The financial advisory industry is on the verge of digital uphaul. Technological advancements have made a significant impact on the processes and functions of financial management. LeadCenter has always been at the center of this digital evolution. This platform is purpose-built for financial advisory firms and caters to their requirements with innovative solutions. These innovative solutions involve but are not limited to:
One of these processes is gathering client information and collecting data. Initially, this data collection was manual and required a thorough interaction with the client to understand their needs better and then craft a financial plan for them. However, this process is time-consuming, requires manual data entry, and is overall tedious. This emerges as a challenge for financial advisors globally.
After receiving requests from almost 120 financial advisors via online forums, LeadCenter team started developing a unique financial questionnaire form with a secured public link to send to contacts. Its sole purpose is to offer convenience to financial advisors and their prospects and bring about the much-needed and requested change through digital innovative solutions.
The traditional methods of data collecting are tiresome and hold a higher risk of inconsistencies. To top it off, people exhibit a lower attention span and can easily drift away from something that feels monotonous. On the other hand, financial advisors need to close deals and acquire client accounts as fast as possible, which means they need to have accurate client information before they have a first appointment with a client. Let’s see the inherent inefficiencies of opting for the traditional data-gathering methods:
Financial management relies heavily on verified documentation such as tax documents, investment portfolios, income statements, bank statements, and much more.
Both the client and financial advisor had to go through this mountain of paperwork to get all the information. Not only does it frustrate the clients but is also a logistical nightmare for financial advisors to keep track of every client’s financial records in physical documents.
One of the biggest challenges of manual data collecting or entering is its higher susceptibility to human error.
People make mistakes and in the case of managing finances, it is much more likely that you mess up numbers and create discrepancies in the financial portfolio of a client. This could lead to a huge disaster as wrong calculations lead to significantly inaccurate financial plans.
For every business, time is the most valuable asset. The same goes for a financial advisory firm.
However, managing a client’s finances requires you to spend countless hours entering data into Excel sheets, cross-checking documents, creating checklists, and updating the database. You may also require additional staff members to help with this task. The traditional method is not only time-intensive but also uneconomical.
The physical records of client financial data are harder to safeguard. Traditionally, financial advisory firms invested in lockable cabinets, safes, and even additional security staff to keep their clients’ confidential data safe.
It makes for one more challenge of traditional data collecting and even with all the stops in place, the physical documents are prone to loss and damage.
Manually entering data takes an extensive amount of time. So much so that it creates a lag between gathering client information and crafting a sound financial plan.
This is due to the ever-evolving financial landscape. By the time, the advisors start analyzing the gathered information, the market trends may fluctuate, thus making their strategies obsolete.
This scenario calls for something that benefits both the client and the financial advisor.
LeadCenter answered the call and introduced a Financial Questionnaire for the clients to fill in their information. A Financial Questionnaire is an online form that has a secured public link. You can send this link to new contacts/prospects to fill in their data, on their own time, and at their own pace. This form consists of various sections for prospects to populate their information. Some questions have checkboxes to choose more than one answer while some have Yes/No options. It depends on the kind of data that you require from your contacts.
Accessing the Financial Questionnaire and sending it to your prospects is as easy as pie. Just follow the steps given below:
As a financial advisor, you’re responsible for managing your client’s finances and giving them sound financial advice. All this requires a strong database and your ability to gather accurate information about your client.
Let’s explore the importance of your client’s financial details in parallel with the Financial Questionnaire:
The Financial Questionnaire is fairly detailed and addresses all aspects of your client’s financial history. The biggest advantage is that all questions have a set number of options to choose from. Your contacts can auto-populate their information and experience hassle-free data submission.
The comprehensive data gathering empowers you to make informed decisions and craft a tailored solution for your client. The Financial Questionnaire gathers information regarding your client's financial priorities, risk tolerance, and unique goals. This enables you to craft a strategy that aligns with your client’s specific requirements.
Without detailed client information, you’ll be doling out generic advice and failing to strategize accordingly. The Financial Questionnaire takes care of this problem by highlighting potential opportunities and identifying risks. You can use this to devise a smart strategy with clear targets such as savings or investment opportunities for your clients.
The Financial Questionnaire provides you with detailed client information along with your prospect’s complex financial situations. In this way, you can familiarize yourself with this prospect’s unique financial needs and prepare for a more meaningful interaction during your first appointment. With a deep understanding of your prospect’s financial requirements, you’re more likely to form a bond of mutual respect and trust.
Managing finances is a complex process. However, the Financial Questionnaire is simple, clear, and transparent. Your prospects populate their information, thus enabling you to simplify the more complex concepts of the financial world for them, and helping them make informed decisions. You can discuss in detail the challenges of their financial situation and devise proactive plans accordingly.
The Financial Questionnaire takes into account unforeseen circumstances and gathers critical information. This information includes life events, economic shifts, and market trends. It enables you to craft a course of action if and when there’s a change in the financial landscape. This is how you can stay ahead of changing circumstances and ensure adaptability.
LeadCenter offers the Financial Questionnaire as an innovative and convenient solution to financial advisors and their clients.
Let’s see some of the benefits of using the Financial Questionnaire.
Ever since the technological advancements in the financial advisory industry, financial advisors have been speaking out about having a form to send to their contacts.
Here’s how the Financial Questionnaire benefits advisors:
People want convenience. Nobody wants to be interrogated on their first appointment with a financial advisor.
A Financial Questionnaire brings certain benefits for the prospects:
A satisfactory client experience is the ultimate goal of any business. Taking all the complexities of the financial management system into account, the LeadCenter team wanted to create something to act as a bridge between financial advisors and their clients. This is precisely what a Financial Questionnaire achieves. Here’s how this works.
Before the very first meeting (virtual or in-person), you, the financial advisor, send the Financial Questionnaire to the prospect. Now, two things happen. One, you can track your prospect’s progress as they submit answers to each section. Two, your prospect can take all the time in the world to answer the questions. You do not have this luxury during a meeting.
With a Financial Questionnaire, you and your prospect will be more than prepared to discuss the next steps instead of going over each aspect of their financial history. This creates a level of trust and reassurance for your prospect and translates into a positive client engagement experience.
The Financial Questionnaire is a robust feature that works harmoniously with the LeadCenter data management system. It doesn’t require a complicated setup or additional logins. It works as a strategic enhancement of the platform. When a prospect submits their financial data via the questionnaire, our automated system will parse this data and categorize it accordingly. Moreover, the reporting and analytics tools synchronize perfectly with the Financial Questionnaire feature. This synchronization results in valuable insights from the collected data.
The Financial Questionnaire is a robust feature of the LeadCenter platform which means that it integrates well with the Redtail CRM as well. You can harness the power of automation from both platforms using the questionnaire.
