A few days ago I got my annual phone call from a Yelp Representative looking to talk me into advertising our business on Yelp. I have never had any success or even leads for that matter from Yelp nor has any of our clients. If anyone knows me, you don't want to get on the phone with me unless you have scheduled a marketing consultation appointment because I will talk your ear off your head.

Anyway, I broke the Yelp Representatives spirit, but before I did, I learned a few interesting things. Of course, Yelp is still charging small businesses $400 per month for premium listings. I am still not clear what Yelp promises to give my business for $400 per month, but I quickly drove the conversation to the other advertising features I was looking at while pretending to be listening to the Yelp representative.

I concluded, after my self-evaluation of the advertising and marketing plans on Yelp, there are 5 solid reasons you may want to consider using Yelp for marketing.

1. Pay Per Click Campaigns

Like many of the online digital media marketing tools, you will find a pay per click option. I asked the representative about this feature, and she did not offer much help or advice. The tool is a self-service portal. Therefore, it is not much of a hot selling point for Yelp Representatives. However, this tool for small businesses is possibly a big win! You have the option of paying as little as $5 per day ($150 per month). The cost per click varies per industry. My industry is a bit high. When I entered $5 per day, I was told I could expect 9 profile views from this. in 30 days. This translates to $16.67 per click. I was told other industries are cheaper, so this is worth looking at for all.

2. Hot Deals

I am sure you are familiar with Groupon. Well, Yelp has a Groupon-style marketing campaign portal. You can run a deal up to at least $450 and provide a discount amount for as much as you like. This marketing tool works best for businesses that can offer discount amounts off of any item or service they sell. In our case, I ran a Yelp deal that provides consumers with $375 service for $275 ($100 savings). Our plan is to give 4 hours of consultation services for $275 with this deal. Yelp will keep 30% of the $275 (or $82.50). We will make $192.50. This amount is within our margins, therefore, we love the deal.

3. Call To Action Deals

For $50 per month, you can have a call to action button on your Yelp profile. This is great for businesses that need website traffic to drive sales. I like this feature the most because as with all the features mentioned thus far there are no long-term contracts to access this feature. This makes this an excellent tool to use when you want to push a specific promotion out to the Yelp audience. This should be used in concert with the pay per click campaign for maximum results.

4. Slide Shows

If your business attracts more leads based on the visual presentation of your product or service, then you are going to want to use the Slide Show features provided by Yelp. For $25 per month, you get greater control over the Yelp Photo gallery. The basic gallery provided is very limited. If your consumers or prospect clients need the visuals of your work, then you must consider getting the slide show feature turned on on your Yelp profile.

5. Gift Certificates

Above I introduced you to Hot Deals. The 30% Yelp's wants may be a bit much for some businesses, especially if you don't have a recurring service model. Yelp has another marketing campaign service that provides gift certificates. For 10% of the amount of the certificate, you can run a gift certificate promotion. Your gift certificate can be from $10 to $500. Again Yelp gets 10%, so if you have a $50 gift certificate you will only get $45 but still, need to provide the consumer with $50 worth of goods or service. Is this a better deal for you? It may be!

Conclusion

Up to now, we have left our Yelp profile unattended and unmanaged. I was not surprised when the Yelp Representative told me we had only 156 views in 12 months. What did surprise me was we had 22 clicks in the 12 months from the 156 impressions. Of the 22 views, we had 9 website visits. I will be honest I don't recall obtaining any new business or sales from these Yelp visits (and we do ask people how they found us). What I did find interesting was the 14% click through rate from the impressions and the 41% click through rate into the website. If we had an advertising campaign plan running on Yelp, I believe we would have easily closed additional sales. We have not relied on any results from Yelp, and we just let our listing sit unattended. That ended today! We at least have an offer running and will be considering the call to action feature next. I found at least 2 of the 5 reasons how Yelp may work for my business.... How about you?

If you need any help getting started on Yelp, please schedule an appointment with us to handle this for you. Hey, use our new Yelp deal to get a big discount on having this task done for your business.