Marketing is an essential part of any business and the more effective our marketing effort, the broader audience we can reach. There are many ways we can improve marketing performance and some of them are more effective than others. For both offline and online businesses, marketing efforts are fairly challenging. It could all come down to how it is delivered, to whom it is being delivered and to what is being focused. People are increasingly more dependent on online services. This could apply on almost many things, such as information, services and products. Google Maps is among the best marketing tool available on the Internet. With this mapping service, it is possible for even small businesses to get themselves located by many millions of users around the world.
Actually, Google Maps is a free service that can bring a lot of productivity to us. We should make sure that our business listing can be found easily on Google Maps. It is easy to create good listing with the Local Business Center feature. It will take only a few minutes to complete and it won’t cost a thing. We should be able to control our listing and let it speak for ourselves. If we have an associated website, we should be able to integrate it with Google Maps. It is important that all details are thorough and accurate. Your edits and additional information will be shown immediately after we verify it through the Local Business Center. This should help us to properly represent our business and extends our market coverage at the same time. We could start by researching local areas for similar businesses, such as by searching for “pool cleaning Chicago”.
We should go to http://www.google.com/localbusinesscenter and sign in with our Google Account. If you still don’t have one, creating it should be very easy. Once we have logged in, we can add new listing and our business details. From here, our form can be filled with essential details and we could determine how they should be displayed. Once our business details are recorded into Google’s system, we can type in our address and the map will be zoomed automatically into our location. If Google’s best guess still isn’t quite spot-on, we could move the market to improve the accuracy. After we have confirmed the location details, we could fill in other information, such as phone numbers and email address. We should research other competitions in the area and try to use unique keywords that others haven’t used.
Hours of operation and payment options are other important details. We should include them if we want to make sure that first time buyers will become repeat customers. Our business can stand out only if we add enough interesting details. However, it is quite possible that the information doesn’t fit well on any category, so we should properly assign these details in proper areas of information.
