Which Platforms Bring You The Most Business and the Best Business

The #1 way to grow your general notary business is by understanding which platforms bring you the most business and the best business, and not wasting time with the rest. The quick answer to which Platforms will bring you the most and best business is both Google My Business and Google Ads. Some of you are going to say, “I already have that,” and want to skip this blog as well as the next one. We can almost guarantee you that you’re not doing all the things needed to maximize the results. They’re like any other platform. Some people have business Instagrams that make them 6 figure incomes. Other people have business Instagrams that make them hardly anything. So don’t skip over this blog. If you do, you just don’t have a learner’s mindset, and we can’t help you there.

Before we get into the strategy and tactics around Google My Business, it’s important to have a discussion on why Google is the best platform to spend your time and effort on. A lot of new notaries we speak with have all the enthusiasm and determination in the world and tell us that they are doing everything they can in terms of promo. They tell us that they are posting like crazy on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. They tell us that they’ve created business profiles on Yelp, Thumbtack, Google My Business, and other review platforms. They tell us that they’re printing out flyers, and getting custom lawn signs and custom magnetic car signs. They tell us that they’re going door to door and telling everyone in their neighborhood that they’re a notary. Their time and attention are split between 10 different marketing avenues. But the reality is, their time and effort would be much better spent if all of it was focused on the ONE, BEST avenue. The best avenue for getting General Notary Appointments is Google (Both Google My Business and Google Ads,) done the right way. I’ll tell you why.

A quick note:

Google My Business and Google Ads are not the best avenues to grow your loan signing appointments. Once again, I recognize that a lot of you reading this are used to doing a lot of loan signings and very little general notary work. When it comes to growing your loan signing business, the more traditional methods of face-to-face networking are what will help you grow that business. That’s because there are very few borrowers at the individual level who are searching out their own loan signing agent. It’s usually a different real estate professional involved in the transaction (i.e. an escrow officer) who arranges for the loan signing agent to be present. That is why you have to network with those real estate professionals face to face and build relationships with them so that they will become a constant source of jobs for you. By contrast, when someone is looking for a notary public for general notary works like Power of Attorneys, Wills, Bill of Sales, etc, they are in fact searching out a notary public on their own. Therefore, when it comes to marketing your general notary service, you can indeed market to the individual.

Now that we’ve clarified that, let’s return to breaking down why Google is the best platform to spend your time and effort on as opposed to other social media and review platforms. First, let’s talk about why it’s virtually pointless to market your general notary service to individuals on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram because that’s what a lot of notaries are doing when we first meet them. 

Let’s pretend you are a restaurant owner for a second. You decide you want to promote your business on Facebook and Instagram. You take photos of the delicious food you offer. You take videos of the inside of the restaurant. You share comments from people who have eaten at your restaurants. You compile all of this into an amazing post that gets shared, liked, and commented on. Someone scrolling through Facebook may see that post, look at the photos, videos, and comments, and decide that they are going to try your restaurant out tomorrow on their lunch break. The content of your post was compelling enough that they decided to give you a chance and come try your food. Whether you are a restaurant, a hair salon, a landscaping service, or a clothing company, this way of outreach on social media can have great results. However, it does not work for promoting your notary services. No matter how great your post is, unless the viewer actually has a document in hand that requires a notary public, they have no need for your service. Let me say that again. Even if you have the most amazing post that gets into someone’s Facebook or Instagram feed, unless they are dealing with a major life event at that exact moment and have a relevant document in hand, they wouldn’t be able to call you to try your service, even if they wanted to. 

The reality is most people don’t need a notary public very often. The need for a notary is usually tied to major life events. Most people don’t even need a notary every year. It’s something they find themselves needing every few years, or just a couple of times in their whole life, usually toward the end of their life. Of course, there is always an exception to the rule. A business person who makes lots of big purchases or a hospice manager who is always around old folks would be two examples of people who may need your services very regularly. But the vast majority of people who see your incredible Facebook and Instagram posts, won’t even need a notary for years. And when they do find themselves in a situation where they finally need a notary, they’re not going back into their Facebook newsfeed to scroll back up through time and try to find you. They’re going to go to some kind of search engine where they can immediately search for a notary in their area. This logic also applies to the practice of knocking on doors and handing out flyers. Even if you pass out a bunch of flyers, unless they have an actual document in hand that requires a notary, they won’t be able to take you up on your service.

That brings us to our next family of platforms that notaries put their time and effort marketing through. There are two classes here. The first class is local business review sites. The second class is search engines.

Let’s start with the first class, local business review sites. There are two companies worth mentioning here: Yelp, and Thumbtack. Let’s start with Yelp. There is no reason not to have a free Yelp profile. There’s no cost, and in the long run, it may bring you a few clients here and there. But I’ll tell you why it’s not as good as Google My Business.

