In this episode, we’ll talk about the quick wins and must have marketing for small business and how these work for 4-5 different types of businesses!
Ken: Hey, welcome everybody to Marketing Guides for Small Businesses Podcast. I’m joined today by Ian and Jen. Paul is on special assignment today, so I am filling in for him.
Today we want to talk about quick wins and what we think are must have marketing solutions for small businesses. There are a whole bunch of problems that I know small businesses face when it comes to marketing. Before really common ones that I see that we’ll focus in on, maybe more on this episode is most businesses way too many leads online. Most marketing efforts take several weeks, if not months, to start to show results. Speed of response is critical to winning business, and many businesses aren’t well positioned to have that speed of response. And if you’re trying to build a pretty robust platform, the tool costs can add up.
That can be a real challenge for small businesses. Nearly every small business that I know of has a pretty limited budget. So what do you do if you have that limited budget? Where do you spend your money? What do you ignore? What should you focus in on? Especially if you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on search engine optimization. Where do you start and how do you really get started?
With that I’m gonna kick it off. And I’m just gonna start talking about some of the basic things that I think are really important to have in place. When we talk about things like quick wins or automated wins from a marketing perspective, what I see some of those being is having an a system on your website that automatically captures leads, but it’s not just your website and that’s the critical thing. You’re getting leads that you may not even be aware of from so many sources. Business profile from Google My Business, could be Facebook, it could be Instagram, it could be forms on your website, phone calls, all of this stuff.
So I think it’s really important to have an automated way to capture and organize all of those potential contacts. And then you have to have a system in place so that you’re not leaking any of those. So just because you’re capturing doesn’t mean you’re following up with them. So speed of response is really important and having solutions in place for that.
Automating frequently asked questions, if that makes sense, which we can talk a little bit more about as we go in deeper into this conversation. And automated booking calendars have become huge, especially over the last two years. And I don’t know if it’s because of the way people think about engaging with a business now due to Covid.
I think that was a big trigger because for a while people had to do and schedule online meetings instead of in-person meetings, even for home services contractors. And I think that really fueled the desire for a lot of consumers and clients, customers, patients, to say, You know what? I don’t wanna call the business and talk to somebody. I just wanna go book online. We’re gonna dig deeper into a lot more of these.
Ian, I’m gonna turn it over to you. One of the must haves, I think these days is to have a web chat widget on your website. Still, a lot of websites don’t have this feature. Why is it important and what do you recommend in terms of a live chat versus maybe an SMS type of a widget?
Ian: I’ll start off with the, what is it? Just in case, we’ve done a full program on this, so go back to episode, whatever it is. We’ll have to share that in the notes where we talked about chat widgets and that kind of stuff. Messaging. Usually it’s a little icon at the bottom of the webpage, which people can click on and it’s, chat with us now.
It’s either goes to a live person in the business, or it goes to a chat bot. So there’s different use cases for each of those. You can even combine the two, which is actually the most powerful option. But really it’s to cater to people who, first of all, may not want to talk to a person. You mentioned that depending on behaviors, there’s also generational things there, where some people are, I’m just gonna pick up the phone and get this done.
And then there’s other generations that don’t want to talk to a person until I have to talk to a person. Even though this is talking to a person, it’s talking with them in the medium of their choice, which is chat. What’s beautiful about it too is that you can integrate these with texting, so you can quickly move people, capture somebody’s phone number, and then move them off of the chat widget per se, and move them into a text platform, which gives you as the business a lot more ability to then communicate with them and nurture that relationship over time. I would say the biggest reason for doing this is A to connect with people where they want to connect with you on, cuz that’s important. You want to be flexible and adaptable to how people want to communicate.
It can also provide immediate answers to frequently asked questions. That’s where the chat bot, I think really can be powerful. Of course, they could chat with a live person, but you don’t want to tie up your customer service or your reception people with having to answer those commonly asked questions all the time.
So a chat bot, you can basically build out scripts that say if somebody uses this type of intentional question or figuring out the intent of the question, you can then deliver this type of message back. And again, it’s about trying to nurture them in their connection. Really, the whole purpose of this is to keep hot prospects from going cold or going somewhere else that may have this form of communication.