Here’s a brief recap of what we learned about the Financial Questionnaire:
To leverage the full potential of the Financial Questionnaire, refer to these resources:
The Financial Questionnaire serves multiple functions. However, its first and foremost purpose is to streamline the collection of clients’ financial data. The Financial Questionnaire acts as an online form that helps you auto-populate your financial information and keeps it secure in a protected digital environment. Its other purposes include:
The Financial Questionnaire is thoroughly detailed. It covers your client’s financial information such as tax statements, bank statements, investment portfolio, financial priorities, objectives, risks, and goals.
Yes, the Financial Questionnaire is highly secure. Each unique link ensures data security. It offers multi-layered security and multi-factor authentication to protect the confidentiality of your client's financial information.
The Financial Questionnaire offers a multitude of benefits for financial advisors. Here are a few:
The Financial Questionnaire has a user-friendly interface and an easy-to-follow format.
Yes, it does! In fact, it is an enhancement of the LeadCenter platform. It is developed for financial advisors to optimize the data collection process. Additionally, the questionnaire works in complete sync with the reporting and analytics tools and provides unique insights regarding the collected data.
Customer Acquisition or lead management is a plethora of strategies and practices to convert new leads into customers. Although lead management software and CRM tools are both designed for easy access to information and better communication, lead management primarily focuses on capturing leads and converting them to customers. CRM, however, helps to increase your customer retention.
This article will tell you everything you need to know about LeadCenter.AI, the best lead management software and CRM solution for your business.
Lead management software is a powerful tool to help businesses manage their sales leads more effectively. Software for lead management can automate and streamline the process of capturing, tracking, and analyzing potential customers, making it easier for businesses to prioritize their resources and focus on the leads most likely to result in a sale.
At its core, lead management software is designed to help businesses track leads throughout the entire sales process. This includes capturing leads from various channels such as web forms, email, and social media and then distributing those leads to sales teams based on criteria such as geographic location or industry. Lead management software can also help businesses assign scores to leads based on their level of interest, budget, and authority to make purchasing decisions.
One of the key benefits of lead management software is its ability to automate workflows, like sending follow-up emails or scheduling calls with potential customers. By automating these tasks, businesses can save time and resources while also ensuring that leads are being contacted promptly and consistently.
Another essential feature of lead management software is its ability to improve conversion rates. By tracking and analyzing the behavior of potential customers, businesses can gain insights into which leads are most likely to convert, allowing them to focus their resources on those leads.
Free Lead management software like Leadcenter.AI can be an invaluable tool for businesses of all sizes. Moreover, lead management software can help you capture, track, and analyze leads more effectively while improving conversion rates and increasing revenue.
CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a software solution that helps businesses manage their interactions with potential customers. It enables businesses to store and organize customer data, track interactions, and automate specific processes to improve customer relationships.
CRM differs from lead management software as it provides a broader range of functionalities beyond lead management. Lead management software primarily focuses on capturing and tracking leads, while CRM software encompasses lead management and customer service, sales, and marketing automation.
By centralizing customer data and interactions, businesses can gain a more comprehensive view of their customers and tailor their interactions to meet their needs. For example, businesses can track customer inquiries and complaints, which can be addressed more efficiently.
Moreover, CRM software allows businesses to automate processes, like sending follow-up emails or scheduling appointments, which can save time and improve productivity. Additionally, CRM software can help businesses identify sales opportunities and streamline sales processes, leading to increased sales and revenue.
The other benefit of using CRM software is its ability to improve customer relationships. By keeping track of customer interactions and preferences, businesses can better understand their customers and personalize their interactions. This can lead to increased customer loyalty and retention.
As for CRM tools, many options are available in the market, including Leadcenter.AI, a free CRM tool that offers features such as lead tracking, email and SMS automation, and customizable lead pipelines. Choosing the best CRM tool for your business will depend on your specific needs and budget.
When it comes down to lead conversion, businesses face a number of serious problems as follows:
LeadCenter.AI is an AI-powered lead management software that has helped over 600 companies develop a versatile business strategy in every challenge mentioned above and capture over 200,000 more leads.
Here is how LeadCenter.AI, software for lead management and CRM, can help your business grow.
LeadCenter.AI makes sure you use every possible channel to capture leads in the prospect stage.
Some of these channels aligned with faster lead capturing are:
The LeadCenter.AI Lead management software streamlines the process by automating key elements like email list segmentation and personalization. By segmenting email lists based on customer behavior or other criteria, businesses can deliver targeted emails relevant to each user. With personalized content tailored to their needs or interests, leads become more likely to take action and convert into sales.
The first step in capturing leads via phone call is to set up a CRM system that organizes all your customer data, including notes from past conversations, demographic information, and industry background.
With LeadCenter.AI, you can get virtual phone numbers for SMS and inbound calls to have this information immediately available, so speaking with customers gives you an edge when it comes to recording their contact details and gathering other important information about them that will come in handy down the line.
LeadCenter.AI allows you to easily manage all chats on your website in an organized manner. You’ll be able to access each conversation thread quickly, respond promptly when necessary, capture important customer information such as contact details, and keep track of any follow-up activities needed. All these processes are automated, so you don't have to manually handle each conversation thread.
Capturing leads via website form submissions is essential to any marketing strategy. By tracking and analyzing these leads accurately, you can gain valuable insights into your customer base and target the right people with the right message for maximum ROI (Return on Investment). With a few simple steps, you can easily set up your website to capture leads and track their progress through your sales funnel.
Using Zapier, users can easily integrate forms into their website or social media channels, allowing them to easily collect leads. In addition, its integration into LeadCenter.AI enables users to build robust automation that can send notifications based on specific events like the contact us page being filled out or abandoned carts in an eCommerce store.
With an influx of customers and their contact information, businesses can track leads and capitalize on new opportunities. One way to effectively capture leads is by uploading them via Excel/CSV using LeadCenter.AI.
LeadCenter.AI organizes all the data gained from online marketplaces into one easy-to-read format. With features like tracking capabilities, the lead management software makes it much easier to identify potential customers and nurture relationships with them over time. Additionally, it can integrate with other existing marketing tools like RedTail CRM and SmartAsset for an even more comprehensive approach to managing leads across multiple platforms.
Once you have set up all these channels on LeadCenter.AI, you can track all the leads captured and learn which channels generate the maximum number of leads. You can also categorize leads by source (channels), stage, and medium to prioritize your resources.
“The longer a deal stays in your pipeline, the less likely you are to ever close it.”
Gathering more intelligence about each lead can boost deals and accelerate your sales cycle.
LeadCenter.AI helps you gather over 20 intelligence points that you can use to categorize your leads, qualify them and learn more about their requirements and intentions. Here is how:
Even though scoring leads hold a prominent position in a CRM team, this effective technique is overlooked by a myriad of B2B and B2C companies.
According to Invesp Statistics and Trends, 80% of sales are not closed until the reps follow up on the first contact at least four more times.
