If you have a Google My Business profile, keeping on top of your business messages is an essential task that you should not ignore. While a Google My Business Profile is a great step in increasing your profile online, you can improve both your Google ranking and business messaging by engaging with your customers through the messaging section.
What are Google My Business Messages?
Google My Business Messages is a real-time digital communication service which will allow your customers to contact your business via your Google business profile. This means that customers get information about your business, products, and services directly from your business profile without having to call you or even visit your website.
Instead, all a customer has to do is click on the Message icon on your Google Business Profile and they will be able to send a message to your business directly no matter what day or time it is.
Google Business Messages can be accessed either through Google search or Google Maps.
This will reduce the time and steps needed before your customer engages with your business directly and provides you with a convenient and quick way to communicate with your interested customers directly.
Why is Answering Google Business Messages Important?
Post-covid, customer expectations about online assistance have never been higher! Your customers expect to be able to access the information they need in real-time without having to deal with delays or calling a business on the phone.
You can ensure that your business is standing out from the crowd by answering your Google business messages promptly. Providing helpful information through your Google My Business Messages is helpful to your business in many ways:
What Are The Benefits of Using Business Messaging on your Google Business Profile?
You will Have Direct Contact With Your Customers From the Start
You can engage with customers at the very start of their journey using Google Business messages. This will give you the opportunity to engage directly with people who have already shown an interest in your product or service and turn them into paying customers!
Don’t Lose Out on Business Due to Being Out of Office
You will be able to receive and answer Google Business messages any time of the day. This will lessen the chances of losing out on business due to limited availability by out-of-office phone and email enquiries.
Google is Your Biggest Resource When it Comes to New Customers
Google is the most visited search engine across the globe and is the first website many people turn to when looking for a product or service. This means that actively engaging with Google My Business Messaging could result in an increase in your ability to attract more customers to your company.
Take Advantage of Automated Messaging for Convenient Engagement with Your Customers
If the idea of having to answer business messaging round the clock seems unappealing, you don’t have to worry! You can use a customer service chatbot to send welcome messages and provide the answers to simple questions that come up over and over.
These chatbots can also then transfer your customers over to your staff when the questions become more difficult to answer to make sure that you are still providing the highest level of customer service.
Engage with Customers Within Your Local Area
Because Google’s business service can identify a customer’s location from their Place IDs, your Google my business profile will be presented to customers who are close by. This is particularly helpful if your business offers a local in-store product or service.
And if your company has several different locations, your customers can use Google My Business messaging to contact staff in the nearest branch to them. So if a customer needs information about the address, opening times, or products in a particular location, they will be able to access accurate, real-time information.
Streamline the Customer Journey to Improve Profitability
You can use My Business messages to improve your customer service and decrease the amount of time it takes to convert someone to search for your business into a paying customer. Efficient, informative and friendly servicing through your Google business profile can
Gives a Professional and Efficient Business Image to your Potential Customers
Customer confidence is increased by evidence that your business gets back to queries promptly and efficiently. Making sure that you answer your Google My Business messages quickly, with helpful information and a professional attitude will encourage your customers to use your business.
Improve Your Google Business Profile Rankings
You will be able to enjoy rewards from Google when you regularly engage with your business messages promptly. Google rewards my business profiles which are regularly updated with posts and engage with customers.
How to Make Google Business Messaging Work For Your Business?
As you can see, there are a whole host of reasons for your to start integrating Google business messages into your regular customer service. But how should you start using business messaging so that it brings the highest return on your time investment?
Below we will talk you through how to use Google’s business messaging so that you can start to reap the benefits as soon as possible.
Set Up a Welcome Message for Your Customers
You can make sure to get off to a great start by making sure to set up an instant welcome message for your customers. This will then appear automatically whenever a customer clicks on the message icon on your Google Business profile.
Your welcome message will be the first thing that customer sees when they decide to contact your business from Google, so you need to make sure to set up the best introduction, to begin with.
Your welcome message should thank your potential customer for contacting your business and ask them how you can help them today.
