635: Influencer Marketing: Observe Your Competitors, Grow Your Location Based Business, and Think Outside the Box with Brand Evangelist Rev Ciancio

David "Rev" Ciancio on Local Business Marketing

David "Rev" Ciancio covers Local Business Marketing in this Marketer of the Day episode. Location based businesses can grow faster by combining clear goals, competitive observation, influencer marketing, and accurate online listings. Rev advises becoming exceptional at a few core strengths while learning enough about other functions to outsource them intelligently. He recommends watching measurable business indicators, such as whether a restaurant sells 100 pizzas a day, to recognize when change or outside help is needed. Influencer marketing works best as one part of a broader campaign rather than as a standalone solution. In one example, a restaurant launched brunch after noticing competitors had Sunday demand, then invited 15 influencers to create awareness alongside email and social promotion. Rev cites roughly $100 per 10,000 followers as a general influencer pricing benchmark while emphasizing that arrangements vary.

Rev Ciancio is a Senior Marketing, Branding and Digital Strategist with 20 years of experience in digital marketing and business development, specializing in hospitality marketing, content and local SEO. He has led many clients to new levels of local, national and international success in the hospitality, financial service and entertainment sectors.

He is also former agency owner as well as a former New York City bar owner. Rev is an “expert burger taster” and pens hospitality and marketing tips on his Instagram @revciancio as well as his LinkedIn Profile.

Quotes:                                                                                                                                       

“Be awesome at two things and outsource everything else.” - Rev Ciancio

“You are failing your business if you do not manage your online listings. Three out of four transactions for a business happen online on one of those sites before it ever happens on a business's website. So if you're not managing that information, you're basically letting the internet decide where your customer should go.” - Rev Ciancio

“Having a great website is important, but managing your information everywhere it lives is even more important.” - Rev Ciancio

Takeaways:

05:48 Success comes from being skilled at your core craft while understanding enough about business to make smart hiring choices.

08:48 Track your business metrics closely and recognize when performance stalls, as this signals the need for strategic changes.

16:26 Avoid complex solutions and focus on executing 3-4 simple, targeted strategies that can help your business move forward.

21:07 Before trying advanced marketing tactics, ensure you've covered fundamental marketing bases like email lists and social media posts.

29:08 For location-based businesses, managing online listings accurately is critical since most customer transactions start with online research.

Resources

Speaker 1 0:00 Marketer of the day. Episode 635, influencer marketing, observe your competitors, grow your location based business, and think outside the box with brand evangelist rev scientio.

Robert Plank 0:18 Hey everyone, and welcome back to the podcast, we're chatting with David rev cincio. And David is a Senior Marketing branding and digital strategist with 20 years of experience in digital marketing and business development, and he specializes in hospitality marketing and content and in local SEO. And David or rev has led many clients to new levels of local, national and international success in the hospitality, finance, service and entertainment sectors. So we're going to hear all about digital marketing, influencer marketing, reputation management, and all kinds of fun stuff. So David, how is it today? Hey,

Speaker 2 0:58 Robert, thanks for having me on the show. You make it sound so fancy, yeah,

Robert Plank 1:02 you have to be excited. You have to enjoy what you do. Otherwise, what's the point? Right? Otherwise, you're just fighting a losing battle.

Speaker 2 1:10 For sure. Well, a lot of my work somehow revolves around food, and that's always fun.

Robert Plank 1:15 So I mean, why is that like you you know you always hear about you know you need to find a niche, and sometimes the niche finds you, or sometimes, you know, you have it in the course of your journey, you end up coming across, you know, dead ends, or this failure led me to this other stepping stone, or this business led me to that. So how did you end up working with restaurants and food and all that fun stuff?