Ken: Yeah. Can you give an example of an automated FAQ response?
Ian: Oh, absolutely. So one of the most common ones that I see is location. What’s your address? Cuz that’s asked a million times for any brick and mortar business. What are your hours? Again, that’s asked a million times.
Even things like if you’re a home services business, what’s your warranty? What services do you offer? There’s so many things that you could answer. For a dentist do you offer braces? You can have the answer to that and present it to somebody because it’s the same answer to everybody.
Ken: Do you accept insurance?
Ian: Yeah, that’s a great one.
Ken: And then you can take somebody directly to like your insurance page where you describe all that you do. So yeah, directions all those kinds of things I think are really important. And it does two things. One is it improves the user experience, if it’s done well, it also saves you some operational costs.
And then really, I guess the third thing is because you are answering somebody’s questions and you’re solving their problems, you’re probably keeping them from going somewhere else. So you’re hanging onto that opportunity. Even if they’re not ready to buy, you’re providing value to them and they’re gonna remember that.
Ian: Just one other addition to that is that you can make these things fairly sophisticated. We’ve talked about very simple question and answer. But if you think about this in a broader sense that we talk about the marketing hourglass a lot or the sales funnel or the buyer’s journey, you have to think about why is somebody messaging me right now? And you can capture that information very easily through this tool, but then you can continue to improve this process by thinking through, okay, so they came in for this information. What are the questions they’re really trying to answer in their mind? And what’s the next step I’m trying to move them towards from my service or my product standpoint?
Because you can provide PDFs, you can send them to webpages. There’s so many kind of next steps you can do through this that it’s very powerful that way.
Ken: Yeah, it’s just like the new web form that somebody fills out. People don’t want to go look and find your contact page on your website. If they’re ready to contact you or work with you or have that question. They just wanna fill out this form and it’s super convenient cuz it pops up at the bottom of every webpage that you decide you want to enable it for. So it’s really important for lead capture.
Ian: Yeah. So one of the circumstances I should have mentioned, cuz this is a pretty cool technique, but I see it all the time in the dental and orthodontic world, where if there’s a connection between the chat widget and their appointment setting or practice management software, you can actually check the availability of the person you want to have an appointment with.
Say you love this particular dental hygienist and you want to have them do your teeth this week you can check their schedule in some of these chat widgets and actually book your appointment right there. It’s almost as good as conversing with a real person. Like it’s very cool that way.
Ken: Yeah. Okay Jen, I’m gonna ask you this question. So we’re gonna talk about Google Business Profile, formerly known as Google My Business. A lot of people may not be aware of this yet, even though it’s been around for a while. Your Google Business Profile, or Google My Business Page actually gives you the ability to send a message to the business, if the businesses decided to enable it.
So one, most businesses maybe haven’t even enabled this, so that’s certainly one thing to think about. But given the fact that Google’s put it there, Google clearly sees it’s important. Are there other reasons why you think enabling this feature is important for a business?
Jen: Yeah, absolutely. I still have to get over not calling it Google My Business. So Google Business for a while. For folks who don’t know, the Google Business Profile that comes up when a business is searched for in Google. Even if you haven’t really enabled it, Google will enable it for you and, collect some of the information and come up with a profile for you.
So it’s the kind of thing that you really wanna claim. If you haven’t claimed it yet, it is free. So make sure you do that if you haven’t done that yet. For those that have done it, enabling the messaging service, why would it be done? Google wants to keep you on Google. It’s funny cuz when I explain Google to clients, I always start talking about Google as if it’s a person.
What’s very important to Google is that you trust that you go there and you’re gonna find the correct answers. You’re gonna get the help that you need for the search that you’re having. And another way for Google to help keep you on Google is to be able to extend that relationship or that ability to help you find out what you want, right to the very end of the journey.
So that would be the reason that Google’s enabled this. I would suggest if you haven’t already, to enable it for sure. And what it’s gonna mean is you’re gonna have to answer it on the other side of that. So be ready for what enabling that service is really gonna mean. Because people are gonna want answers and it’s easy enough for folks to respond if they’re not getting answered. And, what I mean by that is if you’ve got that messaging app or messaging option enabled, and you’re not answering your customer’s questions or your potential client’s questions, it’s a quick click away for them to leave you a review saying, This company is unresponsive.
