Posted 8 months ago Comments
As a consumer, you either love Yelp or you hate it. As a business (profit focused or not), you need Yelp. For those of you not yet familiar with it, Yelp is an online website for consumers to write reviews about businesses. It’s not the only game in town for helping consumers share ratings and reviews of businesses on the Internet, but it’s definitely the major player. Businesses or consumers can submit new locations into their database so that others can read reviews about it. There are even people using their mobile app who will review your museum immediately after their visit.
Submitting your museum into their database is free. They do offer premium services that give you more tools, such as the ability to reply back to people who submit reviews for your museum, as well as the ability to list your museum on competitor’s Yelp pages. Depending on your budget this might be something valuable to you. Some businesses find that Yelp forces them to subscribe and makes them feel like they need to undercut their competition, and thus is a bit forceful. I’m not here to promote Yelp’s premium services or not, so you make that decision.
But at a minimum, you need to be sure your museum is listed for free on Yelp, and if it is, you should make sure the information they have is up to date. If your listing is not up to date or it is missing information, you need to claim your listing and then submit the correct information. Check your listing on a regular basis (perhaps every 3 months).
The real value here is that you can make it fun for users to discover your museum by reading the ratings and reviews from other people who have visited. While negative reviews are obviously a possibility, you can use these as an opportunity to improve your offering even further. If visitors are complaining about poor customer service or lack of new exhibits, at least you will be able to consider addressing it. Don’t be shy. Negative reviews will occur on anyone’s Yelp business listing. Just focus on making positive experiences for your visitors and you’ll begin to see shining 4 and 5 star reviews on Yelp.
If you decide not to spend a few minutes to list your museum on Yelp you will certainly miss out on some new foot traffic. If you think by not creating a listing you are avoiding negative reviews, think again. A consumer can submit your museum to Yelp at any time, and it’s possible they were going to leave a negative review. It might be a good idea to get listed first, so that you can encourage your visitors to leave a positive review. This will give you a nice head start.
Create or Update Your Yelp Listing Now
This will take you less than 5 minutes to complete. So why don’t you jump on it now?
To get started, go to Yelp’s Add Your Business website. You will be walked through 3 steps to either create a new business listing, or claim an existing one (in case someone already added you in).
This article is part of a series titled Improving Your Museum’s Marketing Efforts. To learn more about the series and to read the other articles, visit the series introduction article.
