How One Local Biz Went From Zero to 400 Calls Per Month

Last Updated: August 31, 2017

You already know being visible and discoverable online is key to attracting new customers. However, knowing this basic fact and putting it into action are two very different things.
Wouldn’t it be easier if you could follow a real-life example? That’s why we put together this case study highlighting one of our clients, Advantage Disposal. Based in the Schenectady, NY, area, they’re a local trash collection and waste disposal company that transformed their online presence, going from 4 incoming calls per month to 481 per month in six months. Even more impressive, they got to page 1 of Google’s search results in less than two months.
Itching to find out how they did it? Keep reading!

1. Attractive, Mobile-Friendly Website

The first thing Advantage Disposal did was sign up for our CoreSite program. As part of this program, we built them a beautiful, professionally designed website. Importantly, the website is also mobile friendly, meaning it appears seamlessly and clearly on any mobile device (like smartphones and tablets).

This mobile-friendly element is crucial. Why? Because more people are doing searches from smartphones and tablets than from personal computers. So, if the majority of your audience is discovering your business on a mobile device, doesn’t it make sense to design your website accordingly?
By making their website easy for mobile users to read and engage with, Advantage Disposal has put itself in a fantastic position to attract more visitors.

2. Sound SEO Strategy

Then it was time to promote Advantage Disposal’s website.
We implemented a proprietary approach that includes high-value directories, local maps listings, and hundreds of backlinks. The strategy worked like a charm. As intended, it gave a massive boost to Advantage Disposal’s Google rankings and increased the company’s incoming leads. In the first seven months of the campaign, Advantage Disposal received 1,773 total leads!

Impressively, the company reached page 1 rankings within six weeks. Now, page 1 isn’t the be-all and end-all of SEO campaigns, but it’s pretty darn great—especially in such a short time. Typically, this kind of result takes several months to achieve.

Click to see larger image.

Also, it’s important to understand that Advantage Disposal achieved these Google rankings for multiple search terms, not just one. And these are search terms that people actually use, like “residential waste collection Schenectady NY”…

Advantage Disposal SERP Google Rankings 1

…and “commercial trash collection Schenectady NY.”

Advantage Disposal SERP Google Rankings 2

No fudging the reports here!

3. Consistent, Valuable Activity on Facebook

After seeing substantial success via SEO, Advantage Disposal decided to keep the momentum going. They conquered the Facebook mountain next, with a three-part approach:

First, they added SocialStream. With this feature, we write blog posts for the client and publish them their website. Then, we share each post on their social media pages, including Facebook. This keeps Advantage Disposal’s website updated with fresh content and maintains base-level activity on social platforms.
They also added SocialBuzz. This involves us posting weekly updates on Facebook on a client’s behalf. In doing so, we keep Advantage Disposal’s Facebook page active and engaged.
Additionally, we started running ads for them on Facebook. A Facebook ad campaign allows businesses to market themselves on news feeds much like commercials on TV. The ads interrupt people’s activity, grab their attention, and burrow into their subconsciousness. However, the Facebook audience can actually interact and engage with Facebook ads, which brings in a whole new dimension.

4. Attention-Grabbing Facebook Ads

For Advantage Disposal, Facebook ads were the game changer.
We set up two Facebook ad campaigns for them. The first was a short-term, one-month campaign in February 2017. In this campaign, Advantage Disposal received 11 comments and more than 25 likes, sending traffic to their website and increasing brand awareness. As a result, they received 75 calls in February—a gigantic increase from just 4 calls in January.

Subsequently, in April, we set up a long-term campaign that remains ongoing. To date, this campaign has seen substantially more engagement: 100 likes, 29 comments, and 21 shares.

Since this campaign began, Advantage Disposal has seen an increase in calls every month through July (the last complete month for which we have data).

That’s 1,620 calls in seven months!

5. The Benefits of Increased Engagement

What’s so important about Facebook engagement? Well, as shown above, it’s had an undeniable impact on the number of calls Advantage Disposal receives.
On top of that, we know when customers engage with your brand, they become extremely valuable and are more likely to buy from you:

Engaged customers spend 60% more in each transaction.
They make purchases 90% more frequently (nearly twice as much!).
Engaged customers are two times more likely to upgrade or buy additional services from you.
They are four times more likely to recommend you to colleagues and acquaintances.

In other words, by interacting with their audience on Facebook and dramatically increasing their monthly calls, Advantage Disposal is poised to see an uptick in sales. And isn’t that what all of this marketing is for, anyway?

Use This as Your Guide

If you want to attract more visitors to your website, improve your Google rankings, and increase engagement with customers—priming your business to make more sales—you can’t find a better blueprint than Advantage Disposal.
Ready to market your local business the right way? Call or email us and tell us about your goals. We’ll help you create a strategy that gets you real, game-changing results. If Advantage Disposal can do it, you can, too!