So even though it is a feature, an important thing in order to capture your leads and give as much good service as possible, when folks are interested in your business. Just be aware that putting that feature into your workflow means at the other end, somebody, either your marketing team or someone on your team, is gonna have to be able to respond to that.
So just be aware. It is another tool, but it is gonna require some action on the other side of it.
Ken: Yeah. So we were talking a little bit about this before we started our broadcast. Right now, typically what you have to do is you have to actually log in to respond to your Google Business Profile.
So that can be a little bit of a challenge sometimes. There are tools that will pull in the conversation so that you can respond inside of a tool from omnichannel messaging, which is something that’s, I think, really important for businesses to start to take a look at. I guess the way I see it online marketing is not like a highway where people are just gonna drive and get right to you.
They’re gonna find you in so many different ways. They’re gonna find you on Google Map Result, which is why you’re gonna show up. Thanks to the Google Business Profile, they may find you on Facebook or Instagram. You need to cast a net everywhere that people may be going so that you’re making sure you’re not missing any of the leads that really should be coming your way.
Enabling it in my mind is just, it’s really critical. Like you said, Google wants to keep people on Google. That’s how Google makes money. Ultimately, they make money. They don’t sell these profiles. They make money when they sell ads. The only way they sell ads is if they’re keeping people on Google, doing Google search results.
So that’s one of the reasons why, of course it’s good for Google, but it should be really good for your business too.
Jen: Absolutely. And I think, I know we’re not here to talk about platforms or whatnot. Here’s what it goes back to too. It just reminds me of, if you think of Google Business Profile a little bit as one of the channels of social media. I know it doesn’t act the same as some of the other channels.
It’s the kind of thing where if you have any kind of hangup about certain, say social media channels and being on them, you really gotta get over that. Cuz people are going to start to contact you in the channels that they feel most comfortable in, they like the best. There’s that. Just more and more case for that platform to bring everything into it so you have sort of one command center to respond to all of your questions.
We’re working with a company right now. It was new news to me. If you guys know this already, , maybe I’m a little bit behind, but they are a legal firm. It’s an immigration firm here in Canada. They’re working with people that from outside Canada, wanna come and immigrate to this country. In a lot of parts of the world WhatsApp is more popular, more trusted than general email and whatnot.
And for some of us in North America, conducting very intense business conversations and very serious business conversations over that platform just seems you know what, shouldn’t we take it to email? That kind of thing. But no. And so we’ve started to implement WhatsApp into that lawyer’s communication system.
So as we’re talking here, so if they have that now, they’re gonna have Google My Business coming in, or Google Business Profile. If you get more than two kind of intakes coming in from customer inquiries and you think about the phone, you still get phone calls. You think about email coming in right there, you have four.
And this is just a small company. Pretty quickly it makes the case for having an integrated platform so you can just log in one place and see all your messages coming in everywhere.
Ken: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. So that kind of a good segue to what I wanted to talk about, which is there are a ton of these communication channels and certain people are gonna be really comfortable using ones that they’re comfortable using. Like you said, it may not be the channel that their ideal customers might want to use naturally. So getting a system in place that really does give you that omnichannel communications management, I think is a huge win for small businesses and you’ve gotta look for some technologies to do that.
We have a great solution in place that I think is just amazing, otherwise you’re missing potential leads. And I don’t know of any business that I talk to on a regular basis. I take that back. There are some businesses that are just ready to coast and say, I get enough from my referral network. I don’t wanna work any harder than what I’m working, winding down my career. There are a lot of reasons why, but most businesses are always trying to find and get the best qualified leads they can. And it’s really expensive if you have to advertise to be on all these different channels. But the thing is, there are all these free channels that people are already using and you better make sure you’re capturing all of that. And a centralized communication management platform is critical for that. And finding a tool and in making the investment in a tool like that, I think is a big win for most small businesses if they wanna make sure they’re not missing those opportunities.