This report emphasizes the need for an updated list highlighting the leads who are more likely to be interested in your product or service.
Lead engagement allows you to establish relationships with potential customers, track leads through their entire journey, and identify where you can make improvements to get more conversions.
With LeadCenter.AI, you can monitor customer acquisition efforts, understand customer behavior, and create effective strategies for converting leads into paying customers by scheduling appointments, sending emails and tracking the open rate and clicks, or sending and receiving an SMS, to name a few.
You can also use the RedTail CRM integration to automate lead actions and appointment reminders.
There is almost no business based on a one-time payment. Either recurring payments or revisits to make more sales are at the core of every marketing strategy, so forming effective and long-term customer relationships is inseparable from your business.
LeadCenter.AI enables you to create landing pages, make different forms, and capture leads from various channels, including Zapier. Moreover, you can categorize your leads by stage and connect them to your CRM database. Then you can get the most out of LeadCenter.AI integration and use SmartAsset - your Financial Advisor Marketplace - and RedTail CRM tools for contacts, appointments, and notes to ensure you never lose touch with your leads.
Getting started with LeadCenter.AI in a few steps:
You have unlimited email and phone support as well as consulting and training sessions. Additionally, the support team will help you set up your lead management software, integration, website, landing pages, and forms.
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| Lead tracking | Lead intelligence | Virtual phone numbers |
| Calendars and appointments | Lead engagement | Lead management |
| analytics | Workflows and automation | Integration |
| multi-user | notifications | Website builder |
| Page builder | Form builder |
You can manage one or multiple accounts on LeadCenter.AI. There are two free and professional plans for only $20 per month.
The upside of the professional plan is that you can customize features based on your budget and requirements.
See all customizable features in the professional plan here.
Lead management software and CRM tools are essential for businesses to gain more customers, build relationships, and increase their productivity.
LeadCenter.AI helps track leads, automate processes, build a database of potential customers, and customize messages for an enhanced customer experience via email or SMS.
Moreover, it provides businesses with insights into customer trends so they can make informed decisions about their product or service offerings. Investing in lead management software and CRM tools is an investment in the future growth of your business, and LeadCenter.AI has the best offers for you.
Now, let’s read frequently asked questions about CRM and lead management software.
Lead management software is designed to help businesses manage and track their leads throughout the sales funnel. It typically includes features like lead capture, lead scoring, lead nurturing, and analytics. A CRM, on the other hand, is a broader tool that helps manage all customer interactions, including sales, marketing, and customer support. While both tools can be used for lead management, lead management software focuses more on the sales process.
Using software for lead management can bring various benefits to your business. It can help you automate your sales process, allowing you to spend more time on high-value activities like closing deals. It can also help you better understand your leads by providing insights into their behavior and preferences. Additionally, lead management software can help you improve the overall efficiency of your sales team, leading to increased productivity and revenue.
Most CRM tools have built-in lead management features, making it easy to integrate with lead management software. By integrating the two tools, you can create a seamless sales process that tracks leads from initial contact through the entire customer lifecycle. This can help your sales team stay organized and ensure no leads slip through the cracks. Additionally, integrating your CRM with lead management software can help you gain a complete view of your customers, allowing you to personalize your interactions and improve the customer experience.
How many people are searching for legal services online on search engines like Google every month? What are the strategies that you can apply to rank higher when people are searching for legal services like corporate law, intellectual property, family law, immigration, or personal injury? This information is crucial for law firms to determine the potential of online channels in driving brand awareness and generating leads.
In this article, we will show you how to find the answers to these questions and how to use this knowledge to build a marketing strategy that can increase your law firm's visibility in search engines and attract more clients to your practice.
Before starting with keyword research, the first step is to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP). This will help you understand the basic characteristics of the potential customers you want to target with your services. For instance, if you are a law firm specializing in business law, your ICP may include small to medium-sized businesses in a certain industry, located in a particular region or city, and seeking legal advice on specific topics like intellectual property, contracts, or employment law.
If you are a small or medium-sized law firm, focusing on a specific geography can increase the chances of success in any online channel, including search engines. By identifying the geographic location of your target audience, you can tailor your marketing strategy to better fit their needs and preferences. For example, if your ICP includes businesses located in San Francisco, California, you can use location-based keywords like "business lawyer San Francisco" to improve your chances of appearing in local search results.
When it comes to keyword research for SEO purposes, it's crucial to identify the specific legal services that you want to promote through search engines. This will help you determine the most relevant keywords that potential clients might use to find the services you offer. Whether you specialize in business law, family law, estate planning, or any other legal field, you should create a list of the most important keywords related to your services.
Keyword research is the process of analyzing search engine data to identify the most relevant and valuable keywords for your business. There are many tools available for doing keyword research, but some of the most popular ones include Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Moz. By using these tools, you can discover how many people are searching for legal services online, which keywords they are using, and how difficult it is to rank for those keywords.
A direct ranking strategy means that you are trying to rank directly for the specific legal services that you offer. This involves optimizing your website and content for keywords that are directly related to your legal services and building high-quality backlinks to increase your website's authority and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines.
To conduct keyword research using Ahrefs, you can start by searching for the most important keywords related to your legal services, such as "business lawyer" or "divorce attorney".
Ahrefs will provide you with data on the search volume, keyword difficulty, and other metrics for each keyword, allowing you to determine which ones are most valuable and relevant to your business. You can also use Ahrefs to find related keywords, as well as analyze the top-ranking pages for your target keywords to identify the most effective SEO strategies.
When doing keyword research, the two most important factors to consider are search volume and keyword difficulty. While high-volume keywords may seem appealing, they are often the most competitive and difficult to rank for. As a result, it's often more effective to focus on long-tail keywords that have lower search volume but are more specific and relevant to your target audience. By doing so, you can improve your chances of ranking higher in search results and generating more qualified leads.
Let's say you run a law firm specializing in personal injury cases. Through your keyword research, you've identified that the keyword "personal injury lawyer" is highly competitive, with many other law firms vying for that top spot on search engine results pages.
However, as you dive deeper into your research, you discover that the keyword "car accident lawyer" has a relatively high search volume and moderate competition. This presents a great opportunity for your law firm to create content around this keyword and potentially rank higher in search engine results.
To take advantage of this opportunity, you could create a blog post or webpage that focuses specifically on the services your law firm offers related to car accidents. You could also use variations of the keyword, such as "auto accident lawyer" or "car crash attorney," in your content to help boost your ranking for related search queries.
By focusing on these "best keyword opportunities" instead of trying to compete for the most popular keywords, you can improve your chances of ranking higher in search results and attracting more potential clients to your law firm.
