7 ms·

What did you do to turn things around though?

by nanijoe 10y ago

79d697i6fdif 10y ago
1) Remade website to be more professional looking, faster, more focused towards SEO, mobile friendly. I could write many pages on this :) but following online guides will get you in the ballpark 2) Started writing interesting content. Truly good content is a PITA and you need to be a decent writer to make something compelling, but our first good article got us more traffic than the entire site with over 100 content pages. 3) New tools. everything linked together to see where our sales were coming from. Phone system, website, live chat, in person. All of our leads funneled into one system. We could see what was getting people and what wasn't 4) Online advertising. Locally first, expand AD reach as campaign becomes more nationally competitive. Make sure all the tools you setup continue to track where all these leads are coming from 5) Better "convincing" of clients that we're legit. Company T-Shirts and swag. Hotel-type exaggerated pictures of our team and office. Meet the team page. Professional website like I mentioned earlier. FB, google maps, yellowpages, wherever we could get a free listing. Automated scheduling systems for client meetings, phone tree for calls, tons of previous work repurposed as marketing material for clients to see. Listing our bigger clients on our website. 800 phone #. All the hallmarks of a big successful business even though we weren't exactly gave clients a much bigger confidence in our abilities and enabled us to charge more. 6) Marketing toward high value targets-- we needed to get the ear of C level and VP's. Concentrating on the fact that we were a US company without outsourcing. Marketing to wealthy areas "doctorville" we called it. Targeted marketing to business corridors. We went deep, going as far as checking the AS of your IP address and whether any services were running on it. A surprising amount of the time would could link an IP back to a company, so we could quietly market to your company just from you visiting our site. 7) competitive research. Found our biggest local competitors. Quietly outbid them on all their ad keywords. Even more quietly made sure we had all the backlinks they did on search. Got a list of their clients one way or another, marketed directly to their clients already knowing their weaknesses from our clients who previously worked with those competitors. One competitor hosted their own servers, so I figured out who owned the IP and tracked ownership of the company through their email server. Another put their email address at the bottom of all public sites they wrote, a simple targeted google search returned all/most of their clients' sites. Another had a "client login" page setup on all of their sites that had a redirect to their main page. Searching for backlinks using SEO tools revealed most of these client sites. Lots more. It took a lot of creative thinking and some failures :)
- DenisM 10y ago
  Are you open to consulting? Either to help in hiring a person like you or in getting your help directly? My email is in profile.
  - 79d697i6fdif 10y ago
    only for free, current job prevents me from doing anything outside work :). I'll email you when off work
    - adamqureshi 10y ago
      email me too. In profile. I wanna show you what Im working on.
    - brilliantcode 10y ago
      please email me too! mine is in profile.
    - kekimchi 10y ago
      Could you please also contact me? Thank you !! :)
    - Radim 10y ago
      Ping me as well please, radim@rare-technologies.com. Love your no-nonsense pragmatic attitude :)
- adamqureshi 10y ago
  Daym! its a free strategy brief! Thank You.
  - devopsproject 10y ago
    Isn't most of this common sense stuff? 1) Modern website with seo 2) produce compelling content 3) reduce redundant tools and streamline processes 4) advertise your product 5) advertise your business 6) knowing your customers and decision makers and advertising appropriately 7) understanding your competition
brilliantcode 10y ago
I highly suggest this thread to be "stickied" or made aware of in someway. It's literally gold and this is exactly why toiling the jungles of HN comments is worth it-you discover gems that you can put into action.
- throwawaydbfif 10y ago
  :) I checked out your site, looks great...Very similar to our setup. Two things I noticed. Your site can be made more optimized for highly impatient types. I recommend always showing a phone number that leads directly to a sales line with no wait, and a live chat bubble for those too skittish to give you any information. I always found best results putting the phone number big at the top of the page and again near the contact form. Make it show a special tracked number when users come through ads and the business is open for calls, your regular office number for visitors that didn't come through ads, and a disposable phone number to your cellphone for people that originally came through an ad but tried to call when the business is closed. Make all calls coming through ads go directly to a real person. The justification for all this work is that you already paid good money for anyone that comes through ads so its financially worth a little spam to give them a direct line to a real person. You want your conversion rate as high as possible once you've already paid. If you are a local business use a local area code, 800 # for anything advertised nationally. For the live chat bubble, make it automatically come up and say something friendly to anyone that has browsed site for more than X minutes or seen more than X pages. Make sure it only shows up when real people are available. Add something near to contact form like "or chat with us now" that automatically opens the bubble and notifies a real person of an incoming request. In my experience you'll get around 20% of initial contact from calls and maybe 30% from live chat. A decent percentage of these will be people too lazy, paranoid, or old school to fill out your contact form. Email forms are increasingly used for annoying stuff like permission to view the rest of an article, so many users are weary of giving you a direct contact without knowing if their please will go into a black hole. The ability to contact immediately, through phone and especially live chat alleviates these concerns. It makes you real, legit in their minds, immediately.
  - brilliantcode 10y ago

What did you do to turn things around though?

by nanijoe 10y ago

What did you do to turn things around though?

