What you can learn about your digital presence from your phone number
While we know most consumers walk around everywhere with mini-computers and screens in their pocket, rich with interactive information, it’s the century-old phone call that still rules supreme. Whatever advertising, promotions, online, offline effort you take to promote your business, next to an actual visit, it’s the phone call you want — the most personal, direct line a prospect has to purchasing your product or service.
It’s also the numbers that not only connect you to customers, but define your business and its name/brand in physical space, to an actual address where people can visit find you and send you things. Together, the internet has paired these with almost the entire online identity of your business.
New Plains MediaMedia partners with Vendasta for online monitoring and reporting, and when you provide us your business name and phone number at our Snapshot Report Request button, we run their systems to learn about your online identity so you know how you can improve it, whether we do the work or not. Free, no obligation. This is the first installment on how to best use the Snapshot Report.
To start, it’s easy. Just enter your phone number and your business and online identity details should appear. If there’s any confusion around your phone number, you might see two other options:
Choose From A List of Businesses Associated with Your Phone Number
You’ll be offered a list of businesses to choose from. There might be other businesses or divisions associated with this phone number or slight variations in your business name might cause it to appear as two different businesses according to the binary machines that run the internet. TIP: If there’s more than variation on yoru business, choose the top one, as its often that is likely the most correct one. If none of the businesses on the list are correct, choose “None of these are my business” and go to the next option.
Check Your Specific Information
If your phone number isn’t connecting to your online identity, we will need to take a closer look. As Mike Blumenthal as noted so well in his graphic Owning Your Local Web Equity, NAP+W is the foundation of your digital presence:
Most importantly, and the only thing required at this stage is the following:
Business Name (N in the NAP+W)
Preferably the name of the legal entity that officially operates and owns the business, even if you’re using a DBA (doing business as). If the legal entity name is obscure and not public, definitely enter the DBA for your business in the Common Names field.
Street Address (A in the NAP+W)
What is the physical address of your location? Don’t enter a P.O. Box or a different mailing address for company mail. This is specifically tied to your physical location, even if you work from home or your service provider that does all your work at your customer’s location.
Website (W in the NAP + W)
Hopefully this isn’t your Facebook page, but if it is, enter that. This will also help Vendasta search for your business on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Google Plus (aka Google My Business).
Business Category
Making sure your business is correctly categorized online is key to showing up in searches for your product or service. Searches for your business name are known as branded searches. The Business Category will start to auto-fill when you enter your product or service, and if you offer more than one, list it. Good rule of thumb is three business categories is usually enough, to compete for more is tough, but if you offer more, list those as well. More than five is pushing it.
In our next installment we’ll take a closer look at the additional information you can provide the Snapshot reporting tool to help get the best picture of your online presence possible and then explore the details of the report itself (and what it’s missing). Thanks for reading!