Speaker 2 1:39 So I'm kind of a serial marketing agency owner slash consultant. I've had four of them now, whether it was by myself or with a team or whatever. And the first 11 years of my career, I was in the music business, and what I learned at the end of 11 years of working with musicians is that none of them ever really pick up the guitar or the microphone with the intention to be a business person, and they pick up the that instrument and with the intention of being creative. And so the ones that are really successful are the ones that adopt a business mindset, and the rest of them are just musicians. And I was having difficulty in my own journey in converting people from creative to business. And I, at the time, this would have been like 2010 2011 like social media was really just sort of getting its legs, and the music business was really one of the first industries to embrace it with like Twitter and MySpace and so to show the bands that I was working with that was really easy to use social media, I started a hamburger blog, like, just as a laugh, and that hamburger blog started to, like, really gain attention, especially here in New York City. And I had restaurant operators calling me and asking if I would offer similar services to the restaurant. So to your point, it kind of found me. And then I had a hard realization one day that, like, well, you can't download a hamburger, and if you really like a hamburger, unlike a CD, you might buy it again. And so, you know, I made a hard change. Literally, I walked up one day and was like, I don't wanna be in the music business anymore. I'm literally closing down my agency. Like today, I'm out of here, and I want to go, I want to go help restaurant owners and be in the restaurant business. And it was that was it so

Robert Plank 3:23 nice. So you followed the money. And you mentioned a couple of,

Speaker 2 3:28 I followed the burger.

Robert Plank 3:31 There you go. The Yeah, the the money led you to the burger. So, and there's a couple of interesting things that you mentioned in there. And one is that there's goofing around, and then there's putting the the work and the practice and the discipline in and figuring out a skill and trying different things and figuring out what actually works, whether that's, you know, developing a musical skill or making money. And then something else that you mentioned in there was, was almost like, well, like, how do you go to where the money is? Or go to, like, you know, where you're you're scaling or making a living. And then also hang on to that fun. Because it's like, you know, with all a lot of these musicians, they started because they have this talent, because it was fun. But then at some point it gets to that fork in the world where you're like, Well, do I keep on goofing off, or do I become a business owner? But then there's that, that fear, or that drawback of, well, if I become too businessy, then do I get to the point where I don't even have time for the the music or the hobbies or the fun anymore? So have you experienced any of that, of being like, well, when I'm like, haven't I ever lost sight of what I wanted when I started?

Speaker 2 4:47 For sure, I'm gonna, I'm gonna flip that on its head just a little bit. So my life motto is, Be awesome at two things and outsource everything else. So using the musician model, right? Like, if you're really good at songwriting or really good at singing or playing the drum. Comes, right? You need to, like, be awesome at that, and learn enough about the business piece that then you can hire somebody else to do it, right? So whether that's an artist manager or a booking agent or, you know, a business manager, whatever that is, and I would say the same in any other type of business, if you're starting a restaurant or you're starting a tech company, or you're starting a freighting line right? Like, what can you do that nobody else can do? What can you understand that you can then outsource, right? And so at some point, like, I wouldn't tell again, use the musician as the example. Like, hey, go, be a better businessman, but at least learn enough about it. So when you hire somebody to do it, like, you understand the expectation, and you're open to being taught about what you need to know, and then let that person be good at what they do.

Robert Plank 5:48 I like that mindset a lot. So what I'm hearing from you is that there's a difference between like on one end of the spectrum is you're being like, hands on, control freak, doing everything, and the other end of the spectrum is you're being ignorant. So what I'm hearing from you is that it doesn't have to be that black and white. You can learn about what you want to do in your business. You can even like experiment or be hands on at first, and get things up and running and then hire off the person. So that way you know what questions you ask. You know what's going on, and so that way you're aware, but you're not necessarily doing the hard work, putting in the time, but, but you're also not, like, at the mercy of this person that you're hiring,

Speaker 2 6:32 for sure, and you know, looking at it from a restaurant, a restaurant model like, like, knowing how to make an awesome pizza and knowing how to run a successful pizzeria aren't the same thing, even if they're connected, right? And if your passion is to make the world's best pizza, we'll figure that out first. And then if you can master that, figure out the business model. If you want to own a great pizzeria, figure out the business model and learn the pizza second. You know what I mean,

Robert Plank 6:58 yeah.

