If you don’t think online reviews are important to your business, here’s a study that may change your mind.

1,100 businesses using Capterra’s Conversion Tracking software were studied, and Capterra was able to track the conversion rates of businesses that had reviews displayed versus those that did not. The resulting conversion rates broke down like this:

0 Reviews=4.6%
1-4 Reviews= 5.2%
5-9 Reviews= 6.4%
10+ Reviews= 7.1%

What does this mean to you? 10 or more online reviews on a site like Google Places, Yahoo Local Business, Yelp.com, Yellowpages or Angie’s List can virtually double the number of potential customers who find you online and pick up the phone!

In this study a “conversion” was counted when a potential customer filled out a form. For you, it may be a contact form, an email or a phone call.

Collecting online reviews should be one of your goals for 2013. Here is a step-by-step article to get you started. Here’s how you should handle negative reviews.

A client emailed me recently with the question, “I have a negative online review. This is why I hate all this online social junk. How can I get rid of it?”

Although we’ve written about this subject in several articles over the past year, I realized it might be helpful to put them together in one place.

Step 1: Make it easy for clients to review you online. Here’s a step-by-step guide. If you’re actively collecting positive online reviews from happy clients, an occasional bad review isn’t going to hurt your reputation. Prospective clients are smart enough to understand that if you’ve been in business long enough, not every customer will be a happy one.

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Flash websites are dead. Static websites are dead. Facebook has changed everything.

When the Internet became popular, photographers began putting up static websites that would show examples of their work, and tell about their business. Flash made it easier to create pretty websites, but they were still a glorified yellow-page ad: who we are, where we’re located, what we do.

Google (and Bing and Yahoo) made these websites work because they provided an index to the Internet. But they only answered one question: “how can I find a photographer among a million other photographers?” A great achievement, but it still used the old yellow-pages ad metaphor.

Then Facebook came along, and it turned the idea of searching for a photographer on its head. Instead of worrying about keywords (which Google still does) Facebook asked the question a different way: “which photographers do my friends like?” It’s the difference between an ad and a word-of-mouth referral. People hate being sold, but they will trust their friends.

Which brings us to today. So how will potential clients find us in the future? Here are some likely scenarios: (more…)

It is not uncommon for a wedding photographer to have a “preferred vendors” web page. Even if you don’t have a web page listing your preferred venues, caterers, etc., chances are you have a list in your studio so you can answer the question we all inevitably get from clients, “who do you recommend?”

The problem with a preferred vendors page on your web site is that while it promotes your vendor’s websites – and it might be useful to your clients – it isn’t helping to build your business.

Here’s a way to put your vendor list to work for you: Offer your vendors a special promotion they can offer to their customers. Here are a couple of ideas that can work for your studio.

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The folks over at ClickZ have a great article entitled, “Optimizing Your Local Listing on Apple’s Siri“. Siri is the automated voice on the Apple 4 iphone that answers questions like “who’s the best photographer in Dearborn, Michigan?”

The author of the article did some research and discovered that by registering your business at Yelp.com and getting a couple of positive reviews on that site, you’ll rise higher on the list of pro photographers who Siri recommends as well as move higher on the list of photo studios in your area on Google Places and Maps.

This might change sometime over the next year, but today it’s insider information you shouldn’t ignore.

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“How did you hear about me?”

When we talk to a prospective client, it is easy to get caught up in the sales process. Our inner voice is thinking: we get along great, they like my work, they have the money, and the date is available. This feels like a sale!

And as they get out their checkbook, all we can think is, “Woo-hoo, a new client.” But then we forget to ask:

“How did you hear about me?”

The problem is that – at that moment – we don’t consider those 6 words important. So here’s another way to look at it: Measuring marketing success is the ONLY way to determine how to effectively spend your marketing time and dollars.

If you are not measuring which marketing brings in clients, you are literally throwing money (and your time) out the window.

Top companies pay consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to conduct polls, count clicks, count “eyeballs” and compute brand awareness. But you can get better data than a Fortune 500 company if you make a commitment to yourself to always ask this simple question.

“How did you hear about me?”

Ask it every time, whether you make the sale or not. And don’t trust your memory – keep a piece of paper in your drawer where you write down the answers. Make a check mark next to the ones that result in a sale. A year from now, if you know 20% of your prospects and 10% of your sales came from a specific ad, you’ll know whether or not to run that ad again. If you don’t write it down, you’re just guessing. A professional salesman would be fired for that.

Learn to ask this question EVERY time, and you’ll see the results drop to your bottom line.

One of the most useful and least utilized tools Google offers to small business is Google Alerts.

What is a Google Alert?

Google scours the entire Internet in real time looking for places your name or business name is mentioned. Every time it finds a mention, it stores the link in a database. You can ask Google to send you these links as they happen, daily, or once a week. This makes Google alerts great for tracking customer comments online (good or bad), seeing the results of your marketing efforts, or even keeping an eye on your vendors or competition!

Best of all, Google Alerts only take a few seconds to set up. All you need is a Google (i.e. Gmail) account.

Here’s what you do:

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How important are online reviews? According to online marketing research, 6 out of 10 potential clients look for online reviews of your studio before contacting you, and 8 out of 10 consider those reviews critical to making a purchase.

This means that even if potential clients know your name, 48% won’t consider contacting you without reading positive online reviews.

While that number should scare you, the solution is easier than you realize. Here’s how: (more…)

We’ve been talking about lagniappes for years, so I was surprised to read a new book by Stan Phelps (What’s your Purple Goldfish?) about them. Here’s what Drew McLellan writes in the forward:

True lagniappe can’t be faked or forced. We banter the word authentic around too much these days. But for lagniappe to work, it must be just that — real and offered without expectation of anything in return.

In other words – you do it because you want to, not because it’s in a marketing plan document or because your ROI calculator told you it would generate a 42.36% return. (And no…there’s no such thing as an ROI calculator!)

This is absolutely true.

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Although we constantly talk about social media marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) , it pays to remember that their are many other marketing tools available for your studio. One of the most powerful is the cross-promotion.

Cross-promotions are low-cost techniques for getting your name in front of potential customers by promoting with other businesses. The classic example is putting a stack of gift certificates for bridal photography in a bridal store.

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