Are you using Google Places to capture leads and drive traffic to your small business website? Google Places allows business owners with a brick & mortar location to create a free business listing. For those of you who have never heard of Google Places before, be sure to check out an earlier Google Places article we wrote before proceeding with this article. If you have a Google Places listing then you know just how powerful the tool is. With that said, by adding a coupon to your Google Places listing you can increase the effectiveness of your Google Places listing.
Develop a Coupon Offer
Probably the biggest key to building a successful Google Places Coupon is coming up with a highly actionable offer. When coming up with your offer be sure to put your “customer hat” on. Think about your customer and the type of prospects you’re trying to attract. What do you offer that’s most valuable to them? Also be sure to take into consideration outside factors like what time of year it is, what’s going on in the world (current events), etc. By making your offer relevant to outside factors you can capitalize on the extra chatter that is no doubt going on online. This will help drive traffic to your Google Places Coupon. By taking these steps instead of throwing an offer together you will drive more people to take action on your coupon.
Design a Google Places Coupon
Once you come up with your highly actionable offer it’s time to go into your Google Places account and begin designing your Google Places Coupon. Simply log into your Google Places account and you’ll see two tabs. The first is entitled, “Dashboard” and the second is a tab entitled, “Coupons”. Click the “Coupons” tab to begin designing your Google Places Coupon.
The main inputs for your Google Places Coupon are: | Headline | Sub-Heading | Details | Image | Good Until Date |. When designing your coupon be sure to use your keywords throughout the copy. Your Headline should use keywords and be appealing to the customer-type you are trying to attract. Add actionable details to your coupon to explain as much as possible about the offer. Be sure to include your call-to-action at the end of the Details section. The last thing that you want to remember is to include an image. We used our avatar, but you can use your full company logo, an image relevant to your offer or to your audience. However you approach it the important thing is that you use an image on your Google Places Coupon.
You can watch your Google Places Coupon build on the right side of the page as you add inputs to your coupon. On top of this being free, Google makes it super easy for you to create a Google Places Coupon. Once you have all of your inputs locked in it’s time to finalize & promote your coupon.
Promote a Google Places Coupon
Once your Google Places Coupon is finalized it will start showing up on your Google Places Page. When people search terms relevant to your business and add a location to their search (ie. Online Marketing Chalfont PA) then your Listing will appear. When your Google Places Listing is clicked on users will be taken to your Google Places Page, which is where they will see your Google Places Coupon. Those who are interested in your offer will print out your coupon and bring it with them to your store the next time they are in need of your products or services.
You can also take an active approach and promote your Google Places Coupon on your website, blog, and social media. Google provides you with a URL to add to your web properties. Check out our coupon for discounted Facebook Marketing services as an example. You can now drive your customers and prospects to your Google Places Coupon, which is a great way to positively impact coupon redemption.
Google Places Coupons are a great way to drive sales for your small business. You can create a Google Places Listing and Google Places Coupon for free! Hopefully everyone with a brick & mortar business will go out and create a Google Places Coupon as soon as you’re finished reading this article. It’s worth the 30 minutes that you’ll spend developing your Google Places Coupon. 
Once you’ve created a Google Places Profile for your small business, you can then begin using your profile as a way to drive traffic to your blog. First, navigate to your Google Places listing, click “Owner-verified listing” to get to your profile. Once you’re on your Google Places profile, on the right-hand side, there is a text box for you to “post to your place page”. The post to your place page area is the area that you can use to promote a new blog post.
When promoting your blog on Google Places, simply copy/paste the article title into the text box and then copy/paste the article link into the text box. One nice thing about Posting content to your Google Places Page is that Google Places allows you to input 160 characters — 20 more than Twitter. The extra 20 characters allows you to add the article link in full. By not using a URL shortener, you are adding to your inbound links, which is the single biggest factor in ranking you higher in search.
In the early days of this blog, we would take time to promote each post on sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, and Mr. Wong. Now, we bypass those social bookmarking sites in order to spend more time promoting our content on sites like Facebook, Twitter, BizSugar and LinkedIn. 
This image was taken directly from the Catalyst Marketers Google Analytics Traffic Sources report. As you can see, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and BizSugar are all in the top 10 traffic sources for Catalyst Marketers. With that said, it’s important to not only focus on quantity of visitors driven from a particular source, but also quality of visit. As you will also see on this report is that StumbleUpon still appears in the top 10 traffic sources for us. What you don’t see is that the quality of those visitors is very low. How do we determine quality of visit?