Three Tools to Vitalize Your Prospect Genius Campaign

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Want more add-on options for your Prospect Genius campaign? Looking for ways to get more bang for your buck? Then, keep reading—because we have some great options for you.
As you know, we’re committed to growing with our clients. We aren’t interested in quick fixes. Instead, we want long-term visibility and lead generation for you. That’s why we’re always evaluating our service offerings and updating them to fit our clients’ evolving needs.
As such, we’re excited to discuss three tools that can give your campaign a boost and take your business to the next level. Not all of them are new to our catalog of services, but they’re all increasingly relevant to today’s online marketing demands.
Ready to discover the new directions your online marketing campaign can take you? Let’s jump in!

1. Get More Jobs by Answering More Calls

Already seeing some success with incoming leads? Capture more of what’s already coming to you by taking advantage of our partnership with Professional Answering Service, Inc. Working with this business answering service will help you turn more of those leads into paying customers because it will significantly decrease the number of calls you miss.
As noted by an article in Forbes, close to 80% of callers won’t leave a voice mail if their call is missed, which likely means they’re giving up on that particular business and moving on to a competitor. The key is not to let your incoming calls go to voice mail. Professional Answering Service, Inc. will help you do this.
Prospect Genius recently announced a new partnership with Professional Answering Service, Inc. to help our clients win more customers. When you’re out on a job or you’re away from your desk for the weekend, the staff at Professional Answering Service, Inc. will be able to:

Answer calls on your behalf
Represent your business professionally
Take messages
Schedule appointments
Answer basic customer questions
And more!

Best of all, our partnership provides an exclusive discount for Prospect Genius clients! Professional Answering Service, Inc. will be reaching out to all of our clients soon to see if you’re interested in their help, so keep an eye out. And if you have any questions about their services, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to make it easier for you to land more jobs!

2. Increase Your Visibility by Thinking Outside the Search Box

What if we told you a substantial number of local business searches never even make it to Google? It’s true. People are increasingly crowdsourcing on social media before they ever turn to search engines. They’re asking their network of friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances for personal recommendations for everything from landscapers to hair salons to pediatricians. They’d rather choose a business based on a recommendation from someone they know than take a chance on a business they’ve never heard of.
This is where having an active social media presence is crucial for your business. If people are making recommendations for local businesses on Facebook, for example, they’ll want to tag you so their friend can see your page right away. It saves prospective customers a few extra steps in the search process and makes it easier for them to discover you. And anything that makes it easier for prospective customers to find you should always be at the top of your to-do list.
To help you with your social media outreach, Prospect Genius offers a few different options:

SocialStart—If you don’t have any social media pages at all, we’ll set them up for you and create attractive profiles that will impress prospective customers.
SocialStream—We create compelling and valuable blog content on your behalf and share it across your social media channels. As a result, prospective customers will see you’re engaged with your audience and knowledgeable about your industry.
SocialBuzz—We keep you active and engaged on social media by posting weekly updates on your behalf. These brief posts cover your hobbies, interests, local news, and other topics that highlight the personality behind your business.
Paid Facebook Ads—We’ll target your ads according to specific topics and interests. Then, Facebook will display your ads on the news feeds of matching users. In other words, your ads will be placed right in front of prospective customers!

Interested in expanding your visibility with the help of social media? Give us a call for more details.

3. Improve Your Reputation by Getting More Customer Reviews

As we mentioned above, people almost always look for recommendations from previous customers before they commit to a business. And if they can’t find personal recommendations from people they know in real life, they’ll turn to online reviews. A 2016 survey by BrightLocal supports this. According to its findings, 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends.
Needless to say, most people do their research before hiring a business. So if you don’t provide your prospective customers with adequate information about why they should hire you, you’ll miss out on lots of potential business.
That’s precisely why customer reviews are so crucial. On top of that, your local Google listing is directly affected by your customer reviews. How? Google now displays your business’s “average” star rating as soon as the first review is posted on your listing. You obviously don’t want your star rating determined by just one or two reviews, so it’s in your best interest to accumulate as many reviews as possible.
To achieve this, we recommend signing up with a company like Customer Lobby. Customer Lobby is a service that will contact past customers for reviews on your behalf, integrate those reviews with your website and social media, and even help you add them to your Google listing. We use Customer Lobby for our own marketing efforts, and we’ve had a great experience with the automated process. We barely have to lift a finger.

Get the Biggest Bang for Your Buck!

Now that you’ve already invested in an online marketing campaign from Prospect Genius, why not get the most out of it that you can? By adding any of the above tools to your campaign, your business will take off in new and exciting ways.
Reach out to us today to find out more!

How Much Money Are You Losing From Missed Calls?

