How to Increase Sales With Google My Business in 2021 by Liquor Store Profits

Liquor Profits Store Revenue Optimization

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How To Increase Sales With Google My Business in 2021 Alex Flasinski, Store owner + online expert

www.LiquorStoreProfits.com

HOW TO INCREASE SALES WITH GOOGLE MY BUSINESS IN 2021 WRITTEN BY: ALEX FLASINSKI

Want to know how to increase sales with Google My Business in 2021? Now I know that 2020 might not have been the best year for a lot of liquor and wine store owners around the United States, Canada, Europe and other parts of the world. With more competition coming up every day, especially for us in Long Island, New York. A Total Wine superstore opened up. This caused many liquor stores in our area to lose sales and a lot of people are struggling. Many stores either did 0% increase this year in sales, or maybe even your store was a little bit negative this year in sales. Whatever the case is, I want to help you because we're doing well here. Our sales are going up, way up in fact, and I decided that it's time to share as much as I can with you guys to help you increase your liquor and wine business.

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So, over the few days I'm going to release 15 tips and marketing ideas for how you can start 2021 the right way with your liquor store business. Today we're going to start with one of my favorites. Google My Business or GMB for short. This is one of the first things I did when I bought into this liquor store. It is the one thing that without a doubt, has had the largest effect. Now this effect takes a while to start taking hold. What's Google My Business? Well, you know, when you're on your phone, you're searching on Google, you're looking for answers or you're looking for a retail store in your local area. Maybe you're looking for a pizza delivery, food delivery, or you might be looking for “what time does Home Depot open and close?” What time does the laundromat open so that you can drop off your stuff? Well, people are looking for liquor, wine, beer and alcohol store information as well. And it's very important that you utilize Google because everybody's using Google. Everybody has a smartphone, laptop or computer. Everybody knows what Google is. How do you maximize it? Well, you use it. It's amazing because it's free, you don't pay anything for it. It's actually good for Google for you to do this. And it's good for you to do this. And it's good for the consumers for you to do this. The only person that's bad for is your competitors. If you're in an area where nobody else is utilizing Google My Business and you're the only one using it, you're going to make a lot of money off of that! What happens when somebody is searching for a liquor store on their mobile / cell phone? They see a bunch of results. They see all the liquor stores that Google knows about and in that person's area. So, your goal is to be one of the first, like top five, top three, or even top one, liquor or wine store that shows up for that person's particular search. There's only a few ways to do this. The one thing you must do is create a listing and verify your business on Google My Business. Go on Google, just Google.com. Select “Google My Business” and sign up, you put your n.a.p., which is: business name, store address, and phone number. And you put in all the information, this takes literally five minutes.

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You must do this. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be lazy! 5 minutes of your time to turn on a huge extra revenue stream for your business. You go on Google My Business, you download the app on your phone, that's what I did and It's even easier. Fill in all the business information and as soon as you do that they're going to send you a letter in the mail to verify that it's the right address. I think they also give a phone call to the phone to make sure that it's good. That's step number one, getting your business on Google My Business. Let's say you already did that. That's just step number one. Now, how do you rank higher? Well, there's a few ways. I think the biggest way is by having a company website, the biggest single thing you can do to increase your business ranking on Google is having a website. You don't have to go crazy. You don't have to make a full eCommerce website, which means selling products on there. It's better to have any website with all of your information on it. Who are you? What's the name of the store? What year were you guys open? What are your business hours? Add some pictures of you, and if you have any of your employees. That way people know who you are before they ever enter your store. You might think that it's not important, but it is, it is because it's not like five people a month who are searching for liquor stores. I'm going to show you guys my analytics on my Google My Business listing thousands of people every single week are looking up liquor stores. And they're either going to pick your store and go to it, or not. Let's say you're too lazy and you don't want to figure out how to do that. There's still things you can do to increase your Google My Business ranking, basically your local area business ranking on Google.

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What you need to do is gather reviews. You need to ask as many customers as possible. Who do you know? Customers, when they're not in a hurry, and they're in your store, ask them: “Hey Fred, could you leave me a review?”, he might leave you a review. Ask as many people that are your customers. Make it a goal to try to get at least one review a day. You want to get your reviews. Set a goal of at least a hundred reviews. If you get a hundred Google reviews you're going to be way above the average small liquor stores. This applies to any business, really any local business. Another thing you can do is post pictures. Don't just take pictures of your bottles and the front of your store. You want to have a nice picture of the outside of your store so that people who are Googling you, know exactly what to look for. Like, let's say somebody Googled you, if you have a nice picture of exactly what the front of your store looks like, for somebody who's going to see it for the first time, they already know what to look for when driving to your physical store location. A lot of times you might get a customer pissed off if they miss it because they missed a turn or whatever. If they already know before going to your store what they're looking for, this is that much more possibility that they're going to be happy when they get into your store. Another thing you also want to do is add as many pictures of the inside of your store as possible. Why? Because Google picks people’s businesses who add more pictures of their store and location as more trustworthy. So, you want to add as many relevant photos as you can. And I suggest also definitely adding pictures of yourself because you're a local business. It's one of the advantages of being a local business. WWW.LIQUORSTOREPROFITS.COM

