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A Hands-Off Campaign Means Cookie-Cutter Advertising

Last Updated: November 13, 2015

cookie cuttersYou hire an online advertising company because you don’t want to do all the work yourself. We get it. But here’s the thing: Any worthwhile campaign is going to require a mild amount of effort on your part. Unless you want drop-you-in-a-directory, cookie-cutter advertising, you can’t be completely hands off when it comes to your campaign. You have to have some involvement to make sure everything that’s being put out there about your business is correct and that your advertising will attract the right customers. Otherwise, you’ll be misrepresented online and receive calls for services you don’t even offer. That’s a big waste of your time and money.
You’re paying your advertiser to do a specific job. Your participation will allow them to do that job with much greater success.

Advertising Campaigns Are Like Home Renovations

If you hired a contractor to renovate your kitchen, you wouldn’t expect them to do all the work without any of your input, would you? No. Instead, you have to tell the contractor exactly what you want. You must select the kitchen tile and cabinet styles, pick out the colors and materials, and stay in constant contact with the contractor team in case they run into a problem or have a question. If you don’t do any of this, your contractor won’t have any guidance and you won’t get the results you want. Plain and simple.
The same goes for your online advertising campaign. Your advertiser requires a few hours of your time at the beginning of your campaign in order to collect raw information about your business. This information ranges from company contact details to thorough descriptions of the services you offer. Your advertiser will only need to interview you at the start of your campaign, so you won’t have to be hands on forever. (That being said, you should always make yourself available to answer any questions your advertiser might have down the road.)
So, what does your advertiser need from you, exactly?

Answer Your Phone When Your Advertiser Calls

If your advertiser is calling you, it’s because they have a question about your business. Most likely, they need to clarify a couple of details for your website’s content or Google listing so they can make certain everything is correct. Often, if a major detail is unclear or unknown, they won’t be able to go forward with that stage of your campaign until it’s resolved. By picking up the phone and answering your advertiser’s questions promptly, you’ll not only be making their job easier, but you’ll also be helping your own campaign.

Give Us Some Personality With Photos

You need to set your company apart from local competitors. The best way to do that is to show off what makes you unique. When your advertiser interviews you, they’ll ask you about things like your professional experience, company values, and any other noteworthy qualifications that make you stand out. However, the quickest way to stand out to prospective customers is to have pictures of yourself and/or your team front-and-center on your website.
With your smartphone, it’s super easy to take good-quality pictures and submit them to your advertising provider. Even if it’s as simple as you wearing a t-shirt with your company name and standing in front of your truck, it will allow customers to put a face to your name. Plus, photos with real-life people in them (NOT stock photos) make your company look much more legitimate and trustworthy.
Bonus points if you have a memorable company logo!

Send in Customer Reviews

Your advertiser will want to add customer reviews to your site in order to show off your company in the best possible light. If you’ve received customer feedback—whether through e-mail, Facebook, Google, etc.—you should forward it to your advertiser. You should also encourage your customers to leave reviews whenever possible.

Speak Up If There Is a Problem

You can’t expect your online advertising provider to be psychic or all knowing. If you’ve noticed a problem with any aspect of your campaign, tell your advertiser immediately.
A common example is when a customer leaves a negative review on one of your pages or listings. Your advertiser isn’t constantly monitoring your listings’ reviews, so it’s up to you to let them know when an unfavorable one pops up. While your advertiser won’t be qualified to respond on your behalf (because they don’t know the details of the job or transaction and they aren’t the spokesperson for your company), you should consult with them and ask for advice on how to proceed with a professional response.

Give Us Access to Your Listings

If you’re going to pay your advertiser to advertise for you, you might as well go all in and let them advertise all the way. To do this, however, they need access to your Google My Business profile and other listings. That means you need to pass along your verification PINs as soon as you receive them. If you have any other existing listings or profiles, you’ll need to trust your advertiser with your log-in info for those sites. (And if you don’t trust them, why did you hire them?) Sharing log-in info can be uncomfortable in this day and age, but it’s the only way your advertiser will be able to ensure consistency and accuracy across all platforms.
As we know, consistent, accurate information is essential; bad things happen when information isn’t matching. Read these blog posts for more details on the consequences of not having a singular manager of your listings: “For SEO Companies, Two’s a Crowd” and “Hand Over Your Google+ Local Listing to a Pro.”

Your Participation Is Vital to Success

If you don’t offer at least a small degree of participation, then you can expect close to zero customization. As a result, you’ll be stuck with bland site copy, phony stock art, and an altogether boring and inaccurate campaign. And if any online advertising provider is promising a cheap, totally hands-off campaign, that’s what you’ll get. However, if you spend a little extra time and money, you’ll get a personalized campaign that accurately and effectively showcases your company. You’ll get more valuable leads seeking the services you actually want to perform, which means you won’t waste your time or energy on bogus ones. It’s 100% worth the small investment.

