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On this week’s Relationship Marketing Weekly, Relationship Marketing Expert Kody Bateman interviews Insurance professional Bret Weston!  Bret explains how he created a 90% referral based business and maintain a 95% retention over the past five years. It’s an amazing story that I know you’ll enjoy!

Insurance and financial service professional Mike Smith’s retention/persistency rate is 20% higher than the national average. 80% of his book of business has come from referrals. 100% of his Medicare business and 90% of his annuities business has come from, you guessed it, referrals. How does he do it? His answer will absolutely amaze you…

It's perhaps maybe not that long ago that using an insurance web site was considered to be a cost of doing business, however, perhaps not fundamentally a means to create leads.

Today though, with the new generation of consumers and even a huge block of "traditional" consumers who consider themselves to be "with the times" in terms of doing business online, you must have an active, current, web presence that doesn't just sit there, it must add value. Brochure websites are really a thing of the past.

Too often business is all about doing what your head tells you to do rather than your heart. Leaders are ideally positioned to put humanity, compassion, and purpose back into the workplace, so why not use that power?

By putting people first, and by tapping into employees’ unlimited wells of creativity, initiative, and productivity, the psychic and the financial rewards to your company and the people who work within it will be truly remarkable. Here’s how.

1. CONNECT WORK TO A MISSION
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. The heart-centered leader is a master of divining an organization’s mission and then developing a vision for what paths the organization should take to achieve it. Everyone’s work is positioned as part of a larger, big-story purpose. As Xerox PARC guru John Seely Brown put it, “The job of leadership today is not just to make money. It’s to make meaning.”

2. SPEAKING OF CONNECT. . . CONNECT!
Business is built on a foundation of strong relationships both inside and outside the organization. This makes two-way communication and true dialogue with your people critically important. The best leaders encourage an open flow of ideas throughout the organization and break down the walls that separate employees from one another.

3. LEAVE NO EMPLOYEE BEHIND
None of us is as smart as all of us. Every employee is a source of unlimited ideas on how to improve his or her organization’s products, work processes, and systems. Most employees simply need to be invited to participate and then positively reinforced when they do. However, employee participation only works in an environment of complete and unconditional trust.

4. DON’T JUST TOLERATE WORK-LIFE BALANCE, INSIST ON IT
In the past, companies demanded–and got–the best part of their employees’ lives. Today, the people who run the most successful companies have learned that helping workers balance their lives on the job and off results in a healthy environment with less stress, much higher productivity, and much lower employee turnover. That is a sure recipe for a better bottom line.

5. SHARE THE WEALTH
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich provides two compelling reasons that organizations should share financial success with their employees: First, if you want to attract and keep talent, you have to pay for it. Second, if you want that talent to work with the enthusiasm that comes from ownership, you have to trade equity for it. By sharing the wealth with your people (through competitive pay, performance bonuses, stock options, and the like), you create extremely powerful organizational glue.

6. HAVE MORE FUN
Employees who have fun at work are happy employees, and happy employees are more productive employees. Not only that, but research shows that fun restores immunity, elevates endorphins, and reduces diseases and work absences. There’s simply no reason to have unhappy employees in your organization. Can’t think of anything fun to do? Consider afternoon bowling outings, baseball games, cookouts, goofy hats, impromptu karaoke contests, and mock casinos for a start. Or just ask your employees.

7. BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF ONE
When you lead with your heart, others are sure to be touched, both inside and outside the organization. Putting people first is the key to unleashing the full power and creativity of employee teams, superior customer service, strengthened client relations, and closer and more productive relationships with vendors and suppliers. One person can make all the difference in the world, and there’s every reason for that person to be you.

To secure your best year yet, you may consider using a service like this one. In just minutes, you can create a custom card, add a personal message and picture, and do it all right from your mobile device!  You can even include one of their many gift selections like their amazing brownies, their new premium line of chocolates, you can even include a Starbucks card!

If you would like to learn more about how to incorporate a Relationship Marketing Strategy in your business, feel free to call or text me (Andrea Shepherd) at 424-442-0143.  I will answer all your questions and help you build relationships, increase referrals, and make an amazing impression on all your clients, friends and family!

Source: Inc.com

• Google brings AI-powered ad suggestions to AdWords campaigns. The new campaigns will get optimization suggestion from Google’s AI.  
• Google is testing phrase free AdWords Campaign. 
• Automated PPC bidding is not ideal in all the situations. Here’s a comprehensive article that explains in great detail that when you should not use automated bidding. 
• Google has recently launched a new tool “reach planner” that helps you spend your marketing budget wisely. 
• Don’t want Google to run ads automatically? Here’s how you can opt out of AdWords Ad suggestions.
• Bing has recently launched 4 new features within their Bing shopping campaigns interface. 
• The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is new privacy regulations that are going into place officially on May 25th, 2018. IN response to this rule, Google is making big changes, especially within Youtube Ads. Find out. 
• Bing Ads has launched New Price extensions. According to bing, this will help advertisers show the right product at the right time. 
• Google has launched TrueView that helps advertisers to promote their products/service more effectively. The bumper ads which are 6 seconds long are the first to be introduced.
   

