lead generation

The Prospect Genius Portal App: A New Way to Track Lead Generation

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

We’re always looking for ways to make tracking our campaigns easier for clients. With that goal in mind, we’ve been developing a smartphone app that would enable all of our clients to access their campaign reports with the simple click of a button. Finally, we’re happy to announce that the Prospect Genius Portal app is now available for Androids and iPhones!

Why an App?

Well, think about it. Did you notice any particular trend the last time you strolled through the mall or sat down at a restaurant? If you did, it might have had something to do with the fact that smartphones are popping up everywhere. No matter where you turn, it seems like someone is always typing or scrolling away on their smartphone.
But it’s not an illusion. In fact, studies show that more than half of all American consumers use smartphones. It makes sense, too: their high-speed wireless connections and sleek designs make it easier than ever to be productive and social on the go. For that reason, smartphones are becoming more popular by the day, especially with business owners and service providers who travel from location to location for work. At Prospect Genius, we’ve noticed an influx of smartphone usage among our clients, which is why we decided to design our very own app.
The way we see it, our clients are already using their smartphones several times a day for e-mail, texting, web browsing, and more—so why not use it to keep track of their Prospect Genius campaigns, too?

(Source: comScore, December 2012)

What Makes the App Worthy of Downloading?

Primarily, it allows clients access to their campaign reports right at their fingertips.
While the Prospect Genius Portal app looks similar to the current mobile version of our site, it’s significantly more convenient and user-friendly as it can be accessed almost instantly. Now, whenever a client wants to check on their LeadTrax™ performance or view their MapTrax™ numbers, they can simply launch our app. That certainly beats the hassle of opening their browser and typing in the URL every time they want to check their campaign’s performance.
It’s also free for both Android and iPhone users. That never hurts, either.

What Are Some Standout Features?

Our app was designed with an emphasis on simplicity. After all, we know that our hard-working clients are always on the job and don’t have a whole lot of extra time on their hands to enlarge tiny font or scroll through a long series of menu items. The minimalist design of our app is the perfect complement to our clients’ busy work schedules.
Moreover, there are some great features that make using our app extremely easy and convenient.
1. A basic log-in screen with large, visible text.

2. A streamlined menu that allows clients to quickly select which reports or functions they’d like to access.
Menu screen
3. Every campaign report is available in crystal-clear detail.
Traffic summary
The only typing required is on the initial log-in screen. After that, clients can view the basic menu and check out all the different features of their lead generation campaigns, just as they would in the regular Client Portal of our website or mobile site. There is also a prominent “Contact Us” option that allows clients to call or e-mail us directly from the app with any questions or concerns they might have.

How to Install the App

Are you interested in checking out the Prospect Genius Portal for yourself? Here’s how you can install it on whichever smartphone you own.
Android:
If you’re an Android user, you can search for our app in the Google Play Store or simply go to this link: Prospect Genius Portal.
iPhone:
For iPhone users, just follow these 4 easy steps:
1. Open your browser (probably Safari) on your smartphone and go to http://www.prospectgenius.com/console/
Log-in screen
2. Click on the button indicated in this image.
Log-in screen 2
3. Click on “Add to Home Screen.”

4. Hit “Return” on your keyboard.
Save
We look forward to seeing how our app improves our clients’ productivity and sense of convenience when it comes to making the most of their lead generation campaign. The success of any Prospect Genius campaign depends largely on the degree of participation from each client. By creating this app, we hope to eliminate any obstacles that would prevent a client from having a fair shot.
As always, don’t hesitate to contact Prospect Genius directly for more information!

Ring, Ring… Part II

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

In our last post, we announced three new features available through our client portal:

Calls by Day of Week
Calls by Hour of Day
Call Length by Hour

These reports provide our clients with valuable information regarding their busiest days in terms of phone traffic, helping them to make informed business decisions to promote the success of their companies. To make all this a little bit less abstract, we’ve created a case study to show you just how valuable this call information can be!