You might also decide to include some vital information in your welcome message such as your opening hours, answers to frequent queries regarding your service and how long they should expect to wait for a response when sending you a message from Google business.
If you want to change or adjust your welcome message you can do it easily by editing your Google Business profile settings.
Make Sure to Answer Your Business Messages in Good Time
How quickly you usually respond to Google my business messaging will be displayed on your business profile. So, it is essential that you answer your messages as soon as you can. A customer can see which of the below four categories your business falls into:
- Responds in a few minutes.
- Responds in a few hours.
- Responds in a day.
- Responds in a few days.
Google My Business recommends that you should aim to answer your Google business messaging within 24 hours of your customer first making contact.
If you put yourself in your customer’s shoes, you can easily see why making sure to keep the time it takes to return to your customer’s messages to a minimum. If you need answers about a product or service, you will be more likely to click on the Google My Business profile which has a good track record of answering queries quickly.
If you have a poor track record of responding to your business messaging or don’t answer them at all, Google will penalize your business profile by removing the business messaging option. This will put you at a distinct disadvantage when compared to other local companies that are reachable through the service.
Use Google My Business to Provide Your Customers With Photos and Videos
You can use your Google My Business messaging service to provide interested customers with photos and videos of the products and services they express interest in. Proving visual examples as well as text in your answers can help to increase the interest and response rate of your customers and increase conversion rates.
You can also make sure that there is no misunderstanding or false assumptions about the products and service you are offering. This should help to improve your overall customer satisfaction levels.
So, start to think about how you can leverage Google my business to provide more multimedia information to your interested local customers.
Provide Relevant, Helpful and Informative Answers in Your Google My Business Messaging
When reading messages from Google’s business messaging service, make sure that you pay attention to the query and answer it effectively. Formulate each answer so that it is addressing each query directly and includes relevant and helpful information.
If a customer messages your Google my Business profile asking for information about seasonal opening hours, don’t immediately begin bombarding them with hard-sell tactics and information about products.
Present the information in your Google business messages clearly and concisely so that your customers can quickly access the information they need. This is likely to be much more effective than filling your messages with copy-and-paste marketing messages.
Make Sure to Adhere to Google’s Business Messaging Practices
make sure that all of your staff are aware that Google My Business messaging is not a platform where customers should be sharing personal information, login details, and credit card details. it is a violation of the Google My Business regulations to share this information in the messaging service.
If customers want to purchase your products after engaging with your Google My Business messaging, then you should direct them to your normal purchasing channels. If they query why it can’t be completed via Google’s business messages, simply explain the regulations and direct them to the easiest way to complete the purchase.
Include Google My Business Messaging in Your Overall Customer Service and Marketing Strategy
Now that you know how to use Google’s business messages to engage with your customers and increase your online visibility. It is important that you make sure to include the set-up and use of the service within your overall customer marketing strategy.
To present a cohesive and consistent image to your customers you need to make you that your Google My Business messages in the platform are on brand and match your website and company identity best practices.
You can also make sure to identify how to use the messaging service as a way to move customers over to other selling channels online. Google’s business messaging service can be a productive and quick way to turn interested people into paying customers if you identify the best practices for converting queries into sales.
But remember, to make sure that customers can access the best service from your business, you want to concentrate on answering queries first of all. You don’t want to push customers too hard on selling from the get-go as this can be offputting and lead to loss of sales.
Summary: Using Google’s Business Messaging Can Help You to Improve Your Online Sales Performance
If you want to leverage the Google platform so that it has the best effect on your website traffic and sales conversions. you need to set up messaging on the Google My Business platform. using the tips and best practices we have listed above, you will be able to make sure that your Google profile is a quick and effective way to help and engage with customers.
Follow our tips above about setting up a welcome message, answering messages in the Google recommended 24 hours and making sure that the messages from your staff are helpful and on brand. By consistently providing the best service when you receive a message, you will begin to reap the rewards of increased Google visibility and more customer engagement.
