Updated 13 Nov 2015
Picking up extra business online & from your website
We have had quite a few clients recently asking about the best ways to pick up some extra business for their website so I thought I'd write a quick article on some of the ways that spring to mind (these are in no particular order)....
Seasonal promotions or offers
This is a great way to look after your existing clients by offering discounts on other products & services you can provide - It's also a great incentive for prospective new clients to get on board, you can do % discounts, buy 1 get 1 free offers, 3 months free etc etc - you get the idea. However, this is more likely to appeal to your existing customers as you aren't actually giving them the hard sell, merely pointing out what great things you have available for them at this time of year. Try to make your offers genuinely appealing, ask yourself would you go for it if someone was offering it to you!
Company newsletter & updates
Having your own newsletter is a great way to reach out to your existing customer base - it is good practice to have all your clients in a database that you can email at any time, although you really need to make your newsletter worth reading and always give clients the option to opt out or you'll soon get a lot of complaints for spam! Once you have written a nice article that people would be glad to read you can add a little marketing paragraph or banner advertisement at the bottom - make use of social media haring tools so if your article is well received people can link back to it & share it with others ;)
Referral incentives
Another way to get good business is to offer something back to your regular customers for any business they refer - imagine you offer 10% of any fees paid on a new website people will actually go out of their way to recommend you & given the fact that they would be recommending you to thier friends you already have a high chance of consolidating this business as it's through trusted word of mouth.
Fundraising & charity
This is a nice way to give something back whilst raising awareness for your company & brand - you'll find other local businesses & press will be glad to get involved if it's a good cause & at the same time there will be a worthy cause at the end of it - I saw a company earlier today that had done a charity bike ride & raised almost £1000 for a charity, they actually stopped off along the route to meet their existing clients, pick up donations & get a photograpgh for the local paper, so they picked up some good press and helped a good cause doing it.
Google, Twitter & Facebook ad's
Advertising can sometimes be costly & not pay off, but if you taget niche phrases that are relevant to your industry and a little less competetive you can pick up the odd bit of business quite easily - make sure you check your analytics though so you know what phrases are paying off otherwise you'll end up wasting your budget - Twitter & Facebook ad's are still a little less competitive as not many have latched onto those yet so your budget may go a little further there, we've had so many clients recently who run their own Google ad campaigns complaining that they keep having to up their budget due to people outbidding them on their keywords so niche seems to be the way forward unless you have huge budgets.
Telesales & Cold calling
Not to be underestimated this is still a great way to pick up business, in fact it's better than is was a few years ago because most people have stopped bothering now as everyone got to the point of just putting the phone down as soon as they knew it was a sales call - people still get the odd one but no where near as many as they used to - try it & you'll find you might be surprised if you approach it correctly.
Search optimisation or SEO
This has to be the best way to acquire business in the long term, this can be done to some extent yourself if you know what you are doing or you can hire a company to do it for you - the key to picking up business through SEO is making sure you target phrases that will actually convert & that have a reasonable amount of searches per month & ideally as little competition as possible - This isn't always the easiest of things to identify but any good SEO company should be able to compile a list based on your target market & products/services. I must add that this is not an overnight thing and is not the cheapest way either but good SEO done correctly & kept on top of will see you at the top of the search engines for some of your key phrases within a matter of months (sometimes weeks!) & believe me there is nothing better for your business than being on page 1 of Google for sveral of your main key phrases. you can find out more
about SEO here
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