I don’t know about you guys. We talk to clients all the time who say, Yeah, I know we get some messages from Facebook Messenger. We don’t really do anything with those. We don’t have anybody who can really manage and respond to those. Instagram direct messages, and now a lot of ’em are people reaching out, trying to sell you stuff.
Absolutely no doubt about that. But there are customers who are actually using those channels as a way to ask you a question, find out if you’re the right business that can help them solve their problem and maybe the business that they wanna hire. In certain industries, it’s absolutely critical that you’re paying attention to these channels.
You need something to simplify your life and make it easier and reduce your overall overhead. Because if you had to have somebody monitoring these channels individually, that can start to get pretty time consuming, and that would be somebody’s nearly full-time job and for a lot of businesses. So simplify it, make it as easy as you can, and I think that’s where investing in a smart tool can really pay off dividends.
Ian: I have a client, we ended up having to put a message on their Facebook Messenger, like an automated message that said, Please call us. Because, just with staff turnover or lack of having the visibility up all day, they’re in their practice management software.
They’re not in Facebook and they’re, it’s not connected to their phone for whatever. So they’re losing opportunities and as you said they’re creating disgruntled prospects or clients, and there’s another client in the home remodeling business we have who, again, because we have this omnichannel software we’re actually, as a marketing team, we’re not engaged to answer those questions.
But if I see them stagnating, because we have this omnichannel tool, I just let them know and they’re like, Oh yeah, no, our person left three weeks ago. Or we repurposed them into a different role. And yeah, we need to put somebody else in that role now. Even just as a service provider, as a marketing consultant, we find the omnichannel capabilities truly powerful because it allows us to make sure as much as we’re able to, make sure the bucket’s not too leaky, because that’s a horrible thing when you’re helping somebody market their business. Do social posting, whatever it is, creating engagement, and then all of a sudden these leads are just leaking out the bottom.
That’s the last thing you want for your clients.
Ken: Even if you’re spending your own time as the business owner or working in the business to do social media posting, it still costs you money because it’s keeping you from doing something that is probably a real revenue generator for you.
So yeah, you don’t wanna leak any of these things. And Ian, I think you made a great point. You don’t have to necessarily have to be in a position to monitor and respond to these. I think in some cases, putting a message and sending it back, saying, Thanks for reaching out to us. Please call us at this phone number to get an immediate response or get more immediate answers or whatever, I think is perfectly fine.
One of the things we frequently do is we’ll set up and send an automated booking calendar link to somebody if it looks like that’s what they’re looking for. Even if we can’t answer or respond to very quickly. There’s this other thing that comes into play with phone calls and so I’m gonna transition that over to you now, Ian.
It’s staggering, but 62% of calls to local small businesses go unanswered. That’s a staggering number. It doesn’t mean that they’re ignoring them, but if there’s only one person in the office they only have certain capacity. Some businesses can’t even have a person staffing a phone on a regular basis, and then it goes directly to voicemail.
So there’s still the potential for that lead to be captured, but it also gives your potential customer an opportunity to go somewhere else. So they may not choose to leave a message. Even if you give them the ability to leave a message, they may just move on. Is there a way that you can immediately respond to those missed phone calls and let somebody know that you know that they contacted you and that you are in the process of contacting them right back?
Ian: Yeah, just to back up a little bit, this really is all about how we as humans are living in this day and age with texting and calling and mobile phones. If I’m on a call with someone and my spouse or my children are trying to get through and I noticed that I might text them real quick while I’m on that call quickly put it on speaker phone or mute.
But then just type out a quick text message saying, Hey, I’m on call. Is this urgent? And that’s with a family member. But if it’s another client or something, I might just say, Hey, I’m on a call. I’ll call you back shortly. And that’s really the essence of that automated text reply where you can automate that process. Even beyond one phone number, it can be for the whole organization where even if you have round robin phone circuits where if somebody doesn’t answer, it goes to the next person. You can actually tell it to say if nobody’s answering, whether it’s one person or many, please text that number back.