As a law firm, it's important to understand how many people are searching for legal services online. We conducted keyword research using ahrefs and focused on keywords relevant to legal services such as "personal injury lawyer", "divorce attorney", "real estate lawyer", "estate planning attorney" and "criminal defense attorney". Our research revealed that there are approximately 450,000 monthly searches for these keywords alone. However, it's important to note that people often use variations of these keywords or similar phrases to search for legal services. Therefore, we apply a 5x multiplier to account for these variations, bringing the total monthly search volume for legal services to around 2.25 million searches per month.
To develop a successful marketing strategy based on keyword research, it is crucial to focus on targeting keywords that are relevant to your law firm's legal services and align with your ideal client persona. You can achieve this by identifying long-tail keywords that are specific to your law firm's practice areas, have low keyword difficulty, and a high search volume.
By targeting keywords that are specific to your law firm's practice areas, you can attract potential clients who are actively searching for the services that your law firm provides. This may involve creating dedicated landing pages for each target keyword that are optimized for user experience and conversion, providing relevant and informative content, and optimizing your website's metadata, including title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags.
Furthermore, you can increase the visibility of your law firm's website on search engines by building high-quality backlinks from relevant and authoritative websites. This helps establish your law firm as a trusted source of information and improves your website's search engine rankings.
Overall, an effective keyword targeting strategy for law firms involves identifying keywords that are specific to your practice areas, have low keyword difficulty, and high search volume, and then optimizing your website's content and metadata, and building high-quality backlinks to improve your website's search engine rankings and attract potential clients.
Also, We prepared an excel sheet that contains the most popular 1000 keywords for lawyers that includes the keywords, the search volume, and the competition which you can download from here.
If you need help with a digital marketing strategy for your law firm or building a digital marketing execution plan please feel free to fill up the form at our website and one of our representatives will contact you.
Please feel free to contact us at support@leadcenter.ai or call us at our toll-free number 888-291-7116
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Welcome to our law firm digital marketing series. In this article, we will discuss seven steps that can help your law firm rank higher on Google Maps. As the world has gone digital, it has become crucial for law firms to implement effective digital marketing strategies to remain competitive. Our goal is to help law firms like yours generate more leads and revenue through these strategies.
Google Maps and local search offer two significant advantages for small and medium-sized law firms:
Three factors impact your Google Business Profile ranking on Google Maps or Google Local Search:
If you're a law firm looking to attract more clients, ranking your Google Business profile is a crucial step in your digital marketing strategy. Google Business profiles appear in Google Maps and local search results, making them highly visible to potential clients in your area. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to optimize your law firm's Google Business profile and rank higher in search results.
The first step is to claim and verify your business on Google. Claiming and verifying your business on Google is an essential step in optimizing your law firm's digital marketing strategy. By claiming your business, you can manage your law firm's online presence and ensure that potential clients can find accurate information about your services.
To claim and verify your business on Google, you need to create a Google My Business account and enter your law firm's information, including its name, address, phone number, and website. Once you have entered this information, Google will send you a verification code to your business address or phone number.
You need to enter this verification code into your Google My Business account to confirm that you are the owner of the business. This process ensures that only the rightful owner of a business can manage its online presence on Google. Once you have verified your business, you can start optimizing your Google Business profile by adding more information, encouraging reviews, and building local citations to improve your law firm's visibility in search results.
Completing your business information involves ensuring that your Google Business profile is up-to-date and includes all the necessary details. This includes adding a description of your law firm's services, office hours, photos of your office and staff, and any other relevant information that potential clients may find helpful. It's essential to use keywords that describe your services and location to help improve your profile's visibility in search results. The more detailed and accurate your business information, the more likely it is to appear in relevant searches and attract potential clients. Additionally, providing photos and descriptions of your law firm can help build trust with potential clients and make your law firm more approachable.
Encouraging reviews and responding to them can be an important part of optimizing your law firm's Google Business profile. Reviews are one of the top-ranking factors for local search, so the more positive reviews your law firm receives, the higher it will rank in local search results. Additionally, positive reviews can help build trust and credibility with potential clients.
To encourage clients to leave reviews, you can send follow-up emails after working with them or include a link to your Google Business profile in your email signature or on your website. It's important to respond to all reviews, whether they are positive or negative, as this shows that you value feedback and are committed to providing excellent service.
When responding to reviews, make sure to thank clients for their feedback, address any concerns or issues they may have raised, and provide a positive and professional tone. This will help show potential clients that you are a responsive and customer-focused law firm.
In order to optimize your website for ranking your Google Business profile, there are several things you can do. Here are some details on each step:
By optimizing your website, you can increase your chances of ranking higher in Google search results, which in turn can drive more traffic to your website and Google Business profile.
Creating local content can be a valuable way to optimize your law firm's Google Business profile. By creating content that is specific to your local community, you can improve your visibility in search results and establish your law firm as an authority in your area. Here are some tips for creating effective local content:
Overall, creating local content can help improve your law firm's online presence and visibility in search results. By providing valuable information to your community, you can establish yourself as a trusted authority in your field and attract new clients to your practice.
Local citations are online mentions of your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) on other websites. These citations help Google and other search engines understand the legitimacy and credibility of your business. Building local citations is an important factor in optimizing your Google Business profile and improving your overall online presence.
To build local citations, start by listing your law firm on popular online directories, such as Yelp, Avvo, and Yellow Pages. These directories have high domain authority and are trusted by search engines, which can boost your law firm's visibility in search results.
You can also reach out to local organizations, such as your local chamber of commerce, to see if they can mention your law firm on their website. This can help improve your local presence and establish your law firm as a trusted and respected member of the community.
Make sure your NAP information is consistent across all citations, as inconsistencies can harm your online visibility. Check that your business name, address, and phone number are correct and consistent on all listings, and ensure that any variations (such as "St." or "Street") are standardized.
Overall, building local citations is an effective way to improve your law firm's visibility in search results and establish your business as a credible and authoritative source in your community.
Finally, monitoring your law firm's performance on Google is crucial to understanding the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts. You can use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your website's traffic and search performance.
In terms of your Google Business profile, you can monitor your ranking by checking where your profile appears in search results for relevant keywords. You can also keep track of the number of clicks, calls, and directions requests that your profile receives, as well as the number of reviews and their ratings. This data can help you identify which strategies are working and which need improvement.
Regularly monitoring your performance can help you make data-driven decisions about your digital marketing strategy, allowing you to optimize your efforts and improve your law firm's online visibility and reputation.
By following these seven steps, your law firm can rank higher on Google Maps and Google Local Search, leading to more leads and revenue for your firm. It is crucial to implement these strategies continuously and stay up-to-date on the latest digital marketing trends to remain competitive in today's digital world.
How many people are searching for financial advisors online on Google every month? What are the strategies that you can apply to rank higher when people are searching for services like investment management, retirement planning, annuities, or insurance? We will show you how to find the answers to those questions and how to use that knowledge to build a marketing strategy to rank your business higher in search engines to generate more leads.
