LUTHER LOWE: First take a step back and ask yourself, does it make sense for me to sort of engage on a site like Yelp. And, uh, if you are a B to C business, uh, if you’re some kind of brick and mortar business, or you are a local service business, you probably belong on Yelp. And the goal there is to not only increase the number of people looking at your business listing, um, but also convert them into people that are walking through your door or who ultimately become your customers.
JACK ABRAHAM: Thinking as a … a small basically, what you really need to do in this digital age is make sure you’re present at that moment when the consumer’s making their purchasing decision. You might have thousands, or tens of thousands of different products in your store. We built technology that takes all of that amazing information, what’s on your shelves, all of those products and the prices and images of them and descriptions and titles, and put them on the web. Um, we put them on Milo.com(?), we put them on eBay.com, we have a distribution network.
VALERIA MALTONI: Don’t neglect your own home to go build homes on other sites. Be friendly to these outposts. So use Twitter, use Yelp, use, you know, the tools at hand to also drive traffic back into your home.
JACK ABRAHAM: To be top of mind for a consumer and for them to remember you and engage with your brand, they need to have seen your brand at least seven (Background Noise) times. There’s this new technology called sort of retargeting technology. Where, if you acquire someone and they come to your web site, you can drop a cookie on them and then have them see display ads of your business as they go all across the internet for the next month or two.
MARISSA EVANS: So when we started GoTryItOn, it was really important to create an environment where people felt safe and felt comfortable sharing. Myself and my team have been really … really strict about the quality of the (Background Noise) content on the site, so we moderate the entire site 24 hours a day. And we’ll remove anything that is inappropriate.
LUTHER LOWE: Two-thirds of folks actually get on and, uh, do Yelp searchers for their competitors. And they read the really lousy reviews to figure out where are my competitors failing, and how can I provide a better product in this area.
You can categorize your strategy for marketing online, uh, based on consumer acquisition and consumer retention. Understand what your priorities are, based on whether you’re trying to retain or acquire customers, and you know, invest time accordingly.
JACK ABRAHAM: I would encourage businesses focused on products and services to look … to find where people are buying and where they’re making purchasing decisions across the web, rather than just where people are spending their time.
(END OF TAPE)