MAKE SURE VISITORS CAN FIND YOU! In order to support you in doing that we’d like to suggest that you register your club in Google My Business and make sure that the club contact data is up to date on the Toastmasters website (and that leads coming from that are promptly replied).
- Register (for free) your club on Google My Business
Access GOOGLE MY BUSINESS https://www.google.com/business/ and register your club. Make sure you open the Google My Business profile for your club with a dedicated GMAIL address, ideally the GMAIL address of the club, so that in the following years that address can be passed on to whoever will manage the Public Relations aspects of the club and will be able to keep on updating the club Google My Business entry.
There are VIDEO TUTORIAL for GOOGLE MY BUSINESS first setup – one of them is this one: https://youtu.be/81nhmYRTYZM (less than 15 minutes).
For a more detailed set of instructions see the workshop of Paola Perina, PRM of D109, who has long been promoting this approach to making clubs visible. The workshop is linked here: https://zoom.us/rec/share/fen5Pbj9y4UDJbObN51w8XYg4dnHDxYiUxahUFZQRo2Hjc21dPYxXuWGEvKmhxTP.3tMtXriurmCXu1xK?startTime=1635962592000 (less than 60 minutes).
Below are some suggestions from Paola Perina to make sure your listing in Google My Business is as efficient as possible.
CLUB NAME: make sure it is consistent throughout all of the platforms that your Club owns (Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, your website, etc.)
ADDRESS: same as above. Consistency is key. Remember Google is a computer and precision matters.
OPENING HOURS: Google my Business is not set up for our Toastmaster schedule. What can you do?
1. Toggle the day of the week when your club meets and enter meeting hours
2. Find the section “Special Hours” and add the days of the month when you will not be holding a meeting. Toggle “closed”
Example: if you meet only on the First and third Monday of the month, add in special hours the dates of the second and fourth Monday for that month and toggle closed.
SERVICES: don’t forget to add what people can do or find in your Club. For example:
- Train Public Speaking skills
- Train Impromptu Speech
- Train presentation skills
- Take on leadership roles
- Learn how to give feedback
- Get over stage fright etc.
ATTRIBUTES: useful to add more info you can choose from the proposed lists. Look for SERVICE OPTION and choose ONSITE AND ONLINE to show hybrid meetings. It gives people the idea that they can visit in person or connect online.
REVIEWS: this is a very important element because 9 out of 10 people will look at reviews before making any (purchasing) decision. How do you get reviews? Here are some ideas:
- Ask your Club members to write a review by sharing a direct link either on WhatsApp, Messenger, Slack, or through email
- Ask guests who said they enjoyed the meeting. Send a follow-up email, making sure to include a direct link asking them to leave your Club a Google review.
- Put the direct link under a button on your website, asking people to leave a Google review. How do you get a direct link? Google my Business Dashboard — Home —- scroll down Click —– Share Review Form. That is the DIRECT LINK TO THE REVIEW FORM – Give it to your members and friends, one click and they are ready to review the club.
2. Add keywords to help people find you
CATEGORIES: choose carefully, because this is the element that will be most influential in your ranking on Google. There are more than 4000 categories to choose from. Here is a list of the ones that are most fitting for a Toastmasters Club:
- TRAINING CENTER
- LEARNING CENTER
- ADULT EDUCATION SCHOOL
- CLUB
- NON PROFIT ORGANIZATION
The first three are the best choice as PRIMARY CATEGORY. The other two are best as secondary category. To view all available categories, go to the link: https://pleper.com/index.php?do=tools&sdo=gmb_categories
You can select your own country and the language.
3. Enjoy top placement in Google searches and contacts from qualified searches
Once you have done the above Google will start showing your club in related searches, and you will soon get guests coming to your meetings.
4. Update contact details on Toastmasters website
Make sure your contact details are up to date. Access the Toastmasters website go to Leadership Central and access Club Central – you will need to be an officer and will need to login. At that point go to Club Contact and Meeting Information. Make sure the data that is shown there is up to date and the contact email is an email that is regularly checked since it is at that email that you will get the leads generated by people who visit the Toastmasters.org website.
5. Automate answering to leads
Toastmasters International sends you leads, but sometimes those leads are lost, just because you did not update the email address to which they are sent – check on the TI website as shown above, then automate a reply to email contact requests providing the potential visitor with standard info about the club, and maybe a link to Eventbrite to register for the next meeting, or maybe directly the link of the meeting. It is useful to store data of those leads in a spreadsheet for future use.
For an automatic reply use Zapier or a similar tool – below are two examples:
- Zap to reply automatically to a TI lead: click here to see/copy it the reply will address directly the person who is trying to contact you.
- Zap to copy TI lead details into a spreadsheet: click here to see/copy it this is useful so that you have all the contact details of people that have contacted you in the past in that spreadsheet and can use that to run campaigns in the future.