Do You Have a Plan for Handling Missed Calls?

Last Updated: August 19, 2015

As a small business owner, you can’t possibly answer the phone every time it rings, especially if you’re on a much-deserved vacation from work. But that’s no excuse for missing all of those incoming leads. The number of sales you close is directly proportional to the number of calls you answer, but for those times when you just can’t get to your phone, you must at least have a working backup plan. Otherwise, you’ll never even have a chance to get those leads back.
Here are some things you can do to make sure missed leads don’t tank your business.

Have a Professional Voice Mail System

When answering your phone isn’t in the cards, having a proper voice mail system will allow prospects to leave a detailed message and enable you to follow up with those leads as soon as you can.
Set up a professional greeting: The first step is to set up a professional voice mail greeting. Whether you’re frequently out on the job and can’t pick up your phone or you’re going on an extended vacation, you must record a detailed greeting so prospective customers know that they’re calling a legitimate business. Include your company name, an explanation and/or apology for not answering the phone, and assurance that you’ll return their call ASAP.
Keep your inbox empty: If your inbox is full of old voice mail messages, new callers won’t be able to leave a message. If they can’t leave a message, they’ll immediately find another local business to call. To avoid this problem, delete new messages as soon as you’ve returned the call or logged the contact info. If you’re consistent with this, you won’t have to worry about your inbox filling up ever again.

Note: A few business owners who use pay-per-call services might strategically keep their inboxes full as a way to avoid getting charged when they don’t answer the phone. However, doing this prevents all incoming leads from leaving voice mails. The amount of business you lose by doing this outweighs any pay-per-call charges you’re saving. (If you’re dead-set on avoiding pay-per-call charges, you may want to consider adding another phone line dedicated exclusively to this purpose. Ask Prospect Genius about how to do this.)

Leverage the Convenience of Technology

Because it’s 2015, you can always count on technology to pull through. There are several different ways you can use technology to keep track of missed calls without much effort. The most popular options involve receiving text and e-mail notifications on your mobile phone whenever your business misses a call or receives a voice mail. This way, when you’re out on the job and miss a call, you’ll be able to follow up right away instead of waiting until you’re back at the office. Your chances of closing a sale are much greater if you can catch that prospect before they find another business to hire.
While we do not endorse any particular company, we know that RingCentral offers great message alert and notification services tailored to small businesses. You can also ask Prospect Genius to set this up for you.

Use a Professional Answering Service

While falling back on voice mail or text alerts is cheap, it also incurs a significant risk that those prospects will find another business or service provider before you get the chance to call them back. That’s why many business owners hire professional answering services.

  • Answering services are much less expensive than in-house receptionists.
  • Operating from a remote office, they can answer the phone and deliver messages to you 24/7.
  • They’re professionally trained for customer service and interacting on the phone, making them especially useful if that’s not your strong suit.
  • To make sure they get all the relevant information from your leads, you can even give them a script of which questions to ask.
  • An answering service is also a useful way to screen out marketing calls so you never even have to deal with them.

Again, we do not endorse any particular company, but we know that some of our clients successfully use AnswerConnect as their answering service, so that might be a good place to start.

But Really: Pick Up Your Phone

One of the things that all successful businesses do is answer their phones when prospects call. As we’ve covered before, missed calls mean missed customers, even if you do have a backup voice mail or answering service. Signing up for a missed call notification service shouldn’t be Plan A. Forward calls to your mobile phone, set up an advanced package with multiple lines, reroute calls to ring multiple phones… Do whatever it takes to connect with a lead. That’s the only truly effective way to create new business.

Online Advertising Guarantees Are Just Tricks

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Let’s say you’re an appliance repairman. If you were to install a new part in a washing machine, you would most likely guarantee the quality of your handiwork, but you probably wouldn’t specifically guarantee how clean your customer’s clothes would come out of the wash. Why not? Because there would be too many variables out of your control, like whether the customer added enough detergent, whether they packed the machine too full, or how dirty the clothes were when they were put into the wash. While you can advise your customer on how to best use a washing machine and explain what normally happens when clothes are put into a washing machine, you can’t actually guarantee specific results. A lot of that is up to the customer and the washing machine itself.
Man lying with fingers crossed
This scenario translates to online advertising. Advertisers are the appliance repairman, Google is the washing machine, and quality lead generation is the clean clothing. While it may seem reasonable at first to ask for guaranteed results from your advertising provider, it’s just not something we can do because there are so many variables that are out of our control. We can give you a ballpark estimate of results based on the typical trajectory of a campaign, but we cannot guarantee you specific results. And you should question any provider who does.
In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the most common types of online advertising guarantees and explain why you should think twice before believing them.