Google is struggling hard to keep the reviews trustworthy. They are trying to weed out fake reviews and bring genuine reviews, but they have a long journey ahead.

As reported in Google My Business forums, recently, a Kentucky law firm allegedly ran a contest on Facebook, offering people zoo tickets in exchange for positive reviews. 

This didn’t go down well with other law firms and businesses and they reported the incident to Google. As a result, Google updated their reviews guideline from: 

“Don't offer or accept money, products, or services to write reviews for a business or to write negative reviews about a competitor.”

to this:

“In addition to Prohibited Content guidelines, text reviews are subject to the following additional requirements:
•    Don't use reviews for advertising purposes. This includes, but is not limited to, posting email addresses, phone numbers, social media links or links to other websites in your reviews.
•    Don't include promotional or commercial content.
•    Don't offer or accept money in exchange for reviews.
•    Don't solicit reviews from customers in bulk.”

Reviews are important and it is almost as effective as a personal recommendation, but be careful how you collect it.

To help you get more reviews for your business, we highly recommend our review widget. It’s a small piece of code which is placed on your website and helps you get positive reviews on Google, Yelp and Facebook. In addition, it helps to filter out negative reviews too thus ensuring positive experience to website users. Need more details? Please connect with us.
 

Google has announced new features to the Google My Business API, a brand new GMB agency dashboard & also launched a partner program. 

Google My Business API Version 4.1 Features

• Customer Provided Media: You can now retrieve and view insights for user generated photos and video for locations you own & manage.
• Admin Management APIs: You can now list, accept, & decline account and location related invitations for your account.
• Merchant Provided Description: Describe your business in your own voice and share with users the unique story of your business & offerings.
• Opening Date: Provide the date that your location opened for business.
• Offer Type Posts: A new type of Post on Google, helping users find deals available at your locations.

Agency Dashboard
The new agency dashboard is designed for those who manage multiple businesses and gives these folks:

• Single Organization Accounts on Google My Business to manage all locations and no longer limited to 100 locations.
• User Groups to manage internal teams and control access to locations.
• Improved search functionality enabling users to efficiently search for locations within an account and across location groups.
• Easier workflows to send and receive invitations to manage listings.

Partner Program
Trusted partners will be eligible for early access to new Google My Business features, a partner manager, and the potential to be featured on the Google My Business website. You can sign up for notification of this program here.
 

Pinterest has redesigned profile pages for user and brands, with a cover image from a collage of users latest pins. Its a good opportunity for brands to can take advantage of this update and display their best products campaigns, and most pinned items right up front on your profile page.

Once the new profile design is up, your most recent pins will automatically be featured in the cover image. Here are steps on how to get your best pins at the top of your profile.
Pinterest offers three different options for choosing specific pins that you want to feature in your cover image.

1. Latest Pins – If you choose this option, it will feature the last 24 pins you’ve saved on any board across your Pinterest profile.

2. Recent Activity – Choosing this option will display pins that other users have saved from your site and other accounts you have associated with your Pinterest account.

3. Pick a Board – This option will display all the pins you have on a specific board. Use this option along with Featured Boards and this board should have only that pins, which you wish to be featured as your cover image.

If you choose the option to have a certain board or latest pins featured, Pinterest also creates a tab in the upper right corner to send users directly to that area.

Lately, Pinterest has been striving hard to spruce up its platform and make it more brand-friendly and at the same time helping consumer finding what they are looking for. The new profile design is just another effort of providing a fresher experience on the platform. 

Google has started rolling out the mobile first index. Google has already moved a limited number of sites to mobile first indexing, but this time it’s on a much larger scale. Apart from sending messages on the search console, they are sending emails to the site owners informing them about the shift.

Here’s how the Email looks: 

Mobile-first indexing enabled for "your domain name"

To owner of "your domain name" 

This means that you may see more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You may also see that snippets in Google Search results are now generated from the mobile version of your content.

Background: Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they’re looking for. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site’s content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version. Our analysis indicates that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable.
 

The real take away with this is that you'll be able to quickly know if your site has been moved or not. No more checking logs or guess work.
 

A recent study shows that more review stars translate into higher paid search conversation rates. Businesses with an average of 3.31 stars managed to get 10.42 percent conversion rate, whereas, businesses that had 4.5+ stars achieved a remarkable 12.83 percent conversion rate.

The study also revealed that the response rate also affected the paid search performance. Business with highest response rate saw an average conversion rate of 13.86 percent. While the those with the lowest response rate had to settle down for 10.42. 

Engaging with customers & responding to their reviews is directly related to improved conversion rate as it builds trust among other users. 

So reviews not only help you improve the local search rankings, but also paid search ranking, and conversion rates as well.

So if you are not focusing n reviews, now is the time to do so.

To help you get more reviews for your business, we highly recommend our review widget. It’s a small piece of code which is placed on your website and helps you get positive reviews on Google, Yelp and Facebook. In addition, it helps to filter out negative reviews too thus ensuring positive experience to website users. Need more details? Please connect with us.