How Do People Find You?
Can you answer this question correctly? Do you really know where people are coming from when they get to you? A great time management strategy is to find out where people are finding you the most(ex. your website, online advertising, print advertising, etc...) and squeeze as much juice as you can out of it. Here's a few things that will help you with just that.
Google Analytics
A little techy here, but necessary. Getting your website set up with Google Analytics will not only show you how many people are visiting your website, but more importantly, it will show you what website brought them there. If you don't have a website yet, sign up for out contractor marketing program, and the contractor marketing pros can help. If someone gets to your website by way of a google search, Analytics will tell you what they searched for to get to you. It' shows you if they came from a link from another site also (like forums, social network, a directory, or wherever your site is listed).
Ask Them
It's OK, your customer won't bite. Ask them how they found you. The newspaper? An ad? Online? Recommendation from a friend? There may be a variety of answers to this question depending on your marketing efforts, the key is, just to ask your customer how they got to you. Do you have a follow up questionnaire? You could even fit this into your first phone call to your potential customer.
Use Different Contact Information
This may not be for everyone, but I think it should be mentioned(understand, messing with how people get a hold of you can be dangerous. Don't make your customers confused on how to get you). Using a different phone number for a specific ad will let you know that when someone calls that number, it will let you know that they are calling you because of that specific ad. Or maybe if you have multiple forms on your website (i.e. one on your homepage, and one on your contact page), use a different email address for each form. So you know right away if an email comes to a certain email inbox, you know what page they were on.
What do you do with this information once you have it? Glad you asked. Some logical sense can come into play here. If your Analytics data says that you have more people coming from your Facebook Fan Page than links to your site that you send through Twitter, then major on creating posts for your Facebook page wall than sending tweets. Or getting more leads from an online advertisement than the local newspaper? Then maybe put a little bit more advertising money towards online ads. It's as simple as that.
About Aaron O'Hanlon
Aaron O'Hanlon is the CEO and Co-Founder of Footbridge Media, a digital marketing agency, specializing in the contracting industry. It is his mission to create awareness of marketing online to the home improvement industry and to educate, inform, and assist contractors in taking over their own online presence.
