Successful marketers devote more of their budgets to strategic experimentation

One of our most important resources is 'Think with Google' - required weekly reading for professional internet marketers.

In this this week's article the following caught our eye...

...because so many businesses are yet to 'test' review management.

Testing review management

Here are the considerations most businesses have when looking to test any new marketing tool...

1. Results: should be measurable
2. Cost: should be defined 
3. Disruption: should be kept to a minimum

Let's examine each of these in detail - and in relation to testing HelpHound


Results

These split into two categories: financial and visible

Up until this year financial results were only measurable anecdotally; that was fine, but it did rely on businesses having effective staff feedback mechanisms in place. This all changed when Google introduced their Google My Business monthly report - showing the impact of adopting review management in hard numbers: the rise in website visits and calls to the business.

  We would expect clients to be seeing results like these within months of joining

'Visible' results consist of 'before and after' like this ('before'):

To this (now)...

...and this...

Cost

Until recently adopting professional review management involved businesses in two types of expenditure:

• HelpHound: our initial design and implementation fee and our ongoing monthly fee
• The business's own website: implementation by the business's web designers

Now we have eliminated the second of these for the 'test' phase. For new clients we are able to host our review gathering software on our own servers, eliminating the second of these cost points until the process has been embedded and thoroughly tested and proven by our client business.

Disruption

Similarly, any disruption in terms of both design and implementation onto the business's own website is deferred until the business is certain of the long-term benefits. 

In summary

Now you can see how easy it is to apply Google's exhortation to 'strategic experimentation' to your own marketing - welcome to HelpHound and professional review management for your business in 2018.