If your business engages in person with customers, you likely have some level of familiarity with Google Business Profiles, formerly called Google My Business. 

What are Google Business Profiles

A Google Business Profile is a free tool that allows businesses to manage their online presence on Google Search and Maps. With a Google Business Profile, businesses can add information about their business, such as their hours of operation, address, phone number, website, and photos. They can also respond to reviews, post updates, and message directly with customers.

Who Should Set Up a Profile

Companies with physical locations should set up their Google Business Profile. A Google Business Profile is tied directly into Google Search and Map functionality, which makes it easy for local people to find your business. This tool is designed specifically for businesses that make in-person contact with their customers. That means that it’s specifically designed to help small local businesses looking to make it easier for their customers to find and connect with them.

Why Use Google Business Profiles

A Google Business Profile is a free and valuable tool that helps businesses improve the accuracy of their information online and makes it easier for them to be found by new customers. The profiles appear as results within Google Search and Maps, which helps improve local search engine optimization.

From a management perspective, a Google Business Profile gives you one entry point that makes it easy to set up Google Ads, respond to reviews, and update your listing. They have unique features and functionality by industry, like the ability for restaurants to upload menus.

With verified businesses on Google twice as likely to be considered reputable, this free tool can help small businesses build trust with their customers. 

They also make it easy for companies to connect with their customers, with the ability to enable a messaging feature that’s built into the tool. Google Business Messages can be accessed from Google Search and Maps, with the capability continuing to receive more prominence for companies who choose to turn it on.

Why Activate Google Business Messages

Google offers the messaging tool as a free feature for all Google Business Profiles. They require that companies enable the messaging feature and then follow best practices for continued access. 

One of the requirements for continued access to the feature is tied to response time. With customers seeking to get answers and connect in real time, Google actively measures time to respond (TTR) between messages. If a brand’s agent is slow to respond, Google will remove the brand’s messaging buttons and turn off the functionality for that profile. 

In addition to the ease of access, Google Business Messages offer opportunities to upsell and cross-sell and creates ways to interact with customers on a more personal level. All of this translates to more opportunities for sales, with 72% of people reporting that they’d be willing to make a purchase online if they were able to ask questions in real time.

Messaging is, admittedly, a commitment. Many companies with a Google Business Profile never turn messaging on due to worries about proper staffing to accommodate inbound messages.

That means that their prospects are likely to go to a competitor that they can message and hear back from instantly. If you think that scenario sounds dramatic, think about most people that you know – they want convenience and they naturally seek out things that are easier on them. Sending a message and getting an immediate response without even navigating to a new web page is extreme convenience and easy to use.

For a business owner, any potential missed sales opportunity has to be balanced alongside other things, like the cost of adding a new employee. Thankfully, there is another option: AI-powered automation.

Optimal Conversations™ for Google Business Messages

AI-powered automation is a safe way for a business struggling to decide whether they can justify the cost of added headcount. We’ve built Optimal Conversations™ for Google Business Messages to help support more efficient lead intake, routing, scoring, and internal prioritization. It even includes the ability to hand off to a live person as needed.

At XAPP AI, we believe that small and mid-sized businesses should have access to the same enterprise-grade technology that large corporations rely on. A big part of access is affordability, which is why we’ve priced it to pay for itself by being responsive to prospects and customers 24/7 and by capturing leads that would have otherwise been lost. With 5 billion+ searches daily, that’s a low-risk, high-reward opportunity.

Leveraging an automated solution like OC for Google Business Messages is a cost-effective way to take advantage of the messaging functionality built into so many Google experiences. 

Be the first to get access by signing up for the waitlist today.