In an era where a few large organizations seemingly dominate with their vast resources, how can small businesses rise above and stand out?

Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Emily Washcovick, Senior Field Marketing Manager and Small Business Expert at Yelp, join us. Emily works closely with small businesses across the country, helping them navigate challenges, leverage customer feedback, and thrive in a competitive landscape. She’s here to share insights on how small businesses can excel in customer experience, make the most of their resources, and use innovative tools like AI to grow.

About Emily Washcovick

As Yelp’s Small Business Expert, Emily is meticulously focused on helping local business owners succeed and grow. Her expertise lies in customer engagement, reputation management, and all things digital marketing. Through speaking engagements and thought leadership, Emily shares industry insights that entrepreneurs in any business category can leverage for the growth and well-being of their businesses. She is also the host of Behind the Review, a podcast from Yelp and Entrepreneur Media, where each episode features conversations with a business owner and a reviewer about the story and lessons behind their interactions.

Resources

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Transcript

Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited

Greg Kihlstrom: In an era where a few large organizations seemingly dominate with their vast resources, how can small businesses rise above and stand out? Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Emily Washkovick, Senior Marketing Manager and Small Business Expert at Yelp. Emily works closely with small businesses across the country, helping them navigate challenges, leverage customer feedback, and thrive in a competitive landscape. She’s here to share insights on how small businesses can excel in customer experience, make the most of their resources, and use innovative tools like AI to grow. Welcome to the show, Emily.

Emily Washcovick: Thanks so much for having me, Greg.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in, though, why don’t you start with giving a little background on yourself and your role at Yelp?

Emily Washcovick: Yeah, absolutely. So I started at Yelp 10 years ago, and I started in sales like many people do, calling local businesses, explaining to them how to leverage Yelp, both on the free side and with our advertising products. And about a year and a half into that, I was given the unique opportunity to join our business outreach team. And that team was focused specifically on free tools for business owners. So we would go to conferences, trade shows, conventions, and teach business owners of all industries how to get themselves on Yelp, especially before many businesses knew about it. You know, we were known as a restaurant platform, but we had all these other services and we wanted to get the word out. And when the pandemic hit, unfortunately, all of that in-person engagement came to a halt. And I shifted to more online engagement with business owners through webinars, but also Yelp’s podcast in partnership with Entrepreneur Magazine called Behind the Review. And we bring together the voice of a business owner and a reviewer to talk about what makes experiences unique and memorable and review worthy. And we also teach businesses how to excel in online marketing and customer engagement. So that’s my focus now. And we’ve been doing that since the pandemic. I really, really enjoy it. And I have a great time also on shows like yours, getting to meet other people in the industry and talk about the challenges that people are dealing with today in their small businesses.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, great. Well, yeah, you’re definitely the right person to talk with about these topics here. And I want to start with something really important to small businesses, which is being able to meaningfully compete with those larger organizations. As I mentioned, large organizations, vast resources, able to throw more dollars and more people at problems than a small business. One key thing for businesses is getting found in the first place. So, you know, to get those reviews, to have those good experiences, they’ve got to be found by their customers. So, you know, small businesses can struggle here to get discovered when they’re, you know, trying to compete, whether it’s through ad dollars or other things with larger orgs. What are some actionable steps that a small business can take to overcome this first hurdle of just getting in front of the right customers?

