I’ve spoken to many business owners – smart, seasoned “warriors” who have a great product and work hard and are passionate. Most of them still need a large degree of convincing or explanation about Google My Business that borders on frustrating.
Two reasons why you need to spend time on improving Google My Business:
The further you drop from the #1 listing in Google the more drastically your visitors declines. Especially if it falls to the dreaded “page 2 of Google”.
While there are alternative ways to get to the first page or #1 in Google, Google My Business is a valuable and easy-to-use tool that will truly help you get there.
Over our careers, Craig and I have been involved in the implementation of many marketing automation tools. We’ve been on the ground floor of Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot, and Mailchimp implementations, creating entire marketing automation workflows from scratch. (more…)
Quite often we’ll hear from a business that their website just doesn’t work for lead generation. Either it doesn’t generate leads or if it does they are just plain bad. They tell me they’d rather stick to referrals, or cold calls. They also usually complain that growing their sales is difficult.
The truth is the problem here is not the medium but the execution. Your website should be your BEST driver for generating quality leads. If it’s not there is usually something wrong.
Row after row of young sales people in headsets hitting the phones. We’ve all seen it.
How did it come to this? Cold calling names out of a purchased list one after another in the vain hopes that just through sheer volume you find a potential customer who will give you 30 seconds.
Simply put, it worked while you were smaller and growing but scaling that approach has become tedious.
It stopped being fun. And your sales reps hate what they are doing.
Fortunately there are scalable alternatives to cold calling to generate sales, and it’s a win-win solution for everybody. (more…)
One of the things that boggles my mind about modern websites is the lack of contact information, or even worse, a hostile contact us form. I have found many contact forms that require far too much information, don’t work, use anti-spam technology that doesn’t work, or simply don’t exist.
It’s almost like the people behind the websites don’t want to be bothered by their customers.
We have two separate contact forms on NorthIQ. One is a simple Contact Us form, the other is Get a Quote.
We decided early on that these forms would be light, and easy to fill out. The idea is to give us enough information to have a conversation. Every form that is filled out on any of our websites goes into our CRM (Hubspot). When we are on a call, we open up Hubspot and write notes. (more…)
With some services you can easily see they’ve done a poor job for you, if your car starts making a clunking sound after visiting the mechanic, you’ve probably got a bad mechanic. If your haircut looks horrible, you probably have a bad hairdresser. If you get the wrong leg amputated, you probably have a bad doctor.
Digital marketing can be a little more difficult to come to that conclusion.
How can business owners avoid being preyed upon by unethical digital marketing agencies?
The following are sure-fire things to watch out for when working with your digital agency, or to keep an eye out for when trying to procure services from one. (more…)