Case Study

So we’re going to take a look at real data from all three reports for one of our actual clients. Let’s call them Flooring Company X.
To start, let’s take a peek at their calls by day of the week:

By looking at this graph, you can clearly see that Flooring Company X receives the majority of their phone calls Tuesday through Friday. They get the greatest number of calls on Thursday, with Friday being a close second.
Now let’s see what time of day the phone is ringing:

You can see that calls start coming in about 9 a.m. and don’t really die off until after 3 p.m. These are prime working hours when the company is most likely on the jobsite and unable to take calls.
Finally, let’s take a look at the number of calls that are being answered versus how many are going to voice mail. The Call Length by Hour report can do a pretty good job of illustrating that info.

This data illustrates that Flooring Company X is only answering their phone at 4 p.m. and catching a couple of calls during the lunch hour. Going back to the second graph, you can see that the bulk of their phone calls are actually coming in between 9 a.m. and noon. However, since this last graph indicates that their call lengths hover under two minutes in those morning hours, you can see that they’re, in fact, missing the majority of their calls.
Unfortunately, chances are that all of those callers who are being sent to voice mail are not leaving a message. Instead, they’re likely to hang up and call a competitor instead. So, it’s important to make sure you prevent that from happening to capture more leads and help your business succeed.

What You Can Do About It

Using the information from these call reports, we’ve developed a couple of recommendations for Flooring Company X that could help their business get ahead. For starters, we’d suggest hiring a part-time receptionist. This receptionist could work Wednesday through Friday, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., thus covering the company’s busiest call days during their peak calling hours. Having a receptionist on hand to handle the calls means the rest of the crew would be able to concentrate on their work at the job site without having to worry about who’s answering the phone.
However, realistically, we understand that it’s just not feasible for every business to bring in a receptionist. If that’s not a good option for you, setting designated office days and appointment/job site days might be a good alternative. Look at the days with the highest concentration of calls, which for Flooring Company X is Thursday and Friday. Leave those days open to be in the office to answer the phone. Then, since Saturday through Tuesday tend to have lower numbers of incoming calls, it makes the most sense to schedule appointments to do installs and service on those days.
Whatever solution you choose to help you catch more of your calls—one of our recommendations or a solution you devise on your own—your business will benefit. Every call that goes unanswered is a potential job lost, and each potential job that’s lost is a potential paycheck down the drain, too!

One Size Does NOT Fit All

Of course, each and every business is different. Perhaps your company receives the most incoming calls first thing on Monday. Maybe Wednesday afternoon is your busiest call time. Once you’ve checked out your reports in the client portal, you’ll know your business’s specific call patterns and you can create a plan to best accommodate your potential customers. From hiring a receptionist to scheduling strategic office hours to transferring calls to different employees throughout the week or even the day, you can use your company’s incoming call data to boost your business’s success.
Still not sure how to use these reports in the client portal or how to leverage your call data to your company’s best advantage? Just contact us today and we’ll walk you through it!

Ring, Ring… Part I

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

At Prospect Genius, we’ve created a handful of tools that allow us to analyze the performance of our clients’ lead generation campaigns. One of the primary tracking tools used to indicate a campaign’s efficacy is the call report, which provides us with statistics about when and how the customers of our clients are searching for their business. These statistics are broken down by day of the week, hour of the day, and length of the call.
We recommend that every business owner take a few minutes to compile data about each day’s incoming customer calls. Here’s why.

Some Days Mean More Calls

After taking a peek at our Calls by Day of Week tracker, we found that many businesses received a major increase in incoming calls on one particular day of the week.
Since many businesses receive the most telephone traffic on a specific day of the week, this means it’s extra important to be available to take calls on that particular day!
For example, across the paving industry, Monday had the highest volume of calls, at nearly 30%.

However, for the roofing industry, Tuesday had the greatest number of calls, with 27% coming in on that day.

With Saturday and Sunday being the two slowest days for call traffic in both industries, people seem to be waiting for the beginning of the work week to call and schedule their service needs (likely to avoid emergency/weekend service fees). If you miss calls on Monday or Tuesday, you could be missing out on a ton of appointments! Potential customers aren’t likely to leave a voice mail or to call back—when you don’t pick up your phone, they are probably calling your competitor next!
Your particular business might be experiencing different results from the roofing or paving industries, so it’s important to keep track of your incoming calls to understand what your specific call patterns look like.