Let’s say a person goes to Yelp and searches for a service. What I’m about to describe will happen for any kind of search, but we’ll talk about it in the context of notaries. They go to Yelp and type in “Notary” in the search bar along with the city they’re in. They’ll get a bunch of results of notaries in their area. Let’s say they click on your Yelp profile. They see your reviews, they read your “about us” paragraph, and they decide they want to message you and inquire for a quote. What I am about to explain next is the primary reason why Yelp is not very helpful to you. When someone requests a quote from you on Yelp, you would hope that they are only messaging you. Even if their intention was only to message you, once they click to send you their inquiry for a quote, Yelp will hit them with a pop-up question that essentially asks them, “Would you like to request a quote from multiple businesses with one easy click?” Most people will click yes. Then Yelp sends out their inquiry for a quote to a bunch of other notaries at the same time. All of a sudden, you're not the only person giving them a quote. There are 5 or more other notaries who get the same inquiry for a quote, and they are also responding with quotes. Effectively, it becomes a lowest price wins situation. What you get from Yelp will be a lot of people who tell you that they have gotten quotes for less than what you would normally charge. And don’t even get us started on Yelp Paid Advertising.

This is important to address because, at some point, you will probably get phone calls from salespeople at Yelp. In our opinion, Yelp Advertising could very well be the worst use of your marketing dollars. What many of our notary clients tell us is that the Yelp salespeople are very aggressive and push for you to commit to huge ad budgets. We have run a few Yelp campaigns for notaries who wanted to give it a try. They were getting clicks on their Yelp Ad for about $15 per click, which is way too high. By contrast, you can get a click from a Google Ad for around $3 a click or less depending on how you set up the ad. On top of that, a click from a Google Ad is for you and you only. It sends them to your website or gets them to call you and only you. You can consider that person an exclusive lead. By contrast, you pay $15 to get a click from Yelp just to send them to your profile AND if they do decide to inquire for a quote, Yelp will likely shoot out that inquiry to a bunch of other competitors. The people who contact you will not be exclusive leads. In our opinion, the only time Yelp Ads make sense is if you already have a huge amount of reviews and one of the best Yelp profiles in your industry, as well as a product or service at a very high price point. If you are just getting started and only have a handful of reviews, there’s no point in paying to send them to a weak profile, stay away.

There’s a lot of background information we are covering here before we get to the final point of why Google My Business is the best platform. We feel this background information is incredibly important. Rather than just following a set of recommendations blindly, We want you to develop a sales and marketing mindset that allows you to think and analyze through that lens. This will help you continue seeing opportunities in your everyday life beyond just what I cover in this blog. Although you’ll still be able to grow your business just by following the recommendations and not developing your analytical, marketing, and sales mind, doing so will help you even more.

Let’s move on to the next platform, Thumbtack. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Thumbtack is an up-and-coming platform that you could view as a competitor to Yelp. It’s popular for finding contractors for home improvement projects. People who want multiple quotes will go to Thumbtack to message multiple professionals for whatever project they’re working on. Notary happens to be one of the categories represented on the platform. You also have to actually buy credits to be able to respond to people who message you on Thumbtack, so it is a pay-to-play platform. Although we don’t have much experience with Thumbtack, we have heard from the notaries we work with that it is better than Yelp. However, at the end of the day, it still is a directory of notaries where people are going to want to get multiple quotes and you’ll find yourself in a lowest price war with other notaries. If you have absolutely no traction at all and are literally getting 0 general notary appointments a week currently, Thumbtack is a decent place to get some initial appointments. But it certainly is not the best platform when compared to Google. There are just way more people using Google to find a notary, and in general, they are willing to pay more than someone who is price hunting on a place like Yelp or Thumbtack. 

Now let’s move on to the final class of platforms: search engines. The top two search engines are Google and YouTube. YouTube is a great place to be if you sell a service that requires more explanation. Let’s take the example of Solar Panel Installation. Someone who is thinking about installing solar panels in their home will very likely go to YouTube and watch a few videos about how it works. If you run a YouTube ad targeting those people or have a YouTube channel with a lot of educational videos, you can do very well. However, notaries offer a very standard service that doesn’t require much research. Once people go through their documents, and realize they need a notary, they are going to Google to search for a notary, not YouTube.

Another important reason why people will go to Google is that they are used to going to Google to look for a solution to an emergency that needs to be resolved the same day. Think about it, if you have a pipe burst and flooding in your kitchen, are you going to go to YouTube, or are you going to go to Google to search for “Plumber near me?” If you are in your living room, and all of a sudden a couple of rats go scurrying across the floor, are you going to go to YouTube, or are you going to Google to search for “Exterminator near me?” It’s the same for documents that require notarization. Of course, there are some people who aren’t in a rush and have no problem getting their document notarized anytime within a few weeks. But a significant percentage of people find themselves in an emergency situation where they realize they need a notary that day, or the next day, and so they go to Google in a bit of frantic panic, the same way you might if you had flooding in the kitchen or rats running across the floors.

That is why Google is the best platform to put your time and effort into. Now this can be achieved in two ways. The first is to start and grow a Google My Business Profile. This is the organic way to do it and takes more time. For those of you who haven’t heard that term before, in online marketing, organic refers to marketing where you aren’t paying to run ads. You should definitely open a Google My Business Profile as a notary, and start building up your reviews immediately. We’ll discuss that in the next blog. The second way to win the Google game is to run Google Paid Ads. This will get phone calls rolling in immediately. We’ll discuss that more in the next blog. If you do have a little extra money to invest in ads, I highly recommend it. It’s a fast pass to immediate phone calls coming in, and what you can do is turn every paid appointment into a review, so that your Google My Business profile grows quickly and starts bringing in organic phone calls much more quickly than you would without running Google Ads.

Read next blog and let’s talk about Google My Business.