And of course, this only works with mobile numbers properly. I don’t know what the percentage is now, but many of the calls, whether you’re business to business or business to customer are through mobile phones now, and especially with VoIP and all of that going on, voice over internet protocol. So this automated text reply can be very powerful. And really all you’re doing is, it’s a courtesy to say, I see you’re trying to get a hold of me. I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, whether it’s a group, so someone will be in touch with you shortly, or I’ll call you right after this call. So it’s really a way to keep that process in the person’s mind going that they’re important, but that you’re going to get back to them as quickly as possible, whether it’s a prospect or a customer.
Ken: Yeah. I refer to that as missed call text back, and it’s important. Every business needs to make sure that their business phone number listed on their website is text enabled, so you can receive text messages to that business number. That’s another huge potential missed opportunity for a lot of businesses.
They don’t have a text enabled number on their website. So if you’re using the call tracking system, you’re probably good, but you definitely want to check that. Speed of response is critical. You look at the statistics on speed of response, and I know we, we talked to Zach Anderson a while back about speed of response.
If you respond within the first five minutes, you have an 80% greater chance of closing that business or something like that. Or if you’re the first business to respond, you’re much more likely, I think, like five times more likely to close that business than a competitor. What’s cool about what Ian talked about or what we refer to as the missed call text back feature is that it actually delivers a text message on somebody’s phone.
And they may be in the process of dialing that next business that they wanna contact because they couldn’t get ahold of you. And you’ve responded. And so that may buy you some grace period to where they’re like, Okay, these guys got my message and they cared enough to let me know right away, so maybe I’m gonna give them a courtesy and even if they don’t give you the courtesy before they call the next business it may keep them from making a snap decision to go with that next business so that you still have an opportunity. So I think it’s huge, absolutely huge. And this stuff doesn’t have to break the bank, and it’s such a powerful feature. And if you have something like this in place and your competitor doesn’t, you’re miles ahead. So it’s a great win.
Ian: One, one of the things I should mention too is that, so that’s the external facing part of that text backing, but you can also have it a little more sophisticated where it’s pinging you as the business as well. It could go through email, it could go through text, whatever you think is going to get your team to react as quickly as possible.
You can push out notifications that way just to support your comment about speed of response. I can’t tell you the number of jobs that my team has won, where clients have the prospect when we call them back says, You’re the only company that’s called me back and you were the last company I contacted, and so let’s talk. It’s amazing how common that is and how uncommon you can be if you show people respect and you get back to them quickly.
Ken: Yeah, absolutely. Another thing you can even do, and I know we can do it with our platform, when that missed call happens, you can actually set it up to automatically call somebody else in the business. With the ability to click to connect through to the person who tried to call you so that you can be the response. So you don’t even have to dial the number. It calls you and all you have to do is answer the phone and press one to be connected and it’ll dial the person who originally tried to get ahold of you. This technology exists. It’s not crazy in terms of price. Super powerful, massive differentiation.
I think it’s just a huge win opportunities for businesses who get on board and adopt this kind of technology very quickly.
Jen, let’s shift over to reviews. Ian, you don’t get a review request question this time, it’s going to Jen.
When it comes to review management and generating review requests, what are your thoughts about automating that process?
Jen: By automating them? I think it’s a good thing. Let me explain what we’re talking about when we talk about reputation management. So these are the online reviews that folks would leave about your business, your service, that kind of thing. When we talk about automating it, it’s more about automating the ask to your customer for the review.
A couple reasons why that is so important is that most people that are happy with doing business with you would be more than happy to leave a review. But then we’ve got a whole bunch of hurdles in front of actually getting that review. Where am I gonna leave the review? How do I get there? Because believe it or not, it’s not super intuitive or easy to necessarily leave a review all the time. So not everybody can click through and just know where to go. If you’re on a Google Business Profile, I had to think about that one. Perhaps it’s easier if they’re gonna leave a review on any other channel for you, it’s not always the easiest.
So there is that. There’s also the other thing about what am I gonna say? I don’t really know what to say. When you have an automated review process, here’s typically how it’ll work. So a customer finishes interaction with you. Let’s just say it’s at a hairdresser. So this is a client that actually did do business with you. Your system can be set up to send them out a note, an email or a text or some kind of communication thanking them for their interaction with you and asking them to leave a review. Right below there can be a couple of different review sites that you want your reviews on, so all the person has to do is click right there. It takes you right to the place to leave the review. And also too, what you can do sometimes you can write a couple of sentences, draft a review out for them that they’re able to either go ahead and choose to say those words or to edit them, to make them more personal to them.