Strategically Managing Call Volume

Are you too busy to answer the phone? Hire a receptionist! You could bring someone in part time to answer the phones and schedule appointments on your busiest days.
Every business is different, so you should be keeping track of the day and time of all of your customer calls. These metrics can help you determine not only which days, but also what time of day you’re receiving the most incoming calls, so you can plan accordingly to maximize your company’s success!
Be sure to stay tuned for more details on how you can apply this data to help your business get ahead. Our next blog post will be Part II of this discussion. We’ll take a look at a case study to help you understand how to make business decisions using information like which days and times you receive the most calls.
As always, if you have questions, please contact us. We’ll be happy to talk to you about your call data and what it can mean for your business!

Newsflash: Press Releases Can Help Spread the Word About Your Company

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

From new coupons and promotions to staff expansions to equipment upgrades, the things that happen behind the scenes of your business don’t always feel fresh or exciting. However, did you know that these seemingly small events are actually perfect opportunities to get the word out about your company? Our clients have found tons of success using press releases to make their news known.

So What Exactly Makes for a Newsworthy Item?

Virtually any recent change or announcement pertaining to your company that might be of interest to your community could qualify as “newsworthy.” You might not consider a new discount for veterans or the recent hire of an installation technician to be riveting news, but if it has the potential to impact local consumers, then it’s the perfect subject for a press release.
Here are a few examples:

– Hiring employees
– Sales promotions or coupons
– Completion of training or certification
– Moving locations
– Opening additional locations
– Adding new services or features
– And more!

Use Press Releases to Reinforce Your Online Advertising Efforts

Let’s say that you’ve just hired a new sales rep or you’re promoting a service that you only offer seasonally. Aside from announcing that small piece of news, what can a press release really do for your online advertising efforts?
Well, you’d be surprised at the punch that press releases can pack. Adding value to your online advertising campaign in a variety of ways, press releases:

Generate positive brand recognition. The more your company name appears, the stronger your web presence and power will be in terms of brand recognition.
Connect with hard-to-reach audiences. Usually the people who read your company blog or website have found you by searching for a specific service or your company name. However, if you want to reach people who might not otherwise stumble upon your name, then using press releases to announce the latest news is a great solution. You’ll be able to reach out to a different population and get the word about your business out to more folks.
Get the word out about important updates. A press release makes it easy to let potential customers know about immediate news items like expanded service offerings, address changes, and time-sensitive discounts.

And best of all, press releases are affordable, getting you a lot of bang for your marketing buck.
With the immediacy and convenience of online press releases right at your disposal, there’s no excuse for missing out on prospective customers because you neglected to spread the word about your company. The Internet is filled with consumers who need your services, and connecting with them is a vitally important way to capitalize on as many of those potential clients as possible.

Ready to Create a Press Release for Your Company?

Now that you’ve learned what makes an event newsworthy and how an announcement can help your marketing campaign, it’s time to actually go about creating a press release. However, it’s important to understand that an effective press release requires both a professionally crafted message and a proven syndication strategy.
Not confident in your writing abilities? Unfamiliar with the syndication process? Don’t fret: Here at Prospect Genius, we’re able to both generate and promote press releases about your business, so you can worry about brainstorming your next promotion while we trumpet the latest news from your storefront.
Our team of skilled writers can carefully craft an eloquent press release that will announce your news and represent your company professionally. Then, we’ll publish your press release on our meticulously cultivated selection of creditable syndication sites—allowing you to reserve your time and energy for more pressing business matters, while making sure your news is heard all over the web!

Why Recent Google Updates Should Matter to You

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Did you know that Google is rolling out new updates every month or so? Did you know that just ignoring these changes can negatively impact your online advertising efforts? Here at PG, we talk to local business owners each and every day, and most folks we come across have a “who cares” attitude when it comes to Google’s updates. Since these updates can have a major impact on your local business, we thought it wise to explain why all this does matter!