Emily Washcovick: Absolutely. You know, small businesses have a smaller platform, but they also have resources and features and tools that are available for free on larger platforms that do have visibility and traction. And so that’s Yelp, of course, also your Google business page. You want to also make sure you have all of your listings claimed on specific industry sites that might exist and social media, too. You want to have profiles that are complete and claimed on all of these platforms. And on Yelp in particular, you want to fill out the business information. Use that section to add keywords or phrases about the services or menu items that you want to highlight. And that’s true on other platforms too, right? If you’re thinking about a social media strategy, Think about how you can highlight the different menu items or service offerings you have and use those keywords or phrases to get interest and visibility in a place where consumers might go that is a larger platform. So there’s so many things on that free side that are just about claiming the page, filling out the basic info. And then on social media sites, it’s about showing up regularly and really being authentic. And that’s where I think small businesses almost have an advantage. They have this story they can tell that oftentimes has a lot of background and, you know, history to it. People love connecting to that and they love connecting to people. So if you can tell your business story online, highlight your employees, show the behind the scenes of what you do, that’s really engaging to consumers. And small businesses don’t need as many customers as big brands. So really think about setting appropriate goals for your business, right? If you’re a solo operator and you have a handful of reviews, that’s amazing. You don’t need to have hundreds of reviews to be found. You’ll notice even on sites like Yelp, when people search, we don’t just rank businesses by the number of reviews they have. So remember to show up online, talk about who you are, and market yourself using the various products or services you’re trying to sell. And it can be hard for business owners to constantly promote themselves. It’s hard for anyone sometimes to talk about themselves or bolster themselves. So get in the habit of doing that. Think of it as education. And remember, you’re not bothering your customers. They want to engage with you. That’s why they chose to follow you on social media or on other platforms where they can connect.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, in addition to the organic things that you’re mentioning, as we all know, small business isn’t going to necessarily have the ad dollars to compete head to head with a large organization, but they can use their ad dollars or their promotional dollars wisely, right? Can you talk a little bit about, you know, how does a platform like Yelp or others help small businesses amplify in that way?

Emily Washcovick: Absolutely. And I think that’s a really good point. It kind of goes back to you don’t need as big of a budget because you’re not trying to obtain as many customers per se, but you do need to be more mindful about your budget and you need to be more agile on how you spend too. So when we’re investing in an online platform like Yelp, which I’ll talk about in a minute, we want to put those dollars in, be following up on the leads and then making adjustments or changes based on what we’re seeing quickly. And I’ll talk about some realistic time periods too, but on a platform like Yelp and many online platforms today, you have cost-per-click advertising, which is a real advantage to business owners because it’s giving you visibility. On Yelp, it’s above number one or on competitor pages, oftentimes giving you thousands of impressions and you’re only paying for that visibility when someone clicks on the ad. and chooses to look at your Yelp page. So that’s a great way to get visibility and traction and really only be paying for that engaged business or that engaged customer behavior. Now, on Yelp, once you have that ad budget set for the month, what’s the maximum amount of clicks you want to get, you also need to make sure your profile is complete and enhanced. And we have some of those ad features on the page that let you talk about the main thing you want to be found for, prominently, front and center. And let’s say you don’t have reviews yet, or you only have a few. Yelp advertising allows you to use features on your page that get the information customers care about, front and center, so that they don’t necessarily need all of the review context to know if you might be a good fit for them. And that’s especially the case for service providers. With our restaurants, we see more reviews as customers. We eat three times a day. We hopefully only have to get our roof repaired or maybe find a new salon ever so often. And so with those other industries, set an expectation for yourself and realize that the ad is going to help you no matter how many reviews you have to get that visibility and only be charged when someone clicks. And on social media, if you’re gonna spend ad dollars, you can also curate how those are spent, zone in on the type of target user you want, whether that’s by age or location, and that can be crucial for small businesses to really get that target advertising, which is also available on Yelp. Really zoned in, even down to the zip code, if you’d like.

Greg Kihlstrom: So talking then about the next steps, so we talked about getting found in the first place. Let’s talk about competing on experience and satisfaction. And I think this is an area where I think small businesses have potentially even more of a level playing field, right? Well, I want to get your your thoughts on this, too, of course, before I expound too much on this. But, you know, they can’t always match the budgets as we’ve as we’ve already talked about. But, you know, they can excel in customer experience. So how do you look at this? And how would you recommend small businesses think about using experience and satisfaction as a competitive edge?