Last Updated: April 20, 2017

Do you even notice your phone buzzing in your pocket or ringing on your desk anymore? Many business owners find themselves tuning out their ringing phones for the sake of their own time, energy, and sanity. After all, an endless stream of phone calls comes with the territory of owning a small business—and a good chunk of the time, they’re useless calls from solicitors. Usually, though, there are a lot of customer calls mixed in there. So if you’re just letting your phone ring and not picking up, you could be losing a bunch of business.
It’s perfectly understandable that you don’t want to tie yourself up talking to telemarketers all day. You’re busy, and you simply don’t have time to waste on unwelcome calls. However, by ignoring all incoming calls, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. Rock, meet hard place.
In this post, we’ll look at how missed calls impact your business and what you can do to reduce them. Let’s jump in!

Missed Calls = Lost Money

Did you know that roughly 30% of our clients’ incoming calls go to voicemail? That’s not good, especially when you consider a recent report from Forbes telling us the overwhelming majority of callers hang up as soon as they reach voicemail.
It’s truly unfortunate, particularly because you do have a good chance of turning a caller into a customer: Our proprietary data shows that approximately 60% of answered calls turn into successful sales.
Using these statistics, we’ve broken down roughly how much revenue you’re missing out on by not answering the phone. You can see the numbers in the table below:

Is it safe to assume you don’t want to lose thousands upon thousands of dollars in revenue each year? Then you have to find a way to answer customer calls without wasting all your time on pesky solicitors. If only we had some tips for you…

How to Answer Only the Calls You Want

It actually is possible to answer your customers’ calls without dealing with the annoyance of telemarketers. You have a couple of options:

Use a spam-blocking app on your phone that blocks known solicitors. It may not block spam calls 100% of the time, but it will significantly reduce the number you receive.
Hire a call answering service to answer your phone for you. They’ll answer all your calls, represent your business with professionalism, and take messages from customers. They may even be able to perform other secretarial duties like scheduling appointments and answering basic customer service questions. This frees you up big time.
Stop using your personal cell phone number as your business number. Get a separate line or a forwarding number to use for all of your business needs. This won’t actually cut down on solicitation calls, but at least you won’t be bothered by them when you’re spending time with your family at home.
Take advantage of Prospect Genius’s CallTrax line or a similar call-tracking service. You’ll benefit from our extensive list of blocked numbers, which is constantly updated to keep unwanted callers from wasting our clients’ time.

Get an Exclusive Discount on Business Answering Services!

To help business owners solve their problem with missed calls, Prospect Genius has partnered with a company called Professional Answering Service, Inc. Their experienced management and well-trained staff are available to:

Answer your phone remotely
Dispatch urgent customer calls when needed
Take detailed messages
Schedule customer service calls and appointments
And more!

The best part? Prospect Genius clients have access to Professional Answering Service, Inc. at an exclusive rate! If you think your business could benefit from an affordable answering service, get in touch with us and we’ll help you set everything up.

Keep Everyone in the Loop About Your Online Marketing Team

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

It’s amazing how much damage one, uninformed person can do.
Whether it’s unnecessarily delaying important work, canceling your online marketing services, or hiring a second SEO company because they weren’t aware you had already hired one, the fallout can be serious.

Why They Must Know About Your Online Marketing Team

When you’re showing a new employee the ropes, don’t leave anything out. That includes your online marketing team.
Whether you’ve hired a new office manager or anyone else who might be answering your company’s phone, make sure they’re aware you work with Prospect Genius. And that goes for any other marketing companies or service providers you may have hired.
If new team members don’t know about us, they may assume we’re just another agency calling and annoying your business—which is a perfectly understandable assumption, given how often you receive these types of phone calls.
But we’ve seen firsthand the kind of damage that can happen when someone on your team isn’t informed about your partnership with us.

Cautionary Tale #1

For example, we recently had a client who became too busy with incoming work and asked his wife to help out with administrative duties.
One day, she was looking over the business’s budget and financial statements and noticed payments to Prospect Genius. Not realizing who we were or what kind of value we provided to our client, she decided to cancel our program to save money. Unfortunately, as a result, the business’s web presence quickly plummeted and they stopped receiving the 200+ calls per month they had become used to. Several months later, when the client discovered what had happened, he signed back up with us. But a lot of time, headache, and business could have been saved if he had let his wife know about Prospect Genius from the get-go.

Cautionary Tale #2

Another time, we had a client who hired a new receptionist to handle the influx of customer calls.
One day, we called with a routine question about our client’s campaign. The receptionist was confused because she didn’t know anything about Prospect Genius. Assuming we were just another advertising agency trying to sell to her employer, she dodged our question and ended the conversation by hanging up on us. Again, this reaction is not unusual or unexpected when you receive a sales call—but this was already a paying client. We just needed to clear up a minor issue with their existing campaign. But because we weren’t able to get the information we needed, we couldn’t move forward with our work.