Speaker 3 6:59 Because then

Speaker 2 6:59 when you're hiring, whether you're either side of that conversation, if your goal is the business, the pizzeria part, well, then you need to hire an awesome pizza maker, but you need to actually know what to ask them to do. So you have to understand how to make

Robert Plank 7:11 pizza. So how do you make some of those tough decisions? Because, like, it seems like a lot of people get emotionally attached to the work they're doing, or they're afraid of handing off their baby to somewhere else. So have you experienced any of that? Of like, knowing when the the point of no return is or the breaking point, or just like, when to hire that person, or when to let someone go, or or anything like that. Like, how do you know when to do those irreversible things.

Speaker 2 7:43 Man, that is the like, the most magical question you could ever ask anybody. Robert, I'm convinced that most if you ask most people, if they're open to change, and they think about change and they're willing to have change, they're going to say yes. And I also think that most people, when it comes to that moment to make that decision, actually won't right. And so how do you know when is the breaking point of when you need to make that decision is when your business either stalls or goes down, right? Whatever. Again, using that pizza model, if you're doing 100 pizzas a day, and suddenly you're doing 99 and you can't get back up to 100 or you're getting down to 80, like it's time for change, like it's time for change, and you clearly don't know what is going to make that change. That's the point at which you have to research some ideas and then figure out if your day can handle the change it makes to get back up to 100 pizzas. And I know I like oversimplified it, but that's really what it is, right? Or if your goal is 110 pizzas, and no matter what you do, you can't get past 100 that's the point at which you need to research what it takes to get there and decide whether your day can handle that or not, and if it isn't, that's when you outsource or hire somebody else.

Robert Plank 8:49 You make it sound so simple, so

Speaker 2 8:51 but the core concept is that simple getting there is not simple. That's the hard part, but that's the concept that most people can't get around.

Robert Plank 9:00 And what I'm hearing from your answer there is that it's really important to to have those metrics and to to know, like, how many pizzas you're making in in your example, or in some in our someone else's case, it might be, you know, what's the monthly revenue, or how many clients, or what's the click through rate or what's the daily traffic on the website? So I'm hearing from you that it's important to have to know what those important metrics are, and to watch them every day or every week, or just kind of have that that self follow up so that you know how things are going. And I mean, you and I both know that a lot of people just don't even, don't even have any answers to those sorts of questions, right? They have no idea what things like their lifetime customer value is, or they have no idea how many patients in the doctor's office are coming in every month. So I'm hearing that. So it's important to have that tracking, those metrics, but then also to have those goals, so that way, you know. So is 99 pizzas? Good or bad? Is 110 pizzas? Doable? And then the third thing I'm hearing from you there is that there's that scarcity of time throughout the day, right? Like it's one thing to have to know how things are at to know where things are going, but then there's only so many hours in the day. There's only so many things you can do in the day. So that's sort of where your bottleneck, and then that's, that's when it's time to have someone else do more things, because you have 24 hours in a day. And then now, if you have multiple people, now you're just adding time to that

Speaker 2 10:34 for sure. And if you can't even figure out how to get to that number, then again, maybe to the point where you need to hire somebody else, right? Help me figure out my financial goal. And if you can't even get to that point, maybe you should just go be an employee somewhere and not be a business owner. And that's okay, right? Like everybody's got a bottom line to get to,

Robert Plank 10:51 right? Yeah, if that, if that's what the decision tree dictates, then that's, that's the best that you can do. And so this is really useful, because, you know, you always hear about people saying, well, you should outsource, you should hire experts. But then I think the thing that's missing in that advice that you're mentioning here is, well, does that decision make sense? Right? Like, if I'm on this path and it's not working and it's slowly going downhill just me, then that's the path I'm on. And if adding someone, if adding someone can get me to the goal of things are back in the positive direction, then it just makes perfect logical sense to do that. So I think that this is really helpful for people listening, and for me too. It always a good reminder of, okay, I'm not just going to follow some piece of advice, because you hear, you know, this sort of mantra. But does it make logical sense? Am I going to get the benefit I want from making that decision? So I have some other questions on the influencer marketing stuff. But before we switch gears, do you have anything to throw in here, in this, this category, or anything to add as we transition?

