subject: How to Get More Customers in a Slow Economy [print this page] How to Get More Customers in a Slow Economy
As a small business owner, it can be a real challenge to get leads for your business, especially if you have the sense that the slow economy is hurting sales.
When times get tough, the tough adapt, and you can, too.
What have you always done in the past that's worked well?What's no longer working?
If you don't know the answers to these questions, that means you're not tracking where your leads and business come from.
That's one thing that you can change right away. It's very easy to set up a custom 800-number, for example, to track leads from different sources. If you have a different phone number from your website and the phone book, you can track where your leads are coming from. You can also simply ask clients when they call or come in how they heard about you. Make sure you write down the results so you can track the ROI on your promotions.
Speaking of the yellow pages, many business owners are frustrated by the lack of performance from their sometimes very expensive yellow pages ads.
The Internet is the new yellow pages, especially among the younger generation. If you have a younger clientele, or would like to attract young folks to your business (I'm talking 30 and younger, here...) then you'd better make sure your business is on the web. IN the old days it might have been enough to have a website - that would make you cutting edge in and of itself. But if you have a website that's not generating any business for you, chances are it has a problem in one of two areas, it's not attracting visitors because no one can find it, or it is not converting visitors because you don't have a response-oriented sales copy or lead-capture mechanism on the site.
The good news is, both of those things are easy to fix! By implementing a site redesign to optimize your real visitors experiences on your site, as well as those of search engine "spiders," you'll start to see your traffic and conversions improve. If you want a real surge in traffic, test a Pay Per Click campaign (would you pay 30 cents to get a visitor to your site if you knew one in fifty would buy your product?). Pay per click can be very efficient compared to other "shotgun"marketing solutions.
If you would like help with your search engine optimization strategies, we can help you! As a Lynnwood PPC consulting firm, we help clients identify a strategy, and then implement it for them, to help get their business website in front of clients for a nominal cost per lead.
