GMB Offer Posts

Introduction To The GMB Offer Posts and How To Craft A Great Offer

Google has released a new feature within Google My Business (GMB) called Offer Posts. The new GMB offer posts are very similar to the traditional posts, but you can use them to post sales, discounts, promotions, or other special offers. The new offer posts have some unique features like staring date and ending date, promo codes, and more! We’ll break down the features, and go over some best practices to leverage this new feature to help you improve SEO, gain rankings, and get more sales!

Don’t miss an episode – listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and more!

YOU’LL LEARN

  • What is the “posts” feature in your Google My Business listing
  • What is the new GMB offer posts feature
  • How is an offer post different than a traditional post
  • Where you’ll find the GMB offer posts feature in your GMB listing
  • How often you should put out new GMB posts
  • How many words you can use in a GMB post
  • What types of offer posts are having the best conversion rates
  • How to construct a good offer within GMB offer posts
  • How you can use keywords in your posts for SEO
  • How to set starting and ending dates for your offer post
  • Using promo codes in your offer post for eCommerce applications
  • Using promo codes in your offer posts for non-eCommerce situations
  • Benefits of using images with text overlays in your posts
  • How to make a GMB offer post with a strong call to action (CTA)
  • How to present a clear CTA for your offer with relatable context

Thanks for Listening!

Here is the transcription from Episode 19 What Are Google My Business Offer Posts and How To Use Them Effectively;

Jesse: Hey everybody, welcome back to Local SEO Tactics. I’m Jesse Dolan, with Bob Brennan
as always. And this week we’re going to be talking about one of our favorite topics
revolving around Google My Business. If you’re doing anything with your website, you
should have a Google My Business profile/page set up by now.

Bob: Yup.

Jesse: For your company. That’s what’s going to pop you in the map pack and those top three
results usually, when you’re searching on Google. Hopefully you’re in that map pack. If
you’re not, check out episodes one and two. We talk about how to get that set up and
how to optimize that and utilize some of these tools that Google has in there to get
exposure for your business. Absolutely probably the most relevant thing in SEO right
now today for local SEO, for local service businesses, which is what we’re talking about
here.

Jesse: So, there’s a new feature out within Google Posts, and it basically allows you to put out
an offer. So, just kind of recap and going back, again, check out our episodes one and
two of the podcast. We’re going to talk about Google My Business and particularly the
posts within that. The posts are there to let you, well post ironically right? Post
information about business. It’s almost like a little micro blog post within Google My
Business. That’s going to show up on the right hand side if you get to kind of be in the …
Some people refer to it as the snippet or knowledge panel, things like that, but if you do
a Google search and you see your business on the right hand side, you’re going to get
your post displayed.

Jesse: This is very attractive for companies to have because it just takes up more real estate on
that page. Again, I’m not going to break down the entire reasons why you want to use
that, we cover that in previous episodes; but if you’re on Google My Business and you’re
not doing anything with Posts, start doing something with Posts. Do it daily, do it
weekly, do it as often as you can, doesn’t matter. You can’t overdo it. It’s an absolutely
great resource. Within that you get 300 words, so it’s small. Again, it’s kind of a micro
deal. You get 100 to 300 words roughly to post in there and you can put an image.
That’s how posts have been used to date.

Jesse: Now within those images, some people, there’s been a lot of experiments with just like
photographs, or text ads, or text overlays on photographs. You can kind of really
experiment, see whatever works good with you. Google has a new thing that they’ve
launched in conjunction with Posts called Offers. So it’s really just like it sounds. You
have the ability now to create a post, but turn it into an offer. So, the things that have
been working really good for people in the past with posts have been kind of very call to
action type posts. The reason we’re doing this stuff to get found in Google is to call
people to action, to buy our products, use our services, and things like that for local
service businesses.So, the successful posts to date have been revolving around a strong
call to action.