Speaker 2 11:55 No. I mean, look, I could go deeper, wider, but I'd really like that as a core principle of understanding you know how and when, you know you need to outsource or get more help.

Robert Plank 12:05 Perfect. Yeah, take the make it more logic based, so that way there's less emotional pain attached to it. So cool. So you're saying that a lot of your success here has been with the social media, with the influencer marketing to help these, these burger restaurants and people like that. So what the heck is influencer marketing, and why does it work so well, and how do we do it?

Speaker 2 12:30 Well, I'm going to answer that in two ways. So first is very direct. So influencer marketing is when you work with a market leader who is outspoken through some form of media to influence the way people think or feel about your product or service, right? So, you know, what's a real life example? Well, I'll use my own because I'm my on my own best lens. But like I've, I have couple 100,000 followers on Instagram. It's all food, right? If you want people to know about your french fries, you call me because people go to my account funk with fries, and they think, Oh, I really like fries. This guy knows where the great fries are. If I tell you to go eat french fries at that restaurant, you're going to pay attention, because I've already given you a channel for where you can discover french fries, right? So I've oversimplified what influencer marketing is, but it's, it's about working with a market leader to stoke word of mouth marketing. It's a great it's a great channel for if you're working on a campaign at the awareness level, how do I bring awareness to a product or service?

Robert Plank 13:29 And I'm sure that that people have questions about like, the the effectiveness of it, or the like, the criteria, like, is there a certain like, type of person to look out for? Is it better to go for, like, big or small, or someone in the area? So, I mean, what are the sorts of things that business owners should be looking for and staying away from when it comes to this influencer marketing stuff, as far as, like, finding the right person for what they're doing?

Speaker 2 14:00 So any any question, or, sorry, asking a question like that, right? Has Has somebody instantly want to get down into the tactics like, what size? How initial I pay? How do I calculate the ROI? What should their audience be? Blah, blah, and I say, pause. Okay, influencer marketing should never be done in a bubble, right? Nobody should ever think, oh, influencer marketing, that's the answer to my problems, because it's not a understanding what your overall goals are, and understanding where influencer marketing helps you achieve that goal is the right way to think. So, you know, I'll keep using food as an example, because that's my lens. But you know, if you're a restaurant, or, you know, whether it's a chain, or, you know, local restaurant, and you're launching a new menu item, well, what are all the pieces that you're using to get that new menu item out to the public? Is the goal? Then, x amount of visitors? Is it X amount of, you know, people ordering pizza? Is it people coming to your restaurant? Like, how are you judging the success of that? That if influencer marketing can help you get to that goal, then yes, it's the right channel to use, right? So you have to think about influencer marketing as a tool that helps your campaign and your goals.

Robert Plank 15:11 Nice. I like that thought process a lot. So instead of just saying, well, influencer marketing will work with anything right? Is your is your pizzeria failing? Influencer marketing, or do you want more people indoor influencer marketing? Instead, you're saying, Well, is there a specific outcome you're looking for? And then, does influencer marketing make sense to, like, promote that, that new menu item, or to get 50 more people coming in a day, sort of thing?

Speaker 2 15:37 Sure. I think people would love to believe that there's, like, a single solution to answer all of your marketing problems, and the world is just not that easy. It's about understanding what is the overall goal and then what are the pieces that you need to get there. Now, if you're a small restaurant, right, or a small local business, I don't think you need a ton of really complex solutions. There might be three or four things that you can do that are going to get you enough of what you need to go back to doing what you're doing, which is making food, right? If you're McDonald's, you know, or, you know, Applebee's, well, you you have a lot more complex problems, and you need a lot more complex solutions, right? And so it's about understanding, you know, if influencer marketing helps you get to that goal, then yes, it's a great idea to use it. I'm a proponent for influencer marketing, but I would never tell anybody it is the only solution you should use.