But sometimes just like writing with anything, it’s easier to edit than it is to stare at the blank page and go, What am I supposed to say? So like the automated review. I guess process. Also, on the other side of that, for the clients, the small business that is asking for the review, responding to reviews is very important.
So responding to the good ones is always, lovely, but you gotta respond to the ones that aren’t so great as well. And it gives you a really easy process to understand when a review has been left for your business. And so you can just click to go in there and respond. So it can help you mitigate any kind of negative situations that may be happening from a negative review. So all around, I think it’s a great thing.
Ken: I think there are tools too. I know this for a fact, that there are tools that they will all notify you when you get a review. Sometimes people leave bogus reviews. We’ve probably all experienced it either directly or we know other business owners have been impacted by bogus reviews. It can be hard to dispute those, and so there are tools that actually make it really easy for you to file a dispute claim.
With Google for example. So getting the automatic notification once somebody does write a review to be able to go dispute that, I think is a really nice feature to look for in a review management or reputation management tool as well.
Jen: I comment about this and I have my own question about this for you guys. One of our clients has been getting some bogus reviews. But they’re positive. Which boggles us, right? We had a really good service from, I won’t mention the client from, ABC client. They really took care of us. And every time that client gets a review, we always go, Okay, is this a real client for me? I just wanna verify and whatnot. And there has been in the past year, let’s say, so three, so not a huge amount, but just positive reviews and they’re not a client. Have you had that experience in it? What do , what have you guys been doing with those?
Ken: I’ve seen some of that actually on Facebook for recommendations, and they’re very positive, and you have to read these carefully because what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to sneak a link in to get you to go either to a malicious site or for them to sell their product.
I’ve started to see that happen more and more on Facebook. I haven’t seen anybody leave a bogus positive review on Google. That’s interesting.
Jen: That’s, yeah. So, we’ve had three of those. Another client yeah, we’ve, we have had a bogus review on Facebook that did that link thing. Nice comments. And then, oh, if you wanna go here, and then you can tell it’s fake. They’re just trying to get your traffic right. But no, these have been bogus. Positive reviews on Google My Business. No link, no phone number. That’s what boggles us. What’s the motive here?
Ian: I have seen the circumstance where people confuse businesses.
There’s actually a really good case study where I believe it was a fish and chips restaurant in London, England that had the exact same name as this other business. They were getting horrible reviews. And their business was tanking because whatever business had the same name was a horrible business.
But people wouldn’t read the reviews. They’d just go, Oh the ratings are really bad. They were working with Google to try to make sure they changed their name or did something that helped with this. But on the more normal side, I have seen it occasionally where people do it in confusion. They actually thought they clicked on a different business.
I have seen the link filling ones, Ken, where, and it’s for us, it’s always been on Facebook. Our business even got one and I’m like, that doesn’t make any sense. But yeah, the only thing you can do as a business is to tell Google to report that review. And it’s really up to you as the business or the marketing consultant to decide whether you should do that. I tend to always lean towards reporting it. And the reason why is I think there’s a really important aspect of trying to keep the reviews true to real clients. Supporting that philosophy, I think in the long run is a strength not just to this client, but overall to the whole industry. Because if fake reviews run rampant, it’s not good for anyone.
Ken: Have you looked at the other reviews that person has been submitting?
Ian: I’ve done that sometimes. Cuz you can click on their name right and it’ll say they’ve done this many reviews. I find oftentimes with the fake type of reviews that it’s usually they’ve only done it, one or two other people. I even wonder whether some of these are throw away accounts.
Ken: But I would definitely check that Jen for your client too, just to see if there’s something else going on. All right what else do we have? Let’s just go around and talk about any other nice little quick wins or elaborate a little bit more on something we haven’t really gone in depth into.
I’ll leave it up to you guys who wants to jump in.
Ian: Fight to the death. Go ahead, Ken.
Ken: All right. I’m gonna talk about link tree style pages. So the challenge with social media profiles is you have one link on your social media profile. It’s a missed opportunity if you just send somebody to your homepage.