Emily Washcovick: Yes, I think surprise and delight works no matter the business or industry and no matter the size, right? Those big brands that we think of as the best customer service providers, they do those things that are surprise and delight and we’re amazed because they do it at scale. And with a small business, it’s almost the expectation sometimes because you might be seeing the owner or kind of feeling like you know more of the operations locally. And what I love about Surprise and Delight is it can be when something happens and maybe we need to make an adjustment and show that we can make a change or suit their needs that are maybe particular or different. But it also is about proactive surprise and delight, right? How are you greeting a customer if you have a brick and mortar that very first time? Are you walking them through maybe what the experience is like? All of those connection points in person or even digitally through communication is really valuable. And I think it’s important to remember Customers want that communication proactively and reactively to know what’s going on. And you can really set the experience up before it happens by talking about it online, in communications. Let’s say people are scheduling with you in advance. Let’s get them something before the appointment or before the arrival to know what that experience is going to be like so that we can set them up for success. And I know a lot of businesses also follow up after an experience, see if there was anything that could have been improved upon, or just what that customer experience was. And sometimes we’re afraid to ask for feedback because we don’t want to hear the negative, but I think asking for that oftentimes helps avoid a surprise review that’s critical, for example. You can get ahead of that by asking customers in person how things are going, or following up with them after. And that’s very valuable as a small business because it shows you care. And that makes that customer want to return and come back.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. And so now I want to I want to get to the review part of this as well. So, you know, your show behind the reviews, you talk plenty about about this this topic, you know, customer reviews. I mean, I know as a consumer myself, you know, it’s a game changer, good and bad, you know, depending on depending on the quality of the reviews. They can definitely be a game changer for those small businesses. What are best practices from, you know, seeing what you see? Certainly, you know, what are best practices for using customer feedback and reviews to drive growth? And also, you know, back to the earlier to stand out from competitors.

Emily Washcovick: Yeah, I think the key thing is you first want to ask yourself how you’re thinking about feedback because it is a bit of a psychological thing, especially for a small business, right? It’s more personal than maybe if I’m a marketing manager for a brand. I can kind of separate myself from that feedback. And so for a small business, you want to first remove maybe that negative feeling you have towards online critical feedback. I get it. You much prefer if they came to you in person or shared that with you in a way where you could have fixed it. But I also think we need to look at those online reviews the same way we would as a customer sharing their feedback in person. It’s an opportunity to address it. And I think the really important thing is being aware of where people are talking about you and using that as insights. And I’m not talking about making a change every time you get some sort of critical feedback, but by simply having your notifications on, on Yelp, having Google alerts turned on for your business name so you can see if your business is mentioned online. These are great ways to stay in tune with what customers are saying. And then you want to aggregate that data, right? If you’re getting high volumes of reviews, maybe you’re looking at them and discussing them with the team very frequently, like, you know, weekly in meetings per se. And you want to make sure that when they are coming in, you’re responding within a good time frame, right? And especially if they’re critical, but we sometimes forget to do it with the great ones, you know? A lot of business owners think that consumers turn online to be negative. But on Yelp, we actually have more five-star reviews than one, two, and three-star reviews combined. So, people are overwhelmingly wanting to share positive experiences. So you want to be prepared to respond to the critical, right? But with the positive, you want to respond too because that’s a happy customer who loved their experience. It’s a great opportunity to double down on what they loved about it. Maybe re-emphasize something they mentioned in their review when you respond publicly and welcome them back or maybe mention a future reason they might visit you. But with those critical ones, I think it’s important to have a plan before you get the review. So as a business, what is the standard template that we’re going to use that’s kind of the outline of the response? It should start with a warm greeting. Even if we’re not feeling happy or warm about responding, right? Thank you so much for your review. Then you might want to address something that they mentioned. And what you don’t want to do is go line by line and get into this back and forth about all of the things the reviewer said. We’re not really using the public response to have a dialogue with the reviewer. We’re using the public response to reflect our customer service practices. So we address an item, maybe two if you feel like, and then take the conversation offline. So you either say, you know, we’ve sent you a direct message, we would love to chat further, or give them the way to get in touch, or if you have a solution that’s maybe due to their feedback, you can address that too. I’ve had businesses get feedback on things like, We would love if they would use compostable containers. And when the business made that change, you know, going in and responding and actually addressing that. So it’s important to know what’s being said about you. It’s important to engage. And I think you can remove the emotion a little bit by having a start or an outline to a response prepared. You can also use AI to help you craft a response, which I know we’ll talk about in a little bit. But the other thing I would say is If you’re feeling emotional about the response, have someone else give it a read before we post it, right? We want to show up in a professional manner that takes the high road because oftentimes a critical review appears as an outlier to consumers, right? Maybe the thing they’re complaining about doesn’t matter to the consumer or Let’s say the business is responding, that really impacts that customer’s feeling about the business and feeling about the critical review, right? It builds confidence that if I go and have an issue and mention something, they’re going to want to take care of it. It also makes people want to share their own experience. If they see the business owner responds to the positive reviews, they know that it matters to them and they’ll probably be more likely to share their own experience, which is really powerful.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. It reminds me, I mean, this is maybe a dated reference, but when I owned my marketing agency, this was like 10 years ago, we had a bank client, not going to name names, but regional bank, and they were, which in 2014 was a little late to the game anyway, but they were debating whether whether or not to get on social media or not, because they basically said, Well, we don’t want people talking bad about us on social media. And you know, I told them in a, in a moment of, of honesty, I was like, you know, they’re already talking about you, right? It’s just a matter of, you know, whether you participate in and how you show up to the conversation, you know, much, much to your point, you know, I think it’s, I look at, you know, the test of a relationship is what happens when things are going poorly, not when things are great, right? So the way you show up to a negative feedback, like, at least they’re giving you an opportunity to respond, right? I mean, some people maybe are just trolls or whatever, but let’s discount that’s very small percentage. And say most people, you know, responding, they want I don’t know, it’s an opportunity to respond, right? So I love your feedback here of being thoughtful about it, but responding to both because people want to know that their feedback is valued, right?