Jesse: So as I mentioned earlier about overlay and text on your photograph, if you’re selling
computers, you don’t want to just have a picture of a computer, or something like that.
You want to … What is this? What’s the context, right? Is it for sale? Is this for a repair?
What am I promoting? Your picture should tie into the actual purpose of that post.
You’re going to want to translate those same kind of things into this offer here. So, I’ll
give you kind of a breakdown of some of the features that you can do in this offer. And
then we’re going to kind of roundtable some ideas on what would some good offers be
and why is it relevant to you?

Jesse: So, first, where are you going to find this? You’re going to log into your Google My
Business account and you’re going to go to the area for posts. That should be on your
left hand side of your account. From there, you’re going to create a new post, and if
you’ve done this before, it’s going to be extremely similar to creating a post, but now on
the right hand side, you’re going to see a little tab that says “offer.” And it’s going to
have like a little for sale tag looking thing there. Click on that, and that’s going to be a
different kind of a post. Now this is something that might now be brand new to all of
you. And it was kind of rolled out in a limited Beta if you were lucky enough to get it
before, but now this is just a straight up standard feature within the Google Posts.
Jesse: If you click on that offer tab, you’re going to be presented with a couple different
options that just weren’t there before. So, first thing is, you want to have an offer title.
That’s going to be your strong call to action. Even if you repeat something like this in the
image that’s going to go with your post, put an image on the post. You’re not going to
want to create a post without an image or with just a blank color graphic, something
else, a place holder.

Bob: It’s got to be visually stimulating.

Jesse: Yeah, I mean you’re not going to first read the text, right? I mean you’re going to look at
the image first, and if that image contains text, that’s not so much of what I mean, but
you’re going to be drawn to that image. It’s going to be probably about the same size as
the post on the screen. Definitely use that, and we’ll break that down in a second, but
then within that, you’re going to have the title. So if you’re going to be, let’s say 20
percent off of computers, make sure that, that’s what your title says for this post, for
this offer is 20 percent off of computers or something relevant. And then again, you’re
going to have up to 300 words of text that you can put in that post.

Jesse: Now, write this text like you would any other article on your website. Do it on purpose,
understand what keywords you’re going after, and what your intent is for this. If you’re
pushing computers, mention the word computers, right? Or if it’s a particular brand of
Dell computers, or Dell laptops, or whatever the heck it’s going to be, mention that stuff
in your post. If possible, mention that stuff in the title. This is all relevant to SEO. I mean
that’s the name of the game, right? So just like anything, like we keep preaching, do it
on purpose, do it with intent, and make sure you understand what you’re trying to
optimize it for. And include your text and your phraseology in that way.

Jesse: Now in addition to that, you’re also going to see … Let me pull it up here. A start date
and time, and an end date and time. So that’s kind of the cool part with this offer as
compared to the regular posts. Now the regular post, you just post it and it’s almost kind
of like a blog within the Google My Business post here I’m speaking. You just post them.
Tomorrow you post another one, and then another one, and they just kind of rotate
through almost like on a timeline type of a fashion. They don’t literally rotate on there,
but the most recent one is displayed.

Jesse: With an offer, you might not want that to be evergreen and just be out there forever if
you’re going to run a sale just for the month of July, let’s say. You’re not going to have …
You don’t want that thing up in November and you’re out of stock, or prices change, or
whatever it is. So you can put a finite timeline on this. So, that can be, obviously as long
or short as you want. And if you want to kind of do something retroactive, you have the
ability to say, “This started last Monday,” or something like that. Maybe you’re actually
doing a promotion right now today, you’re listening to this and saying, “Well shoot, we
have a promotion running right now and I’m going to go write a post.” Yeah, you can say
this started last Monday, or last Tuesday, or the first of the month, or whatever it was,
to kind of sync up with your actual promotion that’s happening so it all looks like it was
coordinated. Completely able to do that, that’s fine.