Your homepage is probably great, but I think you might wanna have some offers or calls to action, or links to other profiles that you have, that you want somebody who finds you on Instagram to easily, quickly get to. So basically a Linktree. A Linktree style page is basically a landing page that you can create.
Linktree happens to be a tool that’s used. We’ve used SureBe in the past and there are, several others that are out there. They give you this capability, but you can build a custom landing page when people click on your one link that they get out of your social media profile, and then you can use that to route traffic however you want.
So you can have calls to action. You can have special offers for people who click through on that. And I think doing that is a big win. And I think it’s a simple thing to do. It could be a page on your website that you design specifically for this. It could be using one of these tools like a Linktree or SureBe or another solution.
But I think it’s a simple little thing. It’s easy to do. It doesn’t take a whole lot to do it, but it really can provide a much better experience for prospects and for your business as well.
Ian: Just to support that. I love those. We use SureBe as our tool. I don’t know if all of the tools like the Linktree type tools do this, but for all of our clients, including ourselves, we pump in our RSS feeds into that page. It automatically updates it with our latest blog posts or our client’s latest blog post. And where that super powerful is that we have a process where every time we launch a new blog post we create an Instagram, a Facebook, a Tweet, and a Google Business Profile post. And LinkedIn.
But the one platform, we can’t share a link in, but where it’s really powerful is on Instagram, right? Because we can say, Check out our latest blog post about this topic. And normally you can’t have another link. So what most businesses do is change their link in their profile every time they want to send people to a different page. And this is just an automatically updated page. You can have, as you said, offers, links to your website, click for an appointment, click to call. Like it’s super powerful.
Ken: We’ve actually started building these is just another page on the website cuz we want the traffic on their website instead of taking them to a third party platform. Ian, I know you and I are huge Thrive Theme fans. You can build such a cool style page using a visual WordPress editor platform.
Ian: I’m writing this down, Ken.
Ken: Cool. That’s one of the things I love about this. I hope our watchers and listeners feel the same way, but I always learn something when I talk to you guys.
Jen: Yeah, same here.
Ken: Yeah, absolutely. All right, cool. Jen, do you have any other ideas?
Jen: You know what? My quick wins are less about the technology and more about some of the implementation side of it. I know that’s a little off topic, but it’s just very interesting because as soon as we start working with clients and we start to streamline e everything, they’re pretty amazed about how much can actually get out in that way. One of the quick wins we did have, again, this is implementation, so this doesn’t have to do with any specific social media channel. We got a compliment the other day about, Oh, wow the stuff you’re sending out for us on social looks very professional now. I think they said, makes us look like a real company.
They’ve been around it 20 years and they were just, the speed of how things were coming out and what they were looking like, one line was just way more coordinated than they had been able to do on their own. Just because, you know what? They’re busy running their business. They’re, just like many of us there’s too much going on.
Sometimes it’s just the coordination and getting it out the door can be the quickest win.
Ken: Absolutely. I started my career doing business process consulting and it led to software development, which actually led me into the marketing world. Long story, but what was interesting that I found when I first started my career doing this business process reengineering, is sometimes when you just have somebody who has an outside focus who can look at things and assimilate and integrate and synthesize stuff to work together, that’s a huge win.
It’s not necessarily a trivial investment, but I think it’s a really important investment and that’s why hiring a marketing consultant to come in and take a look at your business and all the different things and make sure that they’re working in concert and can amplify, I think is a great point.
Jen: Yeah. Absolutely. And you know what, It’s so funny cuz the word investment gets thrown around a lot, but if you’re producing the content. And it’s out there online. You have to think about every piece of content. This can now be, or this is now your 24/7 salesperson out there. Giving out information or raising awareness about your service, your product, your company.
Marketing is such a neat thing because everything that you’re doing, you can build upon that strong foundation and pretty soon you have a great momentum working for you. So the quick win can turn out to be like this long term win. So, it’s pretty great about our discipline. That’s what I like about it.
Ken: Yeah. Ian, what about you? Do you have any additions?