This question is important to answer not only for financial advisors but any business to be able to figure out the viability of online channels like search engines in terms of driving brand awareness as well as driving leads online to their business.
The first step in the process is to identify Your ideal customer profile (ICP). The ICP should tell you the basics of the ideal potential customers for your services. This can be like high net worth individuals with more than ten million dollars of assets that live in certain geography or people above the age of 55 that are looking for help with retirement planning.
This is important if you are a small and medium financial advisor or any business because the success in any channel can be higher if you are able to focus not only on an ideal customer profile but also in geography. For example, focusing on retiree that live in Miami, Florida or high net worth individuals that live in Los Angeles or any other place across the US.
Whether you are offering financial advice, investment management with AUM, retirement plans, tax plans, annuities, insurance, or any other services that financial advisors offer but when it comes to keyword research for SEO purposes it's very important to list the services that you are going to promote into those channels. Those three elements: the ideal customer profile, the geography, and the services you offer are important input into the next step which is we call a keyword research that simply means how many people are using search engines like google to search for those services on those geographies.
Keyword research is the way that we know how many people are searching for financial advisors online or financial advisor services? there are a lot of tools available that you can use for doing the keyword research, but personally we recommend using ahrefs and google search console.
Direct ranking strategy means that you are trying to rank directly for the services that you offer as financial advisors.
Let's search for "financial advisors" in ahrefs and see how many people are searching for this keyword. You will see that one of the highest search keywords is "financial advisors near me" with 12000 searches per month and 18000 searches globally while for the keyword "Financial Advisors" It's around 6500. So one of the most important factors here is keyword difficulty, financial advisors near me is one of the difficult keywords to rank for, on a scale from zero to 100 it's 79% difficulty in terms of ranking for.
One of the great things that we advise our customers to do or what we do for them as part of our services is to do that extensive keyword research.
The two most important components for keyword research are volume and keyword difficulty. For example, although the word financial advisor has high volume search it may be very hard to rank for. There are workarounds and different tactics that you can apply to find other keywords that are easier to rank for and drive qualified leads.
Here are examples for keyword research: financial consultant has extremely high volume of search like 11000 per month in the united states alone, 27000 per month globally and the keyword difficulty is 36. Much less than financial advisor so as part of your strategy you pick up this keyword and start using it to build the landing page with the url financial-consultant and then you start trying to rank for this keyword and drive business.
Let's look at another keyword for example "retirement planning" has a high volume of search. Around 15000 people searched for this keyword online, however it's still a difficult keyword.
Another tactic we advise our customers to follow is to add the geography to the keyword. For example the keyword"Financial Advisor Houston" with around 1000 people searches which is around 12-14 thousand searches per year. While the volume of search is not that huge you still can drive qualified leads. This means it shouldn't be hard to rank for those keywords.
So, one of the tactics that you that you can use is to make sure that you have proper landing pages that contain the name of the city and the state that you are serving.
The answer the question of how many people are searching for financial advisors online which we were able to get from ahrefs with the focus only to those keywords: financial advisor investment management, retirement planning, tax planning, annuities and life insurance. The total number of searches is almost 350000 searches per month however we apply a 5x multiplier for people searching for matching and related keywords for example someone searching for financial consultant or a variation of investment management and that brings you to around 1.7 million searches per month.
The recommendation is to be able to find keywords that focus on your ideal customer profiles with low keyword difficulty that you can rank for quickly and most of the time those are long tail keywords.
Being able to do proper keyword research will have a major impact on your SEO marketing strategy as well as the SEO execution plan whether how you build your website, the content, the landing pages, the url for those landing pages and actually doing proper research at the beginning can help you save time and money and rank faster to be able to generate leads from online search engines.
We also prepared an excel sheet that contains the most popular 1000 keywords for financial advisors that includes the keywords, the search volume, the difficulties which you can download from the link in the youtube channel.
If you need help with a digital marketing strategy for your financial practice or building a digital marketing execution plan please feel free to fill up the form at our website and one of our representatives will contact you.
Please feel free to contact us at support@leadcenter.ai or call us at our toll-free number 888-291-7116
Thank you
One of the key factors in improving the conversion of leads to business is intelligence. In this video, I will show you how LeadCenter.AI automate gathering more than 17 pieces of intelligence about each lead when it arrives. This intelligence would help you focus on the most qualified and hot leads to improve conversion ratio of leads to business.
LeadCenter.AI is able to gather five categories: phone call intelligence, email intelligence, intelligence about the interaction between you and the lead, the source of that lead as well as the browsing history.
The software will be able to gather the phone number of anyone fills up a form, start a chat or call. Firstly, it will verify if the phone number is valid or not. The software will be able to reveal the type of the phone whether it's a mobile or a landline. We do the verification directly through the carrier which will give you access to each lead's name, type (consumer or business). If the phone is not valid then this is not a valid lead and the form is filled with inaccurate information and you don't need to waste time on it.
The second part is that you get automated recording of all the calls. It will show you the caller's timeline that includes the time of the call, the duration, the status of the call (accepted or missed) and more importantly, the software will automatically transcribe the code, so you don't need to listen to every single call. Actually, the entire transcription will be done automatically and you will receive an email notification for each code that gets transcribed. The accuracy of the transcription is between 80 and 95 depending on the quality of the call that's being recorded.
Whenever somebody fill up a form or start a chatting session we capture and verify the email address through the email provider. This would save you time and effort.
The third group of intelligence that LeadCenter.AI will gather is that if you start using the software to send or receive emails and SMSs, it will gather crucial part of intelligence and that helps you improve the qualification of those prospects. One of them is the number of times a lead open an email that you sent.
The other piece of intelligence is the number of clicks on a link within the email. How do we do this? whenever you send an email from the software it will insert what we call a pixel which will allow to track the number of opens and the number of clicks for each email that gets sent.
You can use the software to send and receive SMSs. You will be able to tell if an SMS was delivered or not and if the user replied to the SMS, and this is what we call a 360 view about the communication with that lead.
The more a lead interacts with you, that increases the scoring of that lead, the probability of closure and would help you save time and effort by focusing on that particular lead.
The fourth group of intelligence that LeadCenter.AI will gather is about the lead channels. Lead channels will be able to get you the source of the visitor and the medium. One important thing about the medium is that it helps you identify through analytics which ads, emails, campaign, landing pages and keywords are converting best and generating the most amount of revenue.
Another interesting piece of intelligence under channels is that if you are running google ads for example or if you are using utms or parameters in the urls of your website and somebody fills up a form that form will be captured. Not only that, the entire utm parameters will be captured.
The software will be able to show which campaign or keyword got their attention. For example if a lead used a specific keyword such as SEO agency Houston, that helps improve the interaction with the lead as we know that the lead is searching for an SEO agency in Houston and the same applies for any kind of business or service. You are able to tell what the lead is interested in the campaign and that will improve your interaction with the lead.