Jesse: But pick your start date and pick your end date, and it’s going to automatically show
with that context in mind. So, the other thing on there is, if you want, depending on if
this is e-commerce or whatever it is, you can put a promo code on there. So, maybe if
they link from your Google My Business, goes to your e-commerce site, and they need
to enter this promo code, maybe you have a banner on your e-commerce that has the
promo code again, or if it’s for free shipping, or whatever the case is. Or maybe you
don’t promote that and you just want to see, “Are people responding to seeing this offer
post, and then going to my site and taking action, because this is the only spot I’m
showing this promo code,” which would be a cool test to do. But that’s up to you if you
want to do that, but there’s a spot for you to put in that promo code.

Jesse: Another use, it doesn’t just have to be for e-commerce. Let’s say your post says, “Come
into our store to get 20 percent off this Dell laptop. Mention promo code Dell20.” You
want to display that for them, so you’d want to mention that in the text of the post, but
then also there’s literally a field here for you to enter in your promo code. However,
you’re going to us that is really up to you. Those are just a couple quick ideas, but those
are the new features that are available. So it’s pretty cool. If nothing else, it’s something
different. You’re going to stand out on the page and grab that attention of those
customers that are searching, and just kind of scrolling through the page.

Bob: Well and I think it’s key that whatever you offer, again, you’re measuring it.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: So, if it’s a special rate, if you’re an hourly service type deal, maybe you have a visual of
your normal rate with a red slash through it, and then a new rate in green. That’s a bit
unusual. So your whole team and your organization knows where this came from
because this is all new. We really don’t know how effective this is in converting. So, we
are kind of late in the game. We don’t have a lot of experience with it ourselves, and
we’ll probably be digging into that and testing with it. And we’ll circle back with some of
our own results, but it’s one of those things that a person’s going to have to open up
your map pack. Not your map pack, but your Google My Listing or whatever to see this
promo, right?

Jesse: Yeah, maybe to read the whole thing depending on … Google kind of decides how to
display these things depending on different search criteria, but they’re not going to see
the whole post. You’re always just going to kind of see a snippet, and then-

Bob: You have to click again to-

Jesse: Yeah, read more and kind of expand more. We should note too, there’s actually another
field. I was just looking at my notes and I skipped this one. You can also put in a link to
redeem the offer.

Bob: Oh wow.

Jesse: So these are not to be combined together. You can have a promo code, but not use this
link to the offer, but you can do both. Usually on your Google My Business posts, if
you’re going to link anywhere, it’s kind of to the main page that your GMB links to. So
this does allow you to go to something separate. So again, you’re talking about testing
and things like that. If you want to test different things and just see how effective this is,
you can push traffic right to a dedicated web page that maybe has a unique tracking
number, or some other criteria to help you know if this is working.

Bob: So if you’re a pizza shop, how would this work with a pizza shop? Would you just have
again, some enticing offer, with … They could potentially link to a coupon or something
to print out, or would that matter? How would you stage that?

Jesse: Yeah, so I guess there’d be three ways, I was kind of thinking through that. One would
be is if you have the ability to actually place these orders online is, state your deal. Let’s
just say you get a free small pizza with purchase of any one topping, or whatever the
heck it is. But if this was an e-commerce type situation, then yeah, make sure your link
to the offer is there. And if there’s a promo code to input, that, that’s all there and kind
of pushes through.

Jesse: The other option would be is if they just needed to print this, or maybe show this on
their phone. If they walk in, show us this on your phone, just save it, take a picture of it,
whatever it is. If you’re calling in, mention this promo code; but I guess I’d be very
curious if you ran something slightly unique that’s not one of your current promotions,
just to see how much exposure this is getting. It’s pretty new. Hopefully it sticks around,
it’s pretty cool. Sometimes Google will test these things and if there’s just no action,
they pull it down. Google Plus was supposed to be the Facebook killer and it recently, in
the last year, Google put out updates and deactivated a lot of inactive Google Plus
pages.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: So, even though they’re awesome at what they do and they’re extremely innovative,
their ideas don’t always stick. This one looks like it’s pretty good because the post thing
has been working for people. It helps you get exposure, take up real estate. Now you
can actually tie an offer into this. So it seems like it’s going to make sense, but test it
out, see if it’s working for you. If it is, do more of it, find out how to leverage it, but if it’s
not, then don’t and just create traditional posts.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: Kind of on the note, I guess I would recommend … And like you’re saying Bob, this is
new, so nobody has a lot of experience in this yet. This is kind of, for this episode, is an
announcement that it’s out there, to let everybody know. Not so much on maybe how
to best use it. We’re just kind of sharing what we expect to be best practice built on
everything else here, but what we don’t know is if this is going to drive a lot of success
for you or not. What we do know is, using posts again, helps take up real estate on the
Google Search Engine results page, the search page.

