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Comprehensive Business Listings Management

June 30, 2016

Did you know that 88 percent of consumers make a habit of researching companies and products online before making in-person purchases? Pink Shark Marketing can help make sure that those efforts pay off for you, and toward that end we’re proud to introduce our latest tool for managing your business listings across the web.

If you’re a brick-and-mortar establishment that’s looking for SEO and social media services, chances are that you already had some sense of the importance of online marketing for bringing your customers face-to-face with your business. But if you aren’t up to date on the relevant statistics, you might not realize the internet can just as easily steer consumers in the wrong direction as it can deliver them to your sales counter.

Studies indicate that on average about two-thirds of online business listings contain incomplete, outdated, or otherwise inaccurate information. Collectively, these cause businesses to lose 10 billion dollars per year. The listed company may not be personally responsible for bad information on third-party sites, but with the help of Pink Shark Marketing it can correct and enhance that information, and keep it current at all times.

How Do Customers Respond to Inaccurate Info?

If you aren’t managing your business listings, you’re not only putting yourself at risk of losing individual customers; you’re running a risk of harming the overall perception of your brand.

Let’s look at it from the customer’s point of view for a moment. Imagine you’re searching for a restaurant on your favorite consumer review website and you find a listing that initially looks interesting, but it doesn’t include a link to the business’s website. So you type the name into a search engine only to find that the first page of results includes another business listing with a different address or phone number for the business.

What impression would you get from that kind of inconsistency? You’d certainly have to question where the restaurant is actually located. You might even wonder whether it’s still operating. In any event, you’d probably suspect that it had been overly lax about managing its online presence.

Even if you would personally be more forgiving, most consumers wouldn’t. In fact, 73 percent of consumers report that they lose trust in the company as a whole when online information turns out to be inaccurate. That is to say, gaps in online marketing reflect badly on the business’s actual operations.

What Can Pink Shark Marketing Do about It?

If this response to inaccurate information seems overly harsh, it’s because customers don’t realize how difficult it is to individually locate, review, and update business listings in every corner of the web, especially if you didn’t personally submit them in the first place. There are dozens of review sites, social media networks, and search engines that might pick up their information from user submissions, web crawlers, and more.

But with Pink Shark’s new business listings management tool it is now possible to align listing information across more than 60 different sites, all from one place. Furthermore, it allows you to effectively use third-party business listings as another arm of your own website or mailers, by enhancing those listings with special features and announcements of sales and promotions.

Thus, not only will you eliminate the threat of misinformation, you’ll almost certainly increase the click-through rate from each one of your 60-plus online local business listings. Online advertisements with specific featured messages tend to get more clicks overall – 50 percent more in the case of restaurants using the web to announce specials and menu changes.

Are All those Business Listings Really Important?
 It goes without saying that you’ll want to direct as much traffic as possible from your business listings to your website and storefront. But this is made more important by the fact that current trends are directing more traffic to those listings in the first place.

Consumer review sites are proliferating across the web, and more and more consumers are using them and other online platforms in order to seek out local business listings. These days, more than half of all searches have local intent. What has also grown is the ease of carrying out those searches. A customer may research your company on a PC in his home, on a tablet in another business or office, or around the corner on his smartphone.

Those searches might turn up business listings on extremely familiar sites like Facebook, Yelp, or Yahoo; or they may direct consumers to sites that are not currently household names but still maintain significant traffic from prospective customers, like Tupalo, Navmii, and EZLocal.

You’ll want to maintain an up-to-date presence on all of these sites, lest you lose customers who might have visited your business the same day they found its local listing online. Research shows that 50 percent of smartphone users do just this.

While managing all of these listings may have once seemed impossible, now it is rather simple. It only requires that you entrust Pink Shark Marketing with one additional service alongside their social media management or search engine optimization. In exchange, you will be the recipient of a guarantee that virtually no other provider of local online marketing can offer: Every consumer who reads your business name will find the same information and come away with virtually the same impression of your brand, regardless of where they found you online.

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