The last piece of intelligence that LeadCenter.AI will gather is the browsing history or the pages that the user visited before contacting you. This would be valid only if the user fills up a form where through the session we are able to record the entire browsing history. You will be able to find out the url that the lead was in before contacting you as well as the address of his device (where the lead is calling from or where he filled up the form that's the address of the mobile phone or the pc that he used), the date and time of the visit to that specific page and the operating system that was used and the browser.
Please feel free to to set up your free account on LeadCenter.AI. If you need help in setting up your account or configuring it, please feel free to send us an email to support@leadcenter.ai or you can call us toll free at 888-291-7116.
There are five important concepts that are the cornerstone of a successful digital marketing strategy. Businesses lose hundreds of thousands of dollars because of a misunderstanding of those concepts while simple they can have a profound impact on your go-to market strategy.
Understanding and deploying those concepts will effectively help you generate a continuous stream of qualified leads and convert more of those leads to business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo8LqMhz05g
Content is any piece of article, landing page, video, or email you produce with the intention of reaching your targeted audience.
Two mistakes that small and medium businesses do especially when they are starting. The first mistake is that they focus a lot on advertisement. They want to sell their services and generate leads very quickly and that is counterintuitive.
What you really need is to create content that achieves two objectives: first, establish your authority in that line of business, and second, add value to your audience even if part of that value is giving up free information or free value. The objective is that not every customer sees this content will become a client. A percentage of them will convert to customers.
The second mistake that a lot of small and medium businesses tend to make is that they are not consistent and continuous. When you start producing content, there is a process of optimization and figuring out how to create that content which will be explained in details in this post.
You can reach your targeted audience through different channels, some are very well known such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn. On the other hand, there are also smaller channels.
Yes, you can reach to your ideal customer through the big channels, however those channels are expensive and time-consuming to organically generate leads from those if you are going the organic way versus the paid advertisement.
You can generate leads for your business by considering smaller channels such as Google groups where you may find your ideal customer profiles by asking certain questions or sharing information.
One of the major things that you need to do when creating your digital marketing strategy is to define your Ideal Customer Profile ICP.
Defining your ideal customer profile will determine the channels that they are in, the content that you will produce to establish your authority as well as add value to them. Examples of an ICP include customer title, company size, etc...
If you are working on a smaller marketing budget, it would be so confusing to use multi- channels.We have seen many small and medium startups spend their energy getting channel deals. The problem is that this effort gets diluted as it takes time to figure out who are your audience, your Ideal Customer Profile and which channel should you start with to interact with them.
Our advice to you is to focus on one channel to make your campaign success to generate leads and convert them to customers.
If you are adding value, you are establishing your authority over what will happen and you are reaching the right audience, you start generating leads and it's important to be able to capture all the leads that you generate. We find a lot of small and medium businesses don't have a centralized lead management software that automates the capturing of those leads.
It is very important to have a centralized lead management software that can automate the capturing of lead from all method of contacts whether it's chat, website form, email, phone call or whatever other sources or mediums available to capture those leads.
Once you start generating leads successfully, you are able to convert some of those leads to appointments and then to business. It's very important to establish what we call conversion ratio.
What's conversion ratio? basically, the rate at which a website visitor becomes a lead.
When you are doing marketing, you get in front of people. Those are called views or impressions. Views and impressions could be your Google ad or a a post on LinkedIn.
So, for example, let's say you are hoping to convert a percentage of views to clicks or visits, and once they visit your website or landing page, some of them will interact with you by filling out a form to share their contact information. Once they do that, then they become leads. A percentage of your visitors will become leads, and then you will go through a qualification process.
Sometimes leads don't fit your ideal customer profile and the type of business you work with which means they are not qualified. A percentage of them will be qualified, and then there is a conversion ratio from leads to qualified leads.
Once you have qualified leads, you need to start interacting with them, and most probably this would be through appointments. Not every lead will convert to an appointment.
A conversion ratio is when you are able to convert number of leads to new customers and being able to establish an accurate percentage of conversion from each stage in this funnel to the next. This is extremely important especially when we start talking about customer acquisition cost.
The last concept is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), so what's CAC? It's the cost of sales plus the cost of marketing over new customers acquired, and both of those concepts are connected together. Why? Because if I'm spending ten thousand dollars in season marketing even if that generated ten leads but I was able to convert one lead to new customer, then my new customer or my customer acquisition cost is ten thousand dollars.
It's very important to understand what's the customer acquisition cost and once you start understanding that and actually when you start doing advertisement out of time or for digital marketing, the customer acquisition cost will be at the higher end but then once you understand your conversion ratio it's a continuous optimization process where you see where are the conversion ratios as at a lower end and you try to improve it.
Maybe you are able to generate qualified leads but they are not converting to appointments and appointments are not converting to new customers. What we notice with our customers is that even a small percentage increase in conversion from one stage to another can mean a dramatical decrease in customer acquisition cost which in turn will improve your profitability.
A website is a medium, especially for small and medium businesses. A website is a medium to deliver content and capture leads. A lot of small and medium businesses get disappointed because they build a website thinking that they will start generating customers and then find out that is not the case.
Actually, a website without a digital marketing strategy is like a store in the middle of the desert without channels leading to it. Digital marketing strategy is where you are building roads and channels to reach to your store and actually the content you produce is kind of the advertisement or the way you lure in those customers on that road to reach to your store.
Some websites don't need channels. Some websites grow big enough where they have enough viral effect that they get almost 95 percent of their traffic without relying on any channel. And for small and medium businesses, it's really hard to reach that stage. Yes, it's possible, but it's really hard to say I can get customers online without relying on any other channel.
Here, we will show you a demo on how to set up channels as well as read lead tracking on LeadCenter.AI
In the setup menu, you will notice that you have lead capturing under lead capturing. You will have mediums you can set up sources and then you can assign the various mediums that get attached to those sources. So, for example, when you click on medium here, you will see all the existing mediums or the known mediums that can be used to capture leads, that's email redirect, phone call redirect, website forms, offline chat, Zapier calendar csv upload which is manual as well as Redtail which is a CRM for financial advisors.
When you click on for redirect, you will see all the lead sources. For example, the phone numbers or the virtual phone number that we redirect to the business number to capture phone call leads.
Another example, when you click on email redirects it will show you the emails that assigned to those channels or sources and any email that get forwarded to this email will show up under this channel.
If you start running an Omni channel or a multi-channel campaign strategy, it is extremely important to be able to know which channel is generating the best amount of leads and the maximum amount of qualified leads and the customer acquisition cost per channel. So, the first thing of course you want to do is to set up lead sources for all the channels that you are working on.
Please click here to watch the demo.