Emily Washcovick: and use those positive reviews as marketing. Like, we should be sharing those on social media, we should be highlighting them if we have a customer newsletter, because that also encourages your consumer base to share their own experience, right? And on Yelp in particular, we have a firm stance against asking for reviews or soliciting reviews. So you wanna make sure you’re not doing that with Yelp in particular. Other platforms have different rules, so some of them even provide resources for you to ask for those reviews with your customers. I always say, just play by the rule of the platform, right? And the reason we have that strong stance is to level the playing field and make it based on real consumer experiences, right? A Starbucks paying for reviews could overarch any coffee shop in the area, right? But if we’re going off of just those real authentic consumer experiences, it gives you that more authentic view of what customers think. And you know, we’ve all been in that experience, whether it’s an Uber or a Lyft ride or at a business where you’re having like a great time or things are going really well and then at the end it’s like, can you give me a review? And it almost like makes you wonder if the whole experience was just for the end game. And so I always tell business owners, encourage customers to share their experience. Tell them that you love hearing about it in reviews, but then point to all of the places that you have an online presence and let them go where they use the most or where they want to share that experience. And you know, people might think that’s funny, like you don’t want everyone to review on Yelp. I’m not saying that, right? We would love if everyone their experience on Yelp, but we don’t need business owners trying to make their customers into Yelpers. We want those reviews to come naturally and it’s great to tell customers you want to hear their experience, point to your Yelp page, share your Yelp reviews on social, but you don’t need to be sending out a direct link asking for reviews. That’s not the best way to build your authentic online review presence.

Greg Kihlstrom: So I want to talk about, you mentioned AI. I feel like we have to talk about AI in every episode. So we’re going to go there now. And on this show, I talk with a lot of enterprise, those large company leaders. And we’ve talked about AI plenty in that enterprise space. But one of the things that I think is really powerful about artificial intelligence, and at least some of its applications, are that they can be used by businesses of all sizes. Maybe differently, maybe some different areas of focus or areas of benefit. But I’d like to talk about AI for small businesses. I’ve seen it helping organizations scale and grow efficiency. What are some of the most impactful ways that you’re seeing that small businesses can use AI tools for growth?