People can relate to you as a ‘real’ person. If you've never posted a picture of yourself, potential customers are like: “well, it's just another store.” For 95% of people, they probably won't care if you have a picture of yourself. But, maybe for that other 5% of people, they're like “Hey, it's a picture of a real person”. They might pick your store just because you're the only one that actually added a picture of a human, instead of just a couple of bottles in the store. There's another couple more advanced techniques that you can do. One main one is requesting a Google 360 Tour of the inside of your store. That helps your ranking big time. What happens is you just go on Google and look up “Google 360 degree tours,” something like that. A professional Google photographer will then come to your store. Once they're done, a customer can take a virtual tour of the inside of your business from the comfort of their home via their computer from their mobile phone. Very interactive experience. Some other things you can do to increase your ranking would be like getting links from other websites. If you know any business owners with websites, or maybe you can reach out to some of the liquor brands or maybe some of your sales reps know of some liquor or wine brands that offer hyperlinks to stores who carry their products. Get as many links as possible as you can get. Basically what this means is when other websites have a link to your website, from their website, it shows Google that you're more like real, more trustworthy. And Google really likes that. This is a long term game, but the rewards are massive. If you don't have Google My Business already, set that up immediately! Like, don't wait for this. If you think you're too old to use a smartphone, you’re not too old. Google makes this 6

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stuff so everybody can do it. It's ridiculously simple. You have to do that. Your business depends on it. If you already are on Google My Business, start adding more photos more regularly, ask more customers for reviews, get a website if you don't have one, and start with that. Reviews, photos, website. Check. Once you have all of those, you want to increase your Google search engine ranking more. Really, what it boils down to is getting links, getting that 360 degree Google tour, and just getting more and more customer reviews. And don't buy reviews. I don't think it even works anymore. Do not go on a website and just buy reviews that won't work or possibly gets you penalized from Google if they find out. What you want to do is ask all of your customers, ask your sales reps, if you're cool with some of them, ask some of the tasting people that come in, ask your friends and family, of course you yourself, leave a review and all that. One more important thing. You can sign up for these local business directories online. Just Google “local business directory” and sign up for any local business ones for your area online. There's a website called YellowPages.com, make sure your business information is there. Make sure your business information is on a Facebook company page, with your store hours, your website url, and stuff like that. What that actually does is it just creates hyperlinks back to your website and business, right? If you don't have a Facebook page for your store, it'll do two things: a) You'll have somewhere to post even more photos b) It also gives you a link from Facebook to your website. WWW.LIQUORSTOREPROFITS.COM

Before I finish, let me just tell you guys my analytics report from Google My Business. In the past month, 836 people have typed in “liquor store” on Google near us (specifically in our store local area), and clicked our Google My Business listing. And then the rest is just random searches for Pikes Liquor and certain liquor and wine items. Now these items and pages are coming from our website in the Google search results, and that's why it's also good to have a website. In the past month, we've had a total of 26,000+ searches. This is for “liquor store” and not just our business, but “liquor store” in general. And of that, about 5,000 are direct, meaning customers who found our listing by searching for “Pikes Wine and Liquor” or our exact location address. So, we already know they're looking for us. The majority of this traffic is people just looking for liquor store or wine store. Over 21,000 searches in our local area in only a month! Ridiculously awesome for us! Once you have your business on Google My Business, you also then have it on Google Maps. The majority of searches are coming from Google Maps. These are people that are going on their maps app on their cell phone, typing in the words “liquor store” or “wine store” and picking a store. These people are spending money to buy alcohol. This is cash your business could be generating, but only if you create and optimize the GMB listing. I'm going to release 15 digital magazines. And what I'm going to do is give you 15 ideas to increase your sales in 2021. I'm doing this to help you guys work smarter, not harder. I hope this really helps other wine and liquor store owners out there. Our business is up by over $600,000 this year. So we're doing very well over last year, despite COVID. I’m not just speaking here sharing theory. When I tell you these things, these are things that I’ve implemented for my store and honestly helped me achieve this $600k+ growth. I hate knowing giant stores like Total Wine did over $110 million of business in revenue this past year at their new location in Long Island, NY. It's crazy! That's $110 million dollars less that local guys like you and me aren't doing here. Sure, we're up $600k this year, but we lost many customers to Total Wine as well. And I'm doing everything I can to get some of those customers back. In the meantime I figured why don't I help you guys as well to increase your liquor or wine business? Let me know what you guys think in the comments below. I am here to help you and your business thrive in 2021. 8

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