Ian: Yeah, when I’ve thought about this question, Ken, the two things really come to mind. We’ve talked a lot about Google Business Profiles. The thing we didn’t really talk about, but we have on many of these podcasts, is claiming, as Jen said, optimizing and continuing to optimize that Google Buying Business Profile can mean life or death for local businesses.
Or hire someone to do it and then make sure if you do appointments and you have a scheduled appointment tool, connect that because that can be a fantastic funnel into your business. The second thing that I think is often scary for businesses, but it is such low hanging fruit, is Google Ads. I could talk about this all day, but imagine if you could get in front of people that are actually looking for your product or service.
And that’s what Google Ads is. That’s what SEO is but SEO and Google Ads when you marry them together can be so powerful, to capture qualified buyers when they are looking for you. In fact, it shouldn’t cost you anything. Jen was talking about the word investment, but if you do it right, it’s a multiplier.
You invest a bit of money, you get five x. I was running some reports for a client. We’re seeing 129 x from the Google Ads over last year, and that’s what it can do. It’s a fantastic place to be for a business. If you’re ready to jump in.
Ken: Yeah, cool. I gotta talk about a couple of things. So one is I noticed a book over my shoulder here.
Marketing Made Simple. So I’m a huge StoryBrand and Business Made Simple fan. Putting a sales funnel in place is a really quick, important win. And by sales funnel, it’s a landing page, it’s an offer, it’s a nurture sequence. Ideally it’s all automated. Like you said, Jen, it’s 24/7/365. But the last thing is database reactivations.
You have a list whether or not you’ve actually pulled it together or not. It’s in your QuickBooks or accounting software. It’s in your emails, through your business emails. It may be on your invoices that you hand write. But you’ve got ways to contact your past customers. The best, most cost effective thing you can do is to put together a reactivation campaign to go back out to your past customers and ask them to buy again. Give them a reason to, if they don’t have the need, ask them to refer or review you. And that’s a massive win, and that’s probably the very first thing that I would tell most businesses to jumpstart your revenue and get a nice increase in revenue. Is to do that because they already know and trust you.
You don’t have to spend the money to acquire brand new customers. They already know who you are. They’ve already had the experience and so just give them a reason. And sometimes that reason is just to say, Hey, you remember me? It’s time to think about having this done again or something to that effect.
So it doesn’t always have to be a discount as your offer. So don’t forget about that. And then when you marry an automated booking calendar, with that process, you’re gonna increase your bookings, you’re gonna increase your show rates, and you’re gonna have a system in place to where for some reason people forget to show up. You’re gonna send him a reminder to say, Hey, sorry we missed you, do you wanna rebook? So I think that’s a really potent combination. So I’ll say that was Paul’s answer.
Ian: I was gonna call out preacher brother. I couldn’t agree more. Ken, like that is so important. The one thing I would add to that too, so you have stagnant customers or patients or whatever they are, you do reactivation. For existing active customers, patients, you can do the same type of thing, but it’s upselling, cross selling. I think we as businesses, we are a little bit sheepish about that, but you have to remember that your customers, your patients, your clients are being bombarded by your competition every day, all day.
A gazillion emails, a gazillion Facebook Ads. And if you are not talking about it, a trusted advisor to them, if you’re not talking about it, they may just go somewhere else and you may lose the core business that you already have with them. And that would be so tragic.
Ken: Yeah, absolutely.
We actually have a system in place to gamify the referral and reactivation process using text message marketing and social sharing, or text message marketing sharing. It’s gamified because as you do it more and more, you earn points to earn discounts or additional rewards. So there are lots of really cool things that you can do. You can start out with just a simple reactivation program to go back out to your existing customers and just give ’em 10% off or buy one, get one or whatever you might wanna do. But gamification, people love to try to win things and to compete. And so if you can incorporate that element into it as well, you have the possibility to have it become viral. Viral is really hard to predict, but it gives you a tool that it makes it a little bit easier to take it viral. So cool. Thanks for watching and listening to everybody. If you like this podcast, please share it with your friends. Please subscribe and please write reviews on your favorite podcast platform. We really appreciate that. And we would love to hear from you, so if you have any ideas, leave us a comment on our Facebook pages because that’s where it’s live stream. Or send us a note when you find us on our podcast platform. Thanks everybody. See you.