If you are working through our Emergency Marketing Tips To Help Your Business Survive A Crisis in sequence, then you should now have the foundation in place.
Awesome! The basic digital foundation is key to being successful in the digital world. (Haven’t read Part 1 yet? Check it out here.)
Now, it’s time to get some quick results using the tips in Part 2! (Had you jumped to the tips in Part 2: Quick Wins or Part 3: What Should You Do Next? before solidifying the foundation, there is a good chance that you would not have had much success.
And almost certainly, the results would not be as good.
Other strategies rest and depend on a strong digital foundation.)
The Quick Wins tips can get your phone ringing and people visiting your website in as little as a few hours. Some of the tips are free, and most are affordable.
Referrals: The Quickest and Most Powerful Win?
The first tip may be the easiest, and for some businesses the most fruitful: ask your customers for referrals!
Unlike cold prospecting where you have to establish trust to an audience who may not know anything about you, referrals can be very effective because someone is vouching for you.
The personal touch here can make all the difference.
Directories for Quick Visibility
Next is to get listed in top directories related to your product/service.
When you search for something on Google, notice how often the first page of results is occupied by several directories rather than businesses. (Think of Yelp, for example. It often pops up when you search for a particular type of business in your area.)
In Part 3, we describe how to set your sites on making it to page one of Google results, but that does take a lot of time and some investment.
However, you can leverage top directories to your advantage to appear on page one.
Read our guide for details, but a key tip: make sure you list your information 100% the same on all directories, matching exactly what is on your website.
This will help with search optimization and avoid confusion.
Calls and Website Visitors Within Hours using “Search” Ads on Google and Bing
You can also get your business onto page one of Google searches in hours using Google ads.
Once the Google campaigns are in place, it is worth exploring doing the same on Bing. While not the most popular of the search engines, many people do use Bing, and it often has comparable and better ROI.
This has to be done with great care, as you can quickly spend a lot of money with little to show for it (especially if you try to do this yourself without an expert).
To be effective, these small ads need to be very well-crafted to stand out compared to your competition and drive conversions.
We highly recommend using a pro with lots of experience to set up and manage your paid ads to ensure you get good results, avoid pitfalls, and ensure positive ROI.
Ads That Follow Your Website Visitors
One of the principles of marketing is that your prospects need to see your message several times (seven or more) before they will take action.
One way to achieve this is “remarketing” (also called “retargeting”), and for many businesses, this should be set up on both Google and Facebook.
Then, when someone visits your website, they will see your ads in various websites and even in Gmail, multiple times.
These ads can remind them about the specific product they viewed on your website or offer them a discount if they had added a product to your shopping cart but left your website.
Leads Within Hours
Finally, there are ways to purchase leads very quickly, ranging from ones that match the criteria you are interested in, to “warm” leads (meaning that the leads have expressed interest in your type of product/service recently).
Warm leads are the most effective and thus the most expensive.
Looking for Advice or Help?
Help and advice are available.
We encourage you to add comments and questions below, and you can reach out to our team by visiting the Contact page.
Our thoughts and prayers are with our fellow business owners as we all look for ways to get through the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.