds like an excuse for wasting money on fluffy metrics, you’re not alone. Many senior business leaders and owners feel this way. But how do you feel about increasing your fame?
Fame. Reputation. Branding. Call it what you will.
How people feel about your company matters. Do they feel smarter, more on trend, or safer secure in the knowledge that when asked, they can say your name with confidence?
In a world where technology companies want to know everything, truly understanding word of mouth and sentiment has proved elusive - until now.
Technology is advancing to the point where computers are interpreting sentiment, and separating the real from the fake. The facts from the misinformation.
For example, Google wants to understand what people think of things. This could be a product, service, place or brand such as your company. You didn’t think I was joking about Entity SEO and things did you? Understanding what is a thing and how we think about it is the next leap forward in how computers can interpret our world.
How well known or famous your business is in your region is becoming a measurable thing. Predicting what people will do is big business.
Hollywood has been using social media sentiment for awhile to predict box office performance for movie launches, and insurance companies know a thing or two about risk and the probability of something happening. Adtech is another industry keen to predict your next tap or keystroke.
Neural networks are coming to solve many of the greatest puzzles and mysteries of our lifetime. Solving the climate crisis or finding cures for diseases are just two of the ways quantum computing and such networks can be applied.
For Google’s core product of search, machine learning is now actively working to maintain the high quality of search results and user satisfaction. That’s how they keep people continuing to use Google services and grow its advertising business.
Rolling out specific review updates in April and December of last year, 2021 was another baby step forward for Google’s approach to learning sentiment at scale.
Reviews and review related content is more important than ever. If you’re not paying attention, someone else is going to eat your lunch.
What Are You Famous For?
Sentiment and reputation management from a regional perspective, used to be one of those lower priorities you could get away with leaving to one side until you had time to get around to tackling it.
You might get the odd negative review on Yelp, Facebook or Google My Business but it was unlikely to keep you awake at night.
If we think of time decay or the length of time it takes for a reputation to go from ‘best restaurant in the area’ to ‘don’t bother it’s no longer any good’, I’ve noticed it’s often a six to twelve month evolution. Within a year any business can go from having strong word of mouth to the exact opposite.
We’re all familiar with the power TripAdvisor has over people’s decision making. We understand the influence reviews have over us when we’re shopping on Amazon or booking a hotel for a holiday.
Businesses outside of travel and retail have arguably been less affected by the review culture revolution.
There’s a case to be made that December 2021 marked the first major shift in how review related content influences your visibility - and reputation - in Google search results.
Combine this with media companies’ increased focus on local stories to maintain engagement and ad revenues, and those firms and companies proactive in keeping local PR up to date will reap the rewards.
Example: If you’re called ‘Hot Property Solicitors’ then in the short term, Google isn’t going to have any trouble interpreting what you’re supposed to be famous for and HOW TO MEASURE YOUR REPUTATION IN THAT CONTEXT accordingly.
Whereas if you’re a trendy hipster bar like ‘Abandon Ship’ then your branding bio needs to not to forget to mention consistently that you’re a licensed bar and where to find you. Otherwise the machine learning’s lack of certainty might decrease your brand visibility. Very subtle tweaks to existing messaging would likely do the trick.
Things need to be clear to people as much as computers. Sentiment measurement is no longer just for Hollywood and insurance companies. How people feel about your brand and your business starts with local PR.
What’s your story?
Actionable Advice
If you’re going to build the fame of your business - in order to support commercial growth - you will need contacts.
Who in the local or regional media is a champion for your business?
My advice for startups looking to bootstrap your PR is to find the contact details for local journalists and freelance writers, introduce yourself, and keep them in the loop as to your ongoing story. You never know when it will dovetail into their need to produce something at short notice. Consistency of PR updates will help this.
For first impressions, a letter (gasp!) might have more impact than an email that can easily end up in the junk folder. The novelty factor alone of a letter should work in your favour. We’re all inboxed out these days.
Social media DMs might work in a supporting role but again, appreciate not everyone can keep on top of them. My own LinkedIn mailbox has a backlog that is unlikely to ever get fully resolved, so be kind by being brief and respectful.
Those of you with an existing PR agency supplier or in-house PR capability can benchmark what you achieved in the last two years and decide what goals to set for brand and commercial growth. Now is the time to raise the question of how to get more SEO value out of your local PR approach.