Emily Washcovick: Yeah, you know, I always give my little AI preface, it requires human oversight, right? You’re never copying and pasting direct from AI, or at least I hope, right? We’re putting some modifications on that. And I think that’s important for small businesses because it’s helping with speed and optimization, but we don’t want to lose the element of who you are as a brand, right? And so AI, LLMs, they’re amazing for so many things and I’ll give some great examples here, but they do still require us looking over the work and making sure it’s good. And hey, a lot of the times it’s surprisingly amazing, but you know, sometimes it makes funny mistakes or it like, thinks that things are true that are not true. So just check it over, give it a look. But I think AI is great for getting started on a review response. It’ll really impress you. It’ll spit out quite a long one. But then you want to prompt it again, right? Can you make this sound more casual? Can you shorten this? we need to kind of work with it or give it really good directions in the beginning to get the end product we want. Sometimes you’ll pop a review in there and it’ll respond to like everything that they mention and that’s not really the best approach. But if you’re stumped on what do I say in a professional way to address this, it’s a great place to get you started and get you out of the hump of what to say. I also think that it’s great for creating a content account. So, if you have been feeling like you want to do social media more or do it at all and you don’t know where to start, using AI to create a content calendar is so helpful. You can feed in information, whether it’s existing social media you’ve posted or your website or things about your business, and it’ll help you craft not only a schedule or give you ideas of types of content to post, but it’ll also really just get your brain going on what other people are doing. And, you know, I think there’s a lot of fear to like copy what other people are doing, but you’re just putting your authentic story into these different platforms. And so don’t feel like you’re copying someone. It’s going to be your story still. but it’s hard to come up with what to post as a small business on a weekly basis if you’re wanting to do that. AI can give you the framework to react to and build off of. I also think it’s really good for responding to customers or just engaging with other people. Sometimes you get an email and you’re like, Oh my gosh, I want to say something that is not the appropriate thing. And so feed that into AI. Get that little polite polish. It can help you with those easy things that are maybe holding you up or tripping you up from getting back to someone.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, well, and then you kind of touched on this already, but I want to want to go back to how do you balance that and totally agree with what you’re saying, you know, I think I think the, you know, particularly generative AI is what we’re talking about here, you know, is it can be extremely helpful in this regard. How do you recommend that a small business balance that ease of use and just, you know, it can create a lot of stuff for a lot of channels and so on and so forth with like maintaining that personal touch. Like what should they be keeping in mind?

Emily Washcovick: Totally. I think you have to feed personal stuff into it, right? You really have to show it, either your own stuff that you want it to recreate or repurpose, or stuff that you want to zone in on from the industry, you know? There are things that you want to do to give it that personality or kind of give it a starting point to work for you as an LLM. And, you know, I think there’s also the whole process of giving your own brand identity. So, how are you already being personable? Do you really lean into local? Like, what is it that makes you unique or what do you want to make unique? You could get started now, right, and figuring out what this mission is that you want to put together. But think about your own dream, vision, what’s the why for the business and dump it in there. That’s kind of the joy of using these platforms is you can brainstorm and then it can organize or categorize for you. And even if you’re one of those people that brainstorms with other business owners or colleagues. If you have a meeting, it could be on a video call like this, and you record it. You can upload that into these platforms. You can get not only a transcript of your meeting, but it can give you notes. It can tell you what you discussed as next steps. So these are things that sometimes business owners aren’t the best at. And sometimes you’re able to hire a support person, an assistant or something like that, but AI can fill some of these gaps now to help keep you organized, to help take a conversation that you’re having and turn it into a document, you know, an operational plan. And if you’re meeting with a coworker in person or something, you can do the same thing. You can record your conversation and upload it. It seems kind of weird to always document yourself, But I think there are specific times or brainstorms or moments where that’s really impactful and helpful for a business to track and catalog.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, and also, you know, to your earlier point, AI needs something to train from, too. You know, it’s been trained on loads of generic stuff, which is very helpful and gives amazingly good results in many cases. But it’s got to also to make it yours, it’s got to train on you. And so you’ve got to give it some raw material. So yeah, definitely. Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining today. I’ve got one last question for you. Something I like to ask everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role? And how do you find a way to do it consistently?

Emily Washcovick: Yeah, I try to stay in contact with the various internal departments at Yelp I work with and also just business owners that I’ve met over my time. I’m checking in with people from a year ago or six months ago to see how things are going. I also really try to ask for feedback and I try to really dig in on wanting to get critical feedback, right? And I think in that direct connect space, that’s a safe place to get started asking for more of that critical feedback. And sometimes it’s hard to hear, right? It’s not like I really enjoy always getting those nuggets. But I think when you’re open to wanting to know what people think and how you can improve, that lets you make those changes and be dynamic and really be willing to move and adjust because you see the positive that you’re working towards. I think when we get stuck and we push out what other people think for too long as business owners and as people working in a career with other colleagues, it can really be a deterrent to our own growth in the long run. And so, getting used to hearing some of that stuff, sitting with it, and figuring out what you want to action on and what you don’t. Because not all of that feedback needs to be something you change off of, but it’s good to be open and ask for it and stay in contact with people to get that perspective over time.