Please feel free to reach out to us at support@leadcenter.ai. If you have any questions or if you need help both with lead generation and configuring your lead management software you can call us also toll-free at 888 291 711
As a financial advisor, you know you have a lot of experience, and you can offer advice, guidance, and ingenious solutions to your clients. The problem is you don’t have as many clients as you would like and so you’re left constantly worrying about how to generate more leads. Today, your efforts to market your services are just as important as your services. In this article, we’ll share easy tips on how financial advisors like you can generate leads and focus on their business success. You don’t have to be an expert in marketing to create a strategy tailored to help your business thrive. Let’s get started.
Before thinking of the steps you can take to generate leads, you need to ask yourself one question. As a financial advisor, who are you helping? Do you offer investment planning, tax planning, or estate planning? Are you a financial planner, wealth manager, or investment advisor? If you know who you’re helping, you can help them find you by creating content that targets them. Being clear about your services will help you reach the right clients. Your content must reflect, target, and engage the right audience or it’s useless.
This is a must. You cannot run a successful business without creating a professional website and updating it regularly with new and optimized content. Here’s what you can do to stand out. State clearly what your website is about from the beginning and the services that you offer. Create a website with a unique design. Remember to add what value you add to your clients. No one cares about what you can do, but what you can do specifically to help them.
Use the 1st person when you talk about yourself in the bio. Tell your personal story. Say how you’ve personally improved your finances, got yourself out of debt, or invested your money. Also, tell some of your success stories like how you’ve helped your clients save their money better, make better investments, or plan. Don’t just tell your clients that you can help them, show them how.
How are people going to find out that you have experience? Show them that you’re an expert by blogging regularly. Offering free information is not such a bad idea nowadays. Google the keywords relevant to your business and check the questions that people normally ask about those topics and answer them as best as you can. Your blog should be the place where your target audience finds the financial advice they are looking for. By blogging regularly, you build a relationship with your audience, and they start to trust you and when you’re looking for a financial advisor, you come to mind.
Paying attention to SEO keywords means that those who search for your services find you faster because you’re both using the same keywords. What are the main keywords that people use when they search for financial advisors? Include them on the website, blog, social media posts, and tags for YouTube videos. Tell Google that these are the services you provide. Most people think keyword search is the only thing they should care about. Some of the SEO best practices are optimizing page speed, making URLs SEO-friendly, and optimizing title tags, and meta descriptions. Paying attention to SEO best practices will ensure you rank higher for the keywords you’re using, and your website will show up when people look for financial advisor services.
Sometimes, you need to boost your results with ads. Make sure you target the right keywords for your google ads. This way the people who find your services are those who need them the most. Make sure you target the right audience because you don’t want to pay money to target those who are not interested in your services. Setting up google ads is one of the best methods of generating leads because you target those who are already interested and looking for the service.
Case studies are a great way to show potential clients how you’re going to help them by using data you already have. Case studies are a great option because when it comes to their money, people want proof and data. They don’t want promises. Use case studies to show your expertise, your planning, and problem-solving skills. It’s better to create a page dedicated to case studies on your website. The more case studies the better.
If you want to reach more people, start providing information for free. A free consultation where you show your clients what you can do for them (just discussing what they have in mind and your simple recommendations). Offer free courses, create engaging YouTube video content with sound financial advice, and regularly offer webinars. This way you get the word out about your services.
Market research means you check what services people are looking for, but it also means you check what your competitors are doing. You must regularly check the action plan of other financial advisors, their websites, the keywords they target, and their social media efforts. This way you can get new ideas about the best ways to market your services and generate leads.
As a professional financial advisor, you should do your best to look credible online, and there is nothing better than setting up a Google My Business account with information about the services you offer, your location, contact information, etc. It shows that you are serious about your business.
These are the first steps you should take to start generating leads as a financial advisor. Focus on research, define your niche, target your audience with content tailored to their needs, and keep going.
In this presentation, I'll tell you the business problem that LeadCenter.AI solves as well as give you an introductory demo to the software.
So, in working with hundreds of businesses over the last few years small and medium business specifically they tell us that they have a problem. The problem is that those businesses are losing revenue because of bad lead management practices. There are three distinct problems that those businesses face like not being able to track and capture leads from all sources especially tracking to capture those leads automatically. They are not getting enough intelligence about the lead especially for B2C businesses or business to consumer companies that they deal with. The existing CRMs don't provide much intelligence about them and they are not responding to leads on time which reduce the conversion rate of those leads to actual business.
LeadCenter.AI is an AI-powered lead management software that help businesses grow the revenue by automating, tracking, gathering intelligence, and engaging leads to improve conversions of leads to business so the software will automate lead tracking that's for leads that comes through phone, email forms, chats or through integration with third-party lead sources gathering intelligence. Once a lead arrives, the system will start gathering intelligence about this lead and present it to the operator, lead
scoring, and automating the engaging of leads using SMS, email and appointments. LeadCenter.AI will help businesses improve conversion of leads to business while saving time and money so now I'm gonna switch to the demo to give you an overview of the system and how it's used.
I'm in the login screen and I'm going to log into my account and one of the great things about LeadCenter.AI is that I can manage multiple accounts with the same or multiple companies accounts with the same account that I have. That will be very helpful for digital marketing agencies that they manage uh that they do digital marketing for various businesses or companies. They can use LeadCenter.AI to help those businesses capture lead and show a value out of the digital marketing activities that they are doing.
For example, I have Contoso. I'm gonna manage the account. This is just a demo account so none of the user information is real. Once you log in, the first thing you will see is the main dashboard. This is the main dashboard that the operator will use for marketing. There is a simple analytics dashboard and I have a different tutorial about this demoing it, but overall it gives you a quick look at the number of leads that's arriving every day, the lead distribution by sources, by stages, by medium, as well as a pivot mapping of the lead channels, and the the stage of those leads.
The second thing on the left here, you can manage the appointments, you can manage the leads which is the lead dashboard, the tasks related to those leads, the emails that you are sending and receiving from those leads as well as SMSs and calls.
The main and the most important screen is the leads dashboard. In this screen, you can see the various leads that arrive, at what stage it is, what's the medium it arrived through and through which channel. Here, we can see the various leads, at which stages they are and how are they are progressing and those are the open leads. When I click on the three stars here, I can see the the close stages for those leads. If I click on any of the leads here, this is will open the lead view or the lead details view. The lead details view is a great way to see a 360 view of the lead, that's the lead high level details as I said where it came from - the source - as well as the basic information about it and then if you scroll down you, can start seeing more information about this lead, for example, if there is a fixed appointment with that the lead intelligence. I'll talk about it more in details as well as where you can add comments, you can manage tasks, send and receive emails, and send and receive SMSs.
If that lead is a phone call, one additional thing that I'll be able to see is the call recording as well as an automated transcription of that call. The system will automatically capture all the leads by phone, record those calls and transcribe them for easy access for the operator to be able to make decisions about this lead and what to do with it.