Guaranteed Number of Calls

There are plenty of online advertising providers who guarantee you’ll get “X” number of calls through their campaign. But here are some questions you should ask:

  • What kind of calls count?
  • Are they counting unique calls or repeat calls?
  • Are they counting existing customers?
  • Are they counting misdials?
  • Are they counting solicitation calls?
  • Are they counting calls for services you don’t offer?
  • Are they counting calls from totally different geographic areas?
  • Are your calls being sent to multiple other businesses at the same time?
  • What kind of timeline are they using to count the calls? Is it per month? per year?

Providers may guarantee a certain number of calls, but when you start digging for answers, you’ll usually see that their guarantees mean nothing. Even if they do fulfill their guarantee of “X” number of calls, they could be sending you lots of calls unrelated to your services, calls from outside of your service area, or calls that have been shared with your direct competitors. And unless they say otherwise, it could take the entire span of your campaign to reach the promised number of calls. In short, a certain number of calls does not guarantee success for your business.

Guaranteed Number of Leads

Meanwhile, some providers guarantee that they’ll send you a certain number of leads. In this context, the difference between leads and calls is that leads are sent to you in the form of a prospect’s contact info, and they require you to track down that individual in order to obtain their business. If an advertising company guarantees you a certain number of leads, here’s what you should ask:

  • Are they sending live leads to you?
  • Are they also sharing those leads with your competitors?
    • If so, how many?
  • Are they sending leads that aren’t actually relevant to your service offerings?
  • Are they sending leads from the wrong geographic areas?
  • Are they counting leads from existing customers?
  • Are they counting leads from repeat customers?
  • Are they counting spam e-mails?
  • What kind of timeline are they using to count the leads? Is it per month? per year?

Just like providers who guarantee a certain number of calls, providers who guarantee leads will always find loopholes to get around their own promises. To satisfy their guarantee and provide you with the highest number of leads possible, they might just send you leads for any old service, even if you don’t provide that service. They also might be sending you leads that are simultaneously going to other clients, who are most likely your direct competitors. By sending you poor-quality leads or leads that aren’t exclusive to you, they’re able to fulfill their promise without actually helping your business.

Guaranteed Search Engine Rankings

One of the most common guarantees floating around the online advertising industry is for “first-page” rankings on search engines. If they say that they’ll put you on page one, there are a lot of technical loopholes that they might be going through in order to make that happen. Here’s what you should be asking:

  • Are you ranking in organic search results, as a sponsored ad, or in the maps section?
  • Who is performing the search?
  • Which search terms are you ranking for? 
  • Which search engine are you actually ranking on?
  • If they’re using Google, are they searching while signed in to their accounts?
  • Will they clear their own search and browsing history before performing the search?
  • Do they turn off their browser cookies?
  • Are they using a proxy server?
  • Are they always using the same IP address?
  • Which web browser are they using?
  • What location are they searching in?
  • Are they searching from a desktop computer or from a mobile device?
  • How long will the page-one ranking last?
  • Are they just going to take over your existing Google My Business listing?

As you can see, these guarantees can get extremely complicated because there are so many technical factors that play a role in rankings. It’s easy for a provider to work around their page-one guarantee by simply manipulating all the right variables. Normal searches aren’t going to produce the same results.
For instance, if it’s a PPC campaign, then it won’t take much–aside from a lot of money–to get your business on the first page of Google, as sponsored results automatically display at the top of the first page. The specific search terms that they’re using to determine your ranking also matter: Are you ranking for natural search terms like “appliance repair in Albany, NY,” or are you ranking for “Bob’s Appliance Repair, 123 Main St, Albany, NY 12203″? You’ll probably rank at the top when someone searches for your exact company name and location, but that’s not what makes an advertising campaign effective or successful.
The final bullet point is especially important. If you already have a Google My Business listing in good standing, there are many providers who will seek you out because all they have to do to satisfy the guarantee is take over your listing, even though most of the SEO work was done before they even got there. It’s a dishonest tactic, but many providers fulfill their guarantee this way.

Guarantees Are Traps

Providers offer guarantees because they know how to grab your attention. But the takeaway from this post should be that online advertising guarantees, when boiled down, mean nothing. Just like with every other form of advertising that has ever existed in the world, online advertisers can’t actually guarantee results that are ultimately out of their control. If a provider does guarantee you specific results, you should be very, very skeptical.

Missed Calls, Missed Customers

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Right now, you could be hindering your company’s growth without even knowing it.
It’s no joke. Every time you miss a call, you lose money. In fact, you could be losing upwards of thousands of dollars annually from missed calls alone. Whether it’s a call from Google+ Local or a prospective customer, you chip away at your business’s future success every time you don’t pick up the phone.
At Prospect Genius, we’ve noticed a disturbing behavior among our clients: they aren’t answering their phones! For some reason, they don’t seem interested in speaking with prospective customers. But we suspect that our clients aren’t the only small business owners who are letting countless calls go to voice mail or ignoring calls altogether due to a heavy workload. While it’s understandable that you’re too busy to answer your phone, we’re going to demonstrate in this post why it’s still a huge mistake.