Jesse: So, if you’re not going to use this offer, if this is anything other than just … Sorry, if this
is nothing more than just a reminder for you to leverage that Google Posts, hey great, go
do that. It’s going to help you get more exposure and get found online, but if you have
some promotions and some offers, if you’re going to post something, again, get that
strong call to action.

Jesse: Something Bob and I were just talking about before we were recording this here is, from
our own personal experiences and helping businesses, try to stay away from these
generic offers.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: “Five percent off this. 20 percent off that.” A guy stopped into our business years ago
kind of doing just door to door marketing for whatever it is, we don’t need to get into
why. But he shared a super cool kind of metaphor with me that I thought really
resonated and I’d like to share it. Is, you got to give the context to people, what this
offer is. If somebody said you get 20 percent off a pizza, do we know what that really
means? Is that cheap? Is that expensive?

Bob: Is it a 100 dollar pizza and it’s 80 bucks, or what?

Jesse: Don’t really know.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: However, Little Caesars, which I guess I don’t know if they’re nationwide, but they’re
definitely up here in the Midwest, they have a five dollar hot and fresh pizza. Usually
one topping, let’s say pepperoni or whatever the case is for you, but you instantly know
the value of that five dollar large pizza. You can put that into context. Now, is it going to
mean it’s the best pizza, quality ingredients? Probably not right? It’s five dollars.

Bob: It’s Friday, your kids are hungry, you’re late for the baseball game.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: It is what it is.

Jesse: Right, I mean you know it’s a good value really at the end of the day. You can instantly
put that into context without any other feedback. Five dollar pizza, you know what
you’re getting right?

Bob: Just on a parenting pro tip here.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: Just give them their pizza and then make sure they take some vitamins afterward.
You’re good to go.

Jesse: You don’t think there’s a lot of nutrition in a five dollar pizza?

Bob: I’m just saying.

Jesse: Probably not, but it is pretty damn good. I can attest to that.

Bob: Sure.

Jesse: I’ve ate my fair share of Little Caesars pizza. In all seriousness though, you have a limited
amount of space to do this post. The image on it is going to be … If it’s on your computer
screen, maybe half of a business card, just kind of for scale. The image is going to be
that size, the text is going to be probably about that same deal, so this isn’t like a huge
thing that’s going to slap people in the face. You want to catch attention and you want
to quickly convey what it is. So just using that metaphor of, make sure you say your
pizza is five dollars instead of 20 percent off, because you need to just quickly have
people understand: “What is the value? Why do I care?”

Bob: Yup.

Jesse: And you don’t want to make them think.

Bob: Don’t make me think.

Jesse: You don’t want them to run through their head and figure this stuff out. So, just back
tracking as well, we thought something that was important to communicate is, again
with your images. Being very, very visual, contrasting colors. You want this thing to pop
out right? So how do you know what’s going to pop out? Do some Google searching. See
what these things look like out in the wild, right? Google Search Engine Results page is
usually a white background. What are the colors on the page? You want to stand out
from the crowd.

Jesse: If you look at an NFL game and they’re kind of panning through the crowd, a lot of
people wearing team colors, and then somebody’s wearing blaze orange or whatever it
is. Or if you’re at a Green Bay Packer’s game, there’s a lot of blaze orange. We’re across
the border so we’ll make fun of you guys, you deserve it. You got the rings, we don’t, so
don’t worry about it, but you want to stand out from that crowd. So do some searching,
see what’s actually out there in the wild, pick your color schemes, pick your ad design,
what you’re going to do for images to stand out. First thing you got to do is grab that
attention.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: If you get scrolled past, then it’s all for not. It doesn’t even matter what your offer is or
how slick it was. You got to grab that attention, so we would say use colors that are
disruptive.