Building your fame is hard if you’re constantly stuck in the daily grind of putting out fires and doing the hands-on service delivery aspects of the job.
Give your company the opportunity to regularly show the world how it’s doing and what your vision is for the short and long term future.
Share your vision.
Fame Leads To More Leads & Sales
There’s rarely a month goes by without this writer receiving an email from a new startup looking for digital marketing help. Or an up-and-coming business saying they’ve just fired their agency.
It goes as follows: nobody has ever heard of the company, they want to spend money on ads to create sales. They’re not interested in branding and say they can’t afford to invest in anything that doesn’t directly create sales or leads that convert.
It’s not rocket science to see that when presented with a choice between a company you’ve never heard of before, and a similar company you are more familiar with, that the unknown company will rarely get the lead or the sale.
So why do people ignore this basic concept when it’s their own money on the line? And believe me, they do. The saying ‘can't see the forest for the trees’ applies to most companies in this situation.
Founders and business owners, in their impatience due to money invested, turn every time to digital marketing to wave a magic wand and do the impossible: create instant desirability that returns a profit on ad spend.
If it was that easy you’d have more choices than Coke vs Pepsi, Sky TV vs Virgin, or your most famous local restaurant vs the one that just went out of business.
Before you spend money on ads, first measure how famous you are locally and in your wider region. Increasing your fame now with PR is how you achieve the best ROAS later down the road. The cliche of timing is everything is a cliche because it happens to be true. Always, always, always lead with your storytelling foot first.
Local SEO Update
December is such a hectic time of year, you’d be forgiven for not focusing on the impact of Google’s local search update - arguably THE most important one for all businesses with premises.
How easily people can find you and the impact on your discoverability, should be clearer by now. Your stats within the Google My Business and Search Console profiles will reveal whether the change has been positive, negative or none at all.
Whatever your business type, if you’re not easily seen in the search results since this latest update, feel free to get in touch and ask us how we can help.
We solve these challenges every day. We have a strong track record of helping companies overcome such obstacles. A key objective in all of our client work is creating a sustainable foundation for longterm growth.
You’d be surprised how many websites list local business contact information, how many inconsistencies exist, and the negative impact this has on Google being able to understand how trustworthy and legitimate your company actually is in their machine learning eyes, so to speak.
From your About Us page, to your bio across all of your social media profiles, how consistent is your basic details as well as your claim to fame? Start there and focus on getting an accurate, consistent brand message across to your potential clients and customers.
Positive change can begin today if we take that tiny first step and tell ourselves it’s ‘good enough’. Perfection only holds us back for fear of criticism.
Tell the world what you’re passionate about in your line of work.
News
Ayrshire: Councillors back Ayr bakery over planners in pink paint-job appeal - LINK
Glasgow: Scottish Engineering appoints first female president - LINK
Edinburgh's Menzies Aviation ramps up digital focus with key appointment - LINK
Dundee: Breaking Down Social Barriers Through Music and Gardening - LINK
SpaceX rocket launch coup for Britain’s most northerly inhabited island - LINK
Stonehaven entrepreneur gets backing for women’s start-up academy - LINK
Facebook and Twitter ‘failing to tackle fake review factories’ - LINK
How to improve your local ranking on Google - LINK
Microsoft Advertising Shopping campaigns reporting enhancements - LINK
Starling Bank: Facebook boycott has caused ‘no noticeable decline’ in marketing performance - LINK
Clear winner for the most consistent, highest-performing FB campaign - LINK
The State of Web Scraping 2022 - LINK
Fonts Knowledge, a new resource from Google - LINK
Global social media statistics research summary 2022 - LINK
Smartly’s Ryanne Laredo on creativity, privacy, and diversity in social advertising - LINK
5 Ways Smart People Sabotage Their Success - LINK
And Finally…
Recent Twitter #ecomchat debate asked the question, “What else can you audit from competitors' activity, aside from just their websites? How would you do it & why?”
This answer is an excellent summary of competitor research options.
Google Trends has long been used for discovering insights but you may be less familiar with the likes of Social Blade and Milled. You might find them useful.
Until next time - good luck!
Andrew @ Big Pond
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