When Google Calls, You Better Answer

As we discussed in a previous post, Google has been contacting local businesses in an attempt to verify their locations and contact information. While every business owner is theoretically vulnerable to these phone calls from Google, we’ve discovered that older listings are the ones being targeted specifically. If your listing predates the Panda and Penguin updates—or, in other words, it’s at least three years old—then you’re likely to receive a phone call from Google (if you haven’t already). When Google calls, it’s imperative that you answer all of their questions correctly, lest your business listing get suspended and you lose contact with your customers. But before you can answer those questions, you’ll need to answer your phone.

Customers Are Calling. Are You Picking Up?

It may seem unnecessary and obvious to tell you that customers are calling your business, but you’d be surprised by how many prospective customer calls are missed by small business owners each month. To demonstrate that point, we sampled our own clients to see how many calls are answered, how many answered calls lead to sales, and how many calls go to voice mail. Here were the two biggest takeaways:

  • Nearly one-third (29.49%) of customer calls go to voice mail.
  • Roughly 60% of answered customer calls lead to a sale.

Prospective customers are looking for a service to be provided. They want to hire someone. But that means if a prospective customer gets your voice mail, they’re most likely going to move on and dial the next business on their list. In other words,when you fail to answer your phone, you lose business. Plain and simple.
A Real-Life Example:
A Prospect Genius team member recently remodeled her home. She called 17 different deck builders before even one of them got back to her. That means all of those other deck builders lost out on her business! She needed to hire someone, and she kept looking until she got a response.

Missed Calls Mean Lost Revenue…

Using our own call logs, we broke down the volume of missed calls by average job prices with high and low estimates of leads per month. Then, based on the 29.49% ratio of missed calls, we determined how much money each category is losing per year from not answering the phone. Take a look:

Average Job Leads Per Month
(High and Low Estimate)		 Revenue Lost Each Year
$100 20 $1,200.00
70 $4,200.00
$250 20 $3,000.00
70 $10,500.00
$500 20 $6,000.00
70 $21,000.00
$2,000 20 $24,000.00
70 $84,000.00

It’s tough to get an exact idea of what your phone habits are like. We recommend implementing some type of call recording system for your business’s phone line so that you can keep track of many calls are answered and how many go to voice mail. You may be surprised by how much you’re missing out on!

…And Lost Referrals, Too

Referrals are integral to the growth of your business. For every satisfied customer that you have, you can expect a handful of referrals to come to you through word of mouth. With a good referral, you can turn one job into three or four. But when you don’t answer your phone, you’re missing out on the opportunity to grow your client base. In other words, you’re not only missing out on immediate business, but you’re also losing a significant amount of future business.
A Real-Life Example:
We return to the story of that same Prospect Genius team member from above. Further down the road, she needed a home inspector and hired a reliable home inspection company through a friend’s referral. Once the job was finished and she was happy with the experience, she wound up referring that same company to six other people, all of whom booked jobs. When that home inspector first answered his phone, he probably had no idea that there would be seven total jobs on the line.

Find a Way to Answer Your Calls

It’s simple: Responding to customers as promptly as possible is a surefire way to gain more business.
But we know it’s impossible to be available 100% of the time. That’s why we’re sharing a list of recommendations that we often give to our own clients:

  • Hire an answering service or receptionist to pick up the phone while you’re on the job.
  • Forward calls to your mobile phone.
  • Sign up for one of the many available call-tracking features that notify you by text or e-mail as soon as you’ve missed a call.

You can also record a friendly, professional voice mail greeting to let your prospects know that, even though you’re busy on the job, their business is still a priority for you. Here’s a great example from All Pro Appliance and TV Repair, a stellar local business in Allen, TX:

Click to Listen
You can hear the sincerity in the business owner’s voice. Not only does he offer a friendly greeting, but he also sounds like he genuinely wants to speak with the caller. He explains that his technicians answer calls personally and asks the caller to be patient. It’s a great example of how you can convey the importance of any given customer’s call.
Prospective customers are much more likely to wait for your response once they hear how authentic and friendly you are.
No matter which strategies you use, anything that enables you to answer and return more phone calls will be a massive improvement. Don’t let a whopping one-third of your business slip away—do what it takes to make sure that your phone is being answered.
The Prospect Genius program comes with a free call-tracking feature as well as a Client Portal that provides you with various reports so you can watch your campaign’s performance. If you’re interested in learning more about our lead generation program, give us a call at 1-800-689-1273.

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