Google Business View: Why Your Business Needs It
As a marketing company, we have to occasionally market our own business. It’s an ongoing exercise and we use our successful efforts as case studies for existing and potential clients. What better way to give you an example by talking about Google Business View and the why you need this service for your company.
Google Business View isn’t some kind of crazy voodoo magic, but after reading it’s description you may think that. So basically Google trained and certified (not everyone is qualified to do this) photographers come to your business location and take panoramic photos. These high quality photos are then used to create a virtual tour of your store, office, or any space. Anyone anywhere can now take a virtual walk through your store. Someone that lives on the other side of the world can virtually check out your bar that his buddy recommended he visit while in town. Sounds like magic, but this is reality and more and more small businesses are doing this every day.
Go Social decided to provide this service for our own office. The actual photo shoot for our office took about 15 minutes. A few days later after the editing we had our very own virtual tour. The walk-through was embedded on our webpage and it was also attached to our Google Plus profile. This has the extra benefit of your business showing up in Google Maps and also provides ranking benefits to your website as well.
Take A Google Business View Of The Go Social Office
Have a minute? Take a walk through our front door. You can literally see how many pens and pencils we have on our desks, how many fish our in our fish tank, and our passion for comic and sci-fi memorabilia. Good thing we cleaned! The walkthrough pictures used in the virtual tour are so clear you can see dust particles on that one desk we missed during the clean up (I swear, we’re not messy people).
Measure Your Return On Investment
These Google Business View services can and should be used for any business. The one time cost of providing a virtual tour for your company will have long lasting powerful effects. You own the tour forever, so if you change your website or get started on a new social media platform, it can easily be placed anywhere online.
Imagine you and the guys want to visit a new golf course. Imagine checking out all the holes and the entire course without leaving your living room. What if your buddy wants to check out this “hole in the wall” he found downtown. If they have a virtual tour, you would be able to check the surrounding area for visual clues to its location. A car dealership can bring in new customers by having a walkthrough of their showroom. The possibilities are endless.
In summary: Any one not considering this as a window for potential customers to look through needs to give it second thought. The low cost for this service can actually be measured with online analytics to see how many people took a virtual tour and then be correlated to sales. A third person perspective can also give business owners a real look at their store front and interior contents, showing what needs improvement or at least a fresh coat of paint. As a growing company we are happy to have done this and already it has helped relations with our new clients, letting them know exactly where are we.