Good word of mouth – priceless marketing power that money can’t buy.
Yelp is a platform for business reviews that acts as a community driven, virtual consumer advocate, powered by the voices of all types of consumers. While it has its ups and downs, the best being the confidence reads put in the reviews and the worse being the filtering of legitimate reviews, Yelp is a weapon to be used by your business, if you know how to use it correctly. Since anyone can sign you up and make a review of you company, you really don’t have to do anything to get it started, but if you are smart you can harness good publicity and avoid paying for yelp. For more about paying for Yelp please see my other blog post Is Yelp Worth it?
How to use Yelp, Without Their Advertising Fee
Help and be helped…Join Yelp
The new economy (the Internet) has opened up a world of marketing opportunities, such as Yelp, that don’t cost a dime. However, there is one rule that applies to all who are striving to reap the benefits of the super-marketing power of the web; help and be helped, specifically; Yelp and be yelped.
The first step in learning how to use Yelp without paying for it, is to join. Create a personal profile and review businesses that you like.
The testimonies on your website can be helpful, but Yelp reviews will likely carry much more clout. To have the best of both worlds, cross promote your Yelp reviews by referencing Yelp on the testimonials page/area of your website.
Add your business profile.
Once you are an established yelper, integrate your business by creating a Yelp profile for it. Once you have done this you can:
- Communicate with your customers by responding to reviews
- Use widgets to show off your 5 Star reviews
- Get stats on how many people visited your Yelp page
To get started, go to your business’ Yelp page and click on “Edit Business Info”, you will fill out a few forms and be verified by your phone number.
Show Yelp off on your site
Good reviews, especially four or more stars, should be proudly, shamelessly displayed for all to see. After all, you have earned them! Why not prominently place the Yelp logo on your website, and storefront, showing how many great reviews have been written about you?
Even better use the Widget provided by Yelp, here is the one for this website:
Where did my review go?
When happy customers want to show their appreciation, they are inspired to write a favorable review on Yelp. Unfortunately, if someone writes only one, solitary review, it will likely never be seen. Yelp tends to “hide” the reviews of yelpers who only write one or two reviews, apparently to discourage businesses from planting phony reviews for themselves.
The free market rules
While it is not advisable to ask customers to write reviews for you, it is advantageous to ask for feedback, and encourage yelping, in general, to support fellow consumers and businesses in general. Honest, constructive reviews can be helpful to everyone by promoting positive changes in the marketplace.
Cross promote
The testimonies on your website can be helpful, but Yelp reviews will likely carry much more clout. To have the best of both worlds, cross promote your Yelp reviews by referencing Yelp on the testimonials page/area of your website.
Click to Yelp
A clickable Yelp logo can link directly to your reviews on Yelp. Of course, it is best if it opens in a separate browser tab, enabling customers to easily click right back onto your site.