The Venice Update

Back at the beginning of the year (February to be precise), Google launched the Venice update (details). According to their official statements on the changes, Google claims this update “improves the triggering of Local Universal results” and that the newly revised system is able to “find results from a user’s city more reliably.”
While these statements are certainly true, it’s important to realize, just like every other business, Google spins the information it provides to the public for self-serving reasons. So, read between the lines to understand what’s really going on, and how it affects you.

Why YOU Should Care

The importance of the Venice update for you, and your local business’s online advertising efforts, is that Venice essentially burned the rule book regarding map listings and organic results. Before the update changed the system, it used to be that your website could rank well without your map listing, and vice versa. But those days are long gone. The new reality is that if you fail to fully optimize both, you can say goodbye to your rankings.
As Google says, they are now “relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal” in local searches. This tells you point-blank that your website’s ranking factors now help dictate your map listing’s ranking.

The Penguin Update

Google’s most recent update, the Penguin Update (also known as the Webspam Algorithm Update), is their latest effort to provide higher quality content. In short, these changes will decrease rankings for sites believed to be in violation of Google’s quality guidelines.
Just what qualifies as webspam to Google? Here are a few of the concerns Google targets, taken directly from their own quality guidelines:

Why YOU Should Care

In working with local business owners every day, PG hears from hundreds of folks who tell us they’ve found a way to “beat” Google. Their tricks range from creating fake map listings to stuffing keywords into a webpage to using any number of other antiquated, underhanded techniques. And, quite frankly, they don’t work, not in the long term. While these ploys might work right now, you can’t dodge Google forever, and they will stop working one day—often, with disastrous consequences. Using black-hat techniques is Russian roulette because once the iron fist of Google’s spam team comes down on your business, it can disappear from the Internet!
It’s never too soon to clean up your act. So be honest with yourself, and if you’re engaged in “tricks” or behaviors that violate Google’s quality guidelines, stop and clean them up. Get in line with Google’s guidelines before your business sees the business end of Google’s gun.

So What Should You Do?

There are a couple of things you can do, now that you’re aware of how the Venice and Penguin updates can affect your advertising campaigns online:

Accept that your website and map listing aren’t separate anymore, at least in the eyes of the search engines.
Optimize your map listing and then monitor it every single day to make sure no changes are made that could affect its performance.
Own up to any behaviors that Google may consider underhanded and undo them before they undo your business.
Don’t forget that SEO and online advertising are about serving TWO masters at once: one is Google (the machine), but the other (equally important) master is the site visitor (the human). Not considering both when it comes to just about every decision regarding web advertising tends to lead to failure.

Need a Hand?

For business owners who want to make sure Google’s updates aren’t bringing their rankings down, there is a lot to do. But it’s crucial to the success of your advertising efforts on the Internet, so it’s worth it in the end. And, you don’t have to go it alone. Prospect Genius can help!
Monitoring your map listing EVERY day is truly important. You might wonder why it matters: You put the correct info up there when you optimized the listing, so why does it need to be checked? Well, there are a couple of reasons. One is that it’s easy for inaccurate information like old addresses and phone numbers to get switched out for the right contact info; another, is that, unfortunately, some of your competitors might not play by the rules—and could actually report your business as closed! Checking your listing offers protection against these risks. Here at PG, we have a program called MapTrax that can actually monitor your listing for you, helping both ensure your map listing stays correct and freeing up your time to do other important tasks.
We also provide Google Places listing optimization. We include this service for free for clients who sign up for our lead generation program, but we also offer it as a stand-alone service for other folks.
Keeping track of your website’s ranking can be pretty much impossible without some type of analytics tool in place. Just googling yourself doesn’t actually work: If you search for yourself every day, you end up skewing the results. That’s because every time you repeat the same search, over and over, you’re telling Google that the results they’re showing aren’t what you want to see… But here at PG, we have a proprietary program called AdTrax that can accurately track whether your website’s rankings are trending up, slipping down, or holding steady. This is included in all clients’ LeadTrax sites, but we also provide it to clients as a stand-alone service to monitor their own websites or even the success of other marketing campaigns online. This data is critical for your decisions regarding web advertising, so make sure you’re using something to track it!

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