Similar to how you would develop a Linkedln or make a social media account to let people know who you are and what you do, business profiles let others know about your business. Business profiles are used to inform others of the main elements and purpose of your business. It can help give an overview of your operation, with an indication of the worthiness and objectives. In this article, we hope to outline the advantages and disadvantages that you gain as a business using an online business profile such as Google My Business or brandSuite Local, which are meant to manage how your business is viewed accurate online, as well as offline and truly, control their online presence.
Advantages
- Online Business Profiles can help your business stand out from other businesses. By utilizing an online business profile, you are in the sense making your business more viewable and reachable to the average online user. This increased reach can help customers learn more about your business first compared to competitors, which in turn can lead to more profits for your company.
- Online Business Profiles can help you see proof-of-performance of your business more easily. You can see where customers are going on your website, or what customers are searching for your business. This can help you make decisions on what is popular for your customers and what qualities of your business you hope to improve. For example, you can use a business profile to find which products are more in demand by your customers (checking how many times each of your products were searched by customers) which can let you plan for the future to maximize something from your business such as profit. This can be achieved by adding products that are similar to products that you have that are in demand, and stopping production of products that aren’t viewed as favorably by customers.
- Online Business Profiles allow you to more easily interact with your customers. You can use an online business profile for people to more easily search up and look up your contact or other personal information. This information can then be used for customers to contact you. This is a great feature, as having customer feedback can greatly improve your businesss and help find its niche and speciality. It can also help you build a connected community with your customers, which can help with marketing and gaining new customers as well as retaining old customers.
- Online Business Profiles allow you to gain new customers and retain previous customers. By having a landing page in which customers can go to will better make customers associate with your company and the specific products and services that you give.
Disadvantages
- Some online business profiles can be costly. Thankfully, services such as Google My Business and brandSuite Local are completely free, so you don’t have to worry that much if you want to get started with an online business profile (although they can do quite more). If the online business profile that you are looking at costs money, evalute whether that service will truly give you your money’s worth. You can always go back and check for free services.
- Online Business Profiles can take time to setup and understand. Although services such as brandSuiteLocal greatly simplify the process step-by-step by breaking each of its components into easily controllable portions, other services might be a lot more cluttered and hard to understand at first. Most of the time, the effort that goes into setting up an online business profile is almost always worth it.
Conclusion
Your experience with using an online business profile is how you make it to be. By taking the necessary steps required, you can help your business kickstart itself into having a successful online image and take it to the next level. The choice is yours, however, and if you ever believe that using an online business profile is unnecessary you are always free to not use one.