Robert Plank 16:27 And at the moment in this week in particular, I'm seeing a lot of people making things so complicated. And I mean, that's always a problem, but like, I have two coaching clients in particular who they both have just these problems with getting lost in the technology or looking to do 10 different things, and I'm thinking, well, on the outside looking in, it's like, if you just did this one thing, that would get you to, like, the next logical step. So maybe just focus on on this one thing, and don't hide behind the complexity and don't say, I need to pile in all the stuff, because that may make, make you feel good, because now you're ignorant of the problem and the solution again, but, but, yeah, it's like we, we all need to make things simpler and figure out, out of all the possibilities, is there one thing I can just do this week and next week to get to where I want to go and and we feel a lot better about ourselves, and we'd know If that thing is working or not, instead of just instead of just, like, throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And so do you have any interesting like, story or a case study to share with us? So that way we get a real handle on, like, what, what your process is with this influencer marketing stuff, and like, how you how you made some of the decisions that you made, as far as making it work,

Speaker 2 17:42 do you mean for myself or on behalf of a client?

Robert Plank 17:46 I think on behalf of a client sounds like more fun,

Speaker 2 17:48 Amen. All right. So I'm going to give again. I love giving simple examples because they're easier to extrapolate, right? I have a friend that owns a, it's a, it's a, it's a sort of a diner focused on hamburgers, right? Family owned and operated. They have several locations. It's been passed along the generations. Cousin owns this one, uncle owns that one, son owns that one, blah, blah, right? Well, this guy happened to be the newest one in the family to take over location, and he went in and he looked at everything and said, Okay, we're known for burgers. We're known for this. We're known for that. Where can I add incremental revenue, right? Again, he's trying to address the problems. And he realized the neighborhood that he's in, he walked around one Sunday morning, everybody was doing brunch, but him, right? So he knows there's available brunch business, right? And he knows he can serve brunch. He's a diner, right? But he does not get any brunch business. And he said, Okay, well, well, what are some brunch items? Well, I don't maybe people don't come here because I don't have brunch items. I have servers, I have tables, I have food, I have mimosas, like I have all that stuff. Why can't I do it so address problem, I believe I can drive incremental revenue into my restaurant by by serving brunch. So he's done all this back work goes and he figures out, what are the four or five menu items? You know? What's the profit margin on this four or five menu items, and he launches a brunch menu now he could have, just like, put a sign on all the tables to his current customers that says, hey, we have brunch. Now, he did that right? He could have, he could have posted it on his social media to say, hey, we have a brunch. He did that. He could have sent out an email blast to all of his customers to tell him that, that he did that well. He did that well. He did all of these things. He did multiple things. And then in addition, he added influencer marketing. He said, what's a way to speed up the process? How do I attract customers that I know are in my area that like food and would be interested in brunch? So he brought in 15 influencers and served them all the brunch items, and he let them take photos however they wanted. Took them whatever configuration they want. They wanted to take it out on the street. They wanted to balance waffles on their face. I'm kind of making this up a little bit, you know, whatever they want to do, they took photos the way they wanted to do it for their audience. Those 15 influencers shared those pictures and those words, hey, this place now has brunch. You should go there. Now, you know, Robert, he did not generate a ton of business out of that, but what happened is, phone started to ring, reviews started to pop up on Yelp, pictures of other users taking, you know, sharing pictures of those pancakes and those waffles, and little by little, he built a brunch business. Right now, did influencer was influencer marketing the saving grace? Was it? What super powered it? No, he had a whole campaign. He knew what he wanted to accomplish. He saw influencer marketing as a viable way to speed up that process. And it did. And he got kind of lucky, because one of those influencers happened to take, like, three stacks of waffles, and, you know, made this unbelievable picture on Instagram with, you know, sprinkles and whipped cream, and it looked awesome, right? So of course, it generated a whole bunch of awareness, and a bunch of people reposted it, and it got shared and saved and blah, blah, blah, little bit of virality. Nobody walked in the door and said, I want a stack of pancakes 25 high, but they now knew that this place in their neighborhood had brunch. So it's a really small success story from a small local place, but you can understand how that becomes scalable, right,