1) Remade website to be more professional looking, faster, more focused towards SEO, mobile friendly. I could write many pages on this :) but following online guides will get you in the ballpark 2) Started writing interesting content. Truly good content is a PITA and you need to be a decent writer to make something compelling, but our first good article got us more traffic than the entire site with over 100 content pages. 3) New tools. everything linked together to see where our sales were coming from. Phone system, website, live chat, in person. All of our leads funneled into one system. We could see what was getting people and what wasn't 4) Online advertising. Locally first, expand AD reach as campaign becomes more nationally competitive. Make sure all the tools you setup continue to track where all these leads are coming from 5) Better "convincing" of clients that we're legit. Company T-Shirts and swag. Hotel-type exaggerated pictures of our team and office. Meet the team page. Professional website like I mentioned earlier. FB, google maps, yellowpages, wherever we could get a free listing. Automated scheduling systems for client meetings, phone tree for calls, tons of previous work repurposed as marketing material for clients to see. Listing our bigger clients on our website. 800 phone #. All the hallmarks of a big successful business even though we weren't exactly gave clients a much bigger confidence in our abilities and enabled us to charge more. 6) Marketing toward high value targets-- we needed to get the ear of C level and VP's. Concentrating on the fact that we were a US company without outsourcing. Marketing to wealthy areas "doctorville" we called it. Targeted marketing to business corridors. We went deep, going as far as checking the AS of your IP address and whether any services were running on it. A surprising amount of the time would could link an IP back to a company, so we could quietly market to your company just from you visiting our site. 7) competitive research. Found our biggest local competitors. Quietly outbid them on all their ad keywords. Even more quietly made sure we had all the backlinks they did on search. Got a list of their clients one way or another, marketed directly to their clients already knowing their weaknesses from our clients who previously worked with those competitors. One competitor hosted their own servers, so I figured out who owned the IP and tracked ownership of the company through their email server. Another put their email address at the bottom of all public sites they wrote, a simple targeted google search returned all/most of their clients' sites. Another had a "client login" page setup on all of their sites that had a redirect to their main page. Searching for backlinks using SEO tools revealed most of these client sites. Lots more. It took a lot of creative thinking and some failures :)

DenisM 10y ago
Are you open to consulting? Either to help in hiring a person like you or in getting your help directly? My email is in profile.
- 79d697i6fdif 10y ago
  only for free, current job prevents me from doing anything outside work :). I'll email you when off work
  - adamqureshi 10y ago
    email me too. In profile. I wanna show you what Im working on.
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
    please email me too! mine is in profile.
  - kekimchi 10y ago
    Could you please also contact me? Thank you !! :)
  - Radim 10y ago
    Ping me as well please, radim@rare-technologies.com. Love your no-nonsense pragmatic attitude :)
adamqureshi 10y ago
Daym! its a free strategy brief! Thank You.
- devopsproject 10y ago
  Isn't most of this common sense stuff? 1) Modern website with seo 2) produce compelling content 3) reduce redundant tools and streamline processes 4) advertise your product 5) advertise your business 6) knowing your customers and decision makers and advertising appropriately 7) understanding your competition

brilliantcode 10y ago

I highly suggest this thread to be "stickied" or made aware of in someway. It's literally gold and this is exactly why toiling the jungles of HN comments is worth it-you discover gems that you can put into action.

throwawaydbfif 10y ago
:) I checked out your site, looks great...Very similar to our setup. Two things I noticed. Your site can be made more optimized for highly impatient types. I recommend always showing a phone number that leads directly to a sales line with no wait, and a live chat bubble for those too skittish to give you any information. I always found best results putting the phone number big at the top of the page and again near the contact form. Make it show a special tracked number when users come through ads and the business is open for calls, your regular office number for visitors that didn't come through ads, and a disposable phone number to your cellphone for people that originally came through an ad but tried to call when the business is closed. Make all calls coming through ads go directly to a real person. The justification for all this work is that you already paid good money for anyone that comes through ads so its financially worth a little spam to give them a direct line to a real person. You want your conversion rate as high as possible once you've already paid. If you are a local business use a local area code, 800 # for anything advertised nationally. For the live chat bubble, make it automatically come up and say something friendly to anyone that has browsed site for more than X minutes or seen more than X pages. Make sure it only shows up when real people are available. Add something near to contact form like "or chat with us now" that automatically opens the bubble and notifies a real person of an incoming request. In my experience you'll get around 20% of initial contact from calls and maybe 30% from live chat. A decent percentage of these will be people too lazy, paranoid, or old school to fill out your contact form. Email forms are increasingly used for annoying stuff like permission to view the rest of an article, so many users are weary of giving you a direct contact without knowing if their please will go into a black hole. The ability to contact immediately, through phone and especially live chat alleviates these concerns. It makes you real, legit in their minds, immediately.
- brilliantcode 10y ago