Is your business's marketing and review management joined up?

Let's see what we mean by joined up. Here are two advertisements run in the Times this weekend. One is a single page (rate card £27,000) and the other a double page spread (rate card £42,000)...

Now, suppose you were attracted by one of these advertisements, what do we suppose might be your next action*. Perhaps one of these...

• call the business? 
• email the business? 
• visit the business's website?

* as readers will know, there are two kinds of advertising: 'above the line' (often known as 'brand' advertising) designed to enhance the reader's 'feel' for the brand in question and 'below the line' designed specifically to generate a hard - quantifiable - response (leads). Both of the above advertisements might reasonably be considered to fulfil both functions, but as they both include 'calls to action' in the form of web-links we feel justified in judging them on a below-the-line basis.

So - in order to either call, email or visit the business's website their potential customers have two options...

1. follow the url in the advertisement
2. google the business

For the purpose of this article we will assume it's about half-and-half. So let's see what happens when we google these two businesses (on our phone, because that's what most people have to hand when they are reading a paper). First Irwin Mitchell...

...with 'Reviews' front-and-centre, one click away...

And now Invesco...

We are not going to comment at this stage. We will now simply show you a HelpHound client's brand advertising...

...and in print...

...and then show you what happens if a potential customer googles their local branch...

...and - as an added bonus - if the potential customer were to go direct to their website...

...or even search for them on desktop...

So: Our message...

Get your review management sorted and the response to all your other advertising and marketing must rise*, it's as simple as that.

Note re: Irwin Mitchell and reviews sites

The more eagle-eyed of you may notice that Irwin Mitchell have employed both Feefo and Trustpilot. Their experience with these sites is one of the most pronounced cases of deflection that we have ever seen ('deflection': the negative impact on a business's Google score of inviting customers to write reviews to reviews sites - more here).

*Must rise? 

Here are some numbers - from Google My Business - for a single location for one of our clients...

...for more read this.