Robert Plank 21:08 right? It was a new way to get attention. And what I really liked about that story is it's not like he jumped right to the influencer marketing. He made sure that all of his usual bases were covered, right? He handled the the fundamentals. First, he made sure to to post things and he made sure to send a blast to his email list. First, he didn't neglect the simple, proven stuff. He didn't just throw that out and go for the experimental, advanced, exciting stuff. He made sure to have both. And I don't know about you, but I see that so often where the bright, shiny object seems to be the thing that some of these business owners want to run after. Like I was one guy I knew heard about the the lumpy mail, right? The 3d mail, you send a pair of Dyson in a in an envelope, and things like that. And he was like, Oh, well, I'm convinced that if I send, if I buy a huge, big list and I send these envelopes with all these, you know, like a set of car keys in it, or something silly like that, I'm convinced it'll get all these people to my business. And I'm thinking, okay, but don't neglect this whole customer list that you built over years that you haven't contacted it in six months. Don't forget post, just making a simple, quick post to your Facebook page saying, saying, Hey, here's my stuff. Come Come on in or come buy from me. And so I think that that's that's a really important point there of this business owner. He He did all the he made sure to do everything, especially the low hanging fruit, especially the easy stuff. And then he also let these influencers sort of do their thing. And he knew that the end goal of the result was to get some of his, his like reputation built up right, to get those, those reviews on social, and get all that and that he had the patience to not say, Well, I don't have 200 customers tomorrow. I'm going to give up on it. So I like those, those couple of hidden points in there. And so is there, I know it's kind of a loaded question, but is there, like, a usual price range for this sort of stuff? Like, is influencer marketing a thing where it needs to be budgeted for, or it can be tried out small as an experiment, or like, what sort of price ranges are you seeing with this sort of

Speaker 2 23:26 thing? The answer to all of those questions is yes. Sometimes you can get influencers to do things for free. Sometimes you got to pay them. I would tell somebody that you're making mistake if you don't associate some kind of budget to it. Because even if you get influencers to do something in exchange for something free, that something you gave them still cost you something right, whether it was your time or it was a product like there's still cost involved. So you have to have some kind of budget if you're if the question is, then how much do you have to pay an influencer? It's sort of generally recognized that for every 10,000 followers somebody has, that's $100 advertising cost, right? So like, again, using my profile, my main profile is 80,000 followers. You should assume I'm going to ask you for 800 bucks right now. That doesn't mean every time that works. You know, you can go to an influencer and say, hey, I want four. I want four. Looks at your audience. What do you do for me, you know? Or maybe I want you to do a video that costs more, but generally, the 100 bucks for every 10,000 followers is a good rule of thumb to follow

Robert Plank 24:32 awesome Good to know, at least to know that sort of ballpark that there, that way people know if they're if they're underpaying or overpaying. Or just to, like, get, that idea. So yeah, you've given us a lot of like, interesting outside the box ideas here. And also just saw there's hidden in in this discussion are all kinds of little nuggets and reminders, like even just the aspect of that diner owner walking around the block on a Saturday morning, just. To observe competitors, and that's one of those lessons where that was painful for me at first, just to see what my competitors are doing and seeing what they might be doing better than me, because even if someone else is doing things better than us, that doesn't necessarily mean we can't catch up or do that thing that's that implement that missing piece in our own way, or do a little bit better job once we've, once we've, you know, kind of gotten with the program. So there's a lot of little interesting reminders and nuggets in here. And so if people want to keep this conversation going with you, if they're interested about this influencer marketing idea and they want to have a chat with you, or see more, or hear more about how what this is all about, what's your contact information in that way? And how can people just hear more about influencer marketing from you?