Prospect Genius Will Do the Educating

In most cases, your online marketing team will be happy to send you informational materials to pass along to your new employees.
However, Prospect Genius takes it a step further. Not only will we send a packet of information about our team, but we’ll even get on the phone with your new receptionist or office manager and bring them 100% up to speed. We’ll provide them with a thorough orientation of exactly what we do, and we can even show them specific data about your campaign’s performance.
This way, you know that you’re giving out complete, accurate information about your marketing and that everyone is on the same page.

Give Us a Call—We Can Help!

By keeping all of your team members in the loop and fully informed about your online marketing team, you’ll prevent a lot of aggravation in the short term and a lot of potentially lost business in the long run.
Call or e-mail us today to request an informational pamphlet or personal orientation for your new team member!

How This Call-Tracking Feature Can Transform Your Marketing

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

You’ve heard of our CallTrax™ feature—our very own call-tracking tool that comes with every Starter, Core, or Premium program. But did you realize exactly how vital it is to your campaign?
By keeping track of all the phone calls that come through your CallTrax number, it transforms the way you interact with your program. If you take advantage of this powerful tool, we’re confident you’ll see remarkable results.
Here’s how our call-tracking tool is just what you need to achieve the results you’ve been looking for.

Call-Tracking Provides 100% Transparency

The numbers don’t lie. Not only do they keep us informed, but they also keep us honest.
First of all, looking at your call data and assessing how many calls per month you have will let us know if there’s an issue with your campaign’s performance. You can notify us if you see a drop in calls, which will help us diagnose a potential problem before it becomes more serious.
At the same time, your call volume will also tell you how effective your campaign is. Wondering if our program is delivering on its value? Simply check your call log and see how many calls you’re getting per month. The call log only records calls that come through your CallTrax number, so they’re directly attributable to our marketing efforts. We can’t fake anything.

Call-Tracking Keeps a Record of Contacts

Our call-tracking feature doesn’t just tally your number of incoming calls—it keeps track of contact information, as well. That means your call log is a virtual contacts list of all prospects and customers. Since losing track of missed calls and forgetting to follow up with certain customers can cost you valuable jobs, this feature can be a real lifesaver.
Plus, there’s also a way for you to rate your contacts and label which calls led to booked jobs. This way, your call log can give you a quick, at-a-glance report that tells you how many jobs you’ve booked this month. By using this, you’ll not only be able to see how many calls you’re getting, but how many calls are actually turning into jobs. Because booking jobs is your ultimate goal, this insight will help you stay on track.

Call-Tracking Helps Improve Customer Service

Did you know that our call-tracking feature also records all the calls on your LeadTrax line? There are many purposes for this. One of the main purposes is that it helps you assess your own level of customer service.
Getting lots of calls but not booking many jobs? Listening back to your conversations with callers may help you identify a problem you didn’t know existed. For instance, maybe you’re having trouble talking to or connecting with people on the phone. Replaying those conversations can help you figure out where you need to improve in order to book more jobs and keep customers happy.

Call-Tracking Keeps Team Members in Check

In addition to assessing your own customer service, call recording may also help you train your team members to answer the phone properly. You can make sure they’re answering the phone with a professional greeting, using appropriate language, giving out correct information and price quotes, and so on.
Of course you don’t want to feel like a helicopter boss, hovering over your team members at all times. However, it’s important to make sure your business’s service is up to your standards. You want to be certain your customers are getting a premium experience. Listening back to old conversations on occasion is a discreet, convenient way to do this.

Call-Tracking Helps Target Customer Needs

Do you feel like you’re hearing a lot of the same questions and/or requests from customers? Our call recording lets you listen back to conversations so you can take note of these specific concerns. Then, you can start thinking about adding them to your service offerings if you don’t already offer them. These conversations offer priceless insight into your customers’ minds, and you’d be crazy not to take advantage of it.
Once you’ve identified the customer needs and additional services you’d like to target, let us know right away. We’ll get right to work marketing those services so your campaign can reach the next level.
Having trouble accessing your call log through the Client Portal? Want to learn more about its capabilities? Don’t hesitate to reach out at any time.

Prospect Genius

How One Local Biz Went From Zero to 400 Calls Per Month

1. Attractive, Mobile-Friendly Website

2. Sound SEO Strategy

3. Consistent, Valuable Activity on Facebook

4. Attention-Grabbing Facebook Ads

5. The Benefits of Increased Engagement

Use This as Your Guide

How Much Money Are You Losing From Missed Calls?

Missed Calls = Lost Money

How to Answer Only the Calls You Want

Get an Exclusive Discount on Business Answering Services!

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