Bob: Yup.

Jesse: Don’t be afraid to overlay text. Again if it’s a five dollar pizza, if you’ve got a snazzy
looking image of your pizza and good colors that stand out, just put five dollars right in
that image, and then go ahead and write your text of your offer/post accordingly.

Bob: And that’s AB testing. You’re going to be in your GMB. You should be in your GMB at
least every three weeks.

Jesse: Oh yeah.

Bob: So as long as you’re in there, switch this out, just see what happens. I would try it a
couple times, and again, part of the reason you want to do it is more for the SEO piece
too. It’s just a little more collateral that’s in there.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: And let’s try it and see what happens.

Jesse: We’ve said it time and time again whenever we talk about Google products. If Google’s
going to give you something to use, use it.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: This is a thing provided by Google, through Google, and to be shown on the Google
Results Search Engine Results Page. Use the darn thing. And you’re saying every three
weeks. I’d even challenge everybody out there, do this at least once a week. As long as
you know how to log into your GMB account and get to this post area, it takes you like
15 seconds.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: You can whip out one of these posts in, gosh, 15 minutes or less. And I’m talking about if
you don’t have any graphics and you just need to find some stock photos, or snapping
one yourself, whatever, and just throw up 100, to 200, to 300 words, whatever it is. You
can type up that offer real quick and post this thing, try it for a few weeks. If you’re
getting absolutely no traction, you can go ahead and pull back, but I would definitely at
least try it weekly, if not even more frequent if you want. You’re not going to really
overdo this.

Bob: Yeah, have it be part of your routine. Once a week, Monday, you sit down and do this.

Jesse: All right, that’s about it for this week. If you guys got any topics you want us to cover,
drop us a line, Intrycks.com/show. We’re always looking to know what resonates with
you. If you have any challenges, if you have any problems, or you just want to maybe
know the best way to approach something, that’s what we want to talk about. We want
to help you out. We’ve already had some good listener feedback, we’ve been featured
on the show talking about these topics. And we’d love to do more of that to help you
guys out. This is what we’re here for is to help you guys out in the local business circle.

Bob: Yeah, this is where it begins for small businesses. You basically are going to have to get
good at this. And you’re probably good at your craft, and that’s why you went into
business, and you saw the opportunity and that’s where it begins; but this is really
where you got to take your business to the next level is dig into this stuff. And it is
tough. It’s not tough, but it’s not sexy, it’s stuff that you have to get into and work out.
And trust me, when you work at it, it’s going to be all worth it because now you can take
this craft and this ability that you have, and marry it with the people that are looking for
you.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: And once that happens, something magical happens andJesse: Yeah, it’s called money.

Bob: It’s money, yeah. Your wife is happy, and your husband’s happy, and your kids are
happy. And that’s basically what we’re here to do. We like helping small business grow,
and it’s really neat because that’s who you go out and have beer with, you go play
softball with, and fish with.

Jesse: That’s about it for this week. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next week

Check out the show notes below for resource links, guides, and a link to watch the episode in video format!

To share your thoughts:

  • Send us a comment or question in the section below.
  • Share this show on Facebook.

To help out the show:

  • Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and we read each one.
  • Subscribe on iTunes.
  • Subscribe on Google Play.
  • Subscribe on Stitcher.

LINKS

MP3 Audio DOWNLOAD THE MP3 AUDIO FILE

Listen to the episode however you like with the audio file.

Video WATCH VIDEO OF THE SHOW

RESOURCES

Note: some of the resources below may be affiliate links, meaning we get paid a commission (at no extra cost to you) if you use that link to make a purchase.

SHOW FEEDBACK

We're here to help! Share your thoughts on what you'd like us to focus on, or what challenges you are facing right now.