Speaker 2 25:48 Robert, that's a great question. Thanks for asking. If you want to get in contact with me. I have the same screen name on everything, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, it's my name, rev Sian, CEO. Everybody that's listening right now is like, I don't know how to spell that, and I'm not going to I'm not going to remember that. You can google expert burger taster, and you'll find me. Or you can go to my other account name, which is really easy to remember, fun with fries on Instagram, and if you like french fries, it's a really easy way to find me. So I also say this, if you really, really want to know more about influencer marketing specifically as it relates to the hospitality or food and beverage world. Go to foodie tribe.org, it's an agency that I'm helping out right now that specifically does influencer marketing for food and Bev, and I put a lot of content up there, like how to measure ROI, what are the analytics you want to look at? So a lot of my brain thinking goes publicly there if you just want to ingest

Robert Plank 26:43 it, great. And I think that people should go to go to all those places, so that way they can get an idea. And what's the harm in going on Instagram, going to fun with fries and following that? I mean, we all spend enough time that's wasted on social media anyways, and looking at lots of interesting things. So why not go right now to Instagram, to fun with fries, click on that follow button, and then that way, you'll always be reminded, oh yeah, I was going to look into that influencer marketing thing. Well, I saw another cool picture with 1000s of fans, and I see all the likes and comments. And so that's a good reminder. So to recap, some of those places where people can and should go. That's foodie tribe.org is, is that website of that, that client that you're helping out fun with fries on Instagram, Google expert, burger taster, to find out more about what Rev has going on. And then, if you're, if you're daring, if you're ballsy enough to spell it out. I mean, you're listening to this podcast anyway, so you could probably figure it out. And just to make sure that everyone has that information, that is first name, r, e, v, last name, C, I, a, n, C, i, o, it's not that many of that is, I think we can all figure it out. Rev s on social media. Expert burger tastes are on Google, fun with fries on Instagram, and then foodie tribe.org So as we're wrapping up, closing down here, do you have any final thoughts for our listeners? Just about everything we discussed today,

Speaker 2 28:11 I love to, I love that question. And here's like, here's the one piece of marketing, like, really tactical advice I would give anybody who is doing marketing for a location based business? Okay? First of all, what's the location based business? Anything with a front door, an art gallery, a doctor's office, a restaurant, a seamstress, like a dog walker, like somebody has to walk through your door to transact. Transact with you, please? You are failing your business if you do not manage your online listings, right? Go to Google, Yelp, big, Yahoo, four square, TripAdvisor, why? Yp, for anywhere that information about your business lives and manage that information. Right? Three out of four transactions for a business happen online on one of those sites before it ever happens on a business's website. So if you're not managing that information, you're basically letting the internet decide where your customer should

Speaker 3 29:07 go.

Robert Plank 29:08 And the Internet has lots of weirdos, lots of sketchy places, so you don't want them to be managing that. And I don't know about you, rev, but if I'm about to go, if I'm looking into anything, dentist, doctor, restaurant, any kind of those location based businesses. For me as a customer, maybe I'm a weirdo, but the first thing I'll do is I'll look at the reviews. I'll look on Yelp, I'll look on Google. I want to see what the outside looks like. The inside looks like the menu. A couple of the reviews are those reviews current and again, I don't know if I'm the exception or the rule, but if I can't find them on Yelp, or if it looks not maintained, then they are out, and someone else will get my business.

Speaker 2 29:49 Or, first of all, you're not a weirdo. You're everybody. Secondly, if the what happens, if somebody goes to Yelp and that and the information for that business is wrong?

Robert Plank 29:58 No, they're

Speaker 3 29:59 just

Speaker 2 29:59 gonna. Not good, right? Like that's the one. The one piece of advice I gave marketers is please. You know, having a great website is important. Managing your information everywhere it lives is way more important,

Robert Plank 30:11 amen to that. So make sure that all of you out there manage your online listings and contact rev, and we'll see you next time. This is Robert plank, and would you like to be a guest on the program? Do you have an idea for a future episode, or do you just want to tell us how we're doing? Get in touch with us right now. At marketer of the day.com/ask, to let us know you.

Filed in: Archive 3: 2018-2020 • Interview • Podcast • Social Marketing

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