One more thing that the lead management software will do is once somebody fills up a form with an email and a phone number so two pieces of intelligence will be gathered. Through the email provider, we will verify if this email is accurate and the email intelligence will tell you if it's valid or not and when when it was last verified and the phone number will be verified through the carrier figuring out is it a business or a consumer phone, what's the owner name, what's the type of the phone, and is it valid or not.
One of the things that you want to do once you create an account is to set up your account. To do that, you need to open the settings menu by clicking on setup here and that will create will open up the settings menu. On the setup menu, you can configure how leads are being captured, the lead management features like stages and custom fields, the workflows for example the autoresponder that will respond - will automate the responses - to leads when they arrive, email templates, and SMS templates notification, who will be notified when a lead arrives. And there as well, you can access the integration screen to configure integration with Zapier, Salesforce or Redtail.
Thank you for watching this. Please feel free to register your free account at app.leadcenter.ai/register
If you need help in setting up your account, please send us an email to support@leadcenter.ai or call us at our toll-free number it's 888-297-7116
Thank you
We did a review for a customer recently. His website was not driving leads at all for his business. He consulted with us on building a new website integrated with a lead management system. But first, we had to analyze what was wrong with his existing website.
If you are promoting a local service business, when a new customer land on your website, you should deliver to herhim the following 5 critical messages in under 10 seconds.
Assume a customer called Mike. Mike just had major water damage at his house at 6:00 AM. He uses Google to search for a company to help him fix the issue. He visits the first three websites links that show in Google or Google Map.
You can literally reduce your website to 20 words and one image and you will be able to generate more leads than a website having hundreds of pages and thousands of word.
We call this a Landing Page. This is more important if you are running paid ads on Google targeting expensive keywords. Otherwise, you may have wasted another $30 on a Google Click.
The 5 critical messages of the service you offer must be clear at the top of your website. In this example, our customer did water damage restoration in South California.
Lead nurturing is a process that helps organizations identify and engage prospective customers with relevant content while they are in the buying cycle.
Lead nurturing is not only about lead scoring. It is about nurturing leads and turning them into customers.
Lead nurturing is the process of engaging with potential customers until they are ready to buy from you. The process may begin with a lead score, which will indicate how likely that person is to buy your product. But this may not be enough to turn a lead into a customer, which means you need to be willing and able to engage in other ways – online and offline – in order to move the conversation onto the next stage of the buyer's journey and ultimately convert them into buyers.
Lead nurturing campaigns are typically sent to prospects at the top of the funnel, who are usually still exploring their options and gathering information about various options. These campaigns offer a variety of content, such as blog posts, research reports, or videos, that will help them make better decisions about purchasing your product or service.
It is estimated that the average person will make up to 100 decisions about a company before they decide to buy from them. And they’ll spend as much as six months doing it. This means that companies need to have a comprehensive lead nurturing strategy in place if they want to get a prospect from finding them online, through their marketing campaigns, and eventually into their sales funnel.
Lead nurturing starts with qualifying prospects and then building rapport with them over time, but it's about more than just sending emails. It’s about providing relevant content in a way that prompts engagement so prospects feel like you're talking directly to them and not just another business trying to sell them something.
Lead nurturing is a marketing technique that aims to increase the likelihood of a sale. It is an essential component of lead management, and a few businesses have mastered it.
To nurture leads effectively, you need a proper strategy. Here are 7 essential tactics:
#1 Utilize the lead and buyer’s journey
Buyer’s journey is a vital component of any marketing strategy. It helps marketers understand how customers think and shop, so they can focus their efforts on converting prospects into buyers.
The buyer’s journey is usually made up of 5 steps: Awareness, Interest, Evaluation, Trial, and Purchase.
It is important for marketers to consider the lead’s journey. In a perfect world, the customer would always be in the same stage of their journey and the lead nurturing strategy would never need to change. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and many leads will have different needs at different stages of their journey.
#2 “The Golden Touch”
Lead nurturing is an essential part of marketing. It’s the process of helping potential customers become customers. Lead nurturing does this by using a series of messages to create customer interest and guide them through the buying process.
Many marketers are looking for ways to improve their lead nurturing process and have found that adding in the Golden Touch can make a big difference. The Golden Touch involves some creativity with your messages to nurture leads through the sales funnel.
The golden touch is a strategy to nurture leads through the sales funnel with personalized messages. With this strategy, you can get prospects to feel more connected to your company and ultimately turn them into customers. This allows you to focus on the people who are most likely looking for your product or service.
The Golden Touch can be applied in many ways such as email, in-person meetings, social media, and more!
#3 Offer a demo of your product
Providing a demo of your product for lead nurturing can help prospects make informed decisions about your products.
For lead nurturing, it is important to provide potential customers with a demo of the product. A demo allows them to explore your product and see how it can help solve their problems. Demoing your product also allows the customer to ask questions and find out if it is right for them. Also, Demos demonstrates feature functionality.
Many companies are realizing the importance of a demo. A demo allows potential customers to explore your product and see how it can help solve their problems.
Demos can increase conversion rates by up to 2x. In order to create amazing, high-converting demos, Make your demo interactive so visitors can actually experience the product.
#4 Create a knowledge base or user guide on your website
The key to lead nurturing is providing your customer with the information they need to decide how you can help them. A knowledge base or user guide on your website will answer any questions they may have and provide you with the opportunity to advertise what you do best. Create a knowledge base or user guide on your website to answer customer questions and show them what you have to offer.
This will increase the trust of your potential customer and increase their willingness to contact you for more information.
*You can find a great example of a knowledge base on Help Scout's website.
#5 Create educational online videos
If you're a business owner, then you know how important it is to constantly be nurturing leads for your company. You may be struggling to find the right way to market your products/services online and leave potential customers with enough information to make a purchasing decision.
One solution for lead nurturing that has been shown to work well is educational, online videos. Videos allow viewers to get a closer look at the product and its features in a way that is more interactive than a static image or text. Create educational online videos to let leads learn more about your products/services before buying them.
Educational, online videos are a powerful way to nurture leads. They not only provide valuable information about the product and its features but also allow viewers to explore the product in a hands-on way.
#6 Email and Content Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most popular methods for lead nurturing. This is because it costs only a fraction of the cost of other marketing efforts and has a higher conversion rate when targeted to the right audience. However, for email campaigns to be successful they need to be well-planned and organized.
Send notifications when new content is published on your website or social channels, keeping people up-to-date with the latest knowledge from the industry and reminding them about your company as well as product offerings, while still giving them space for decision making and control over their time investment in your company or product offerings without feeling pressured to purchase something right away or make any decisions they might not be ready for at that moment.
#7 Social Media Marketing (SMM) Ads & Promotions: Retargeting
Retargeting, or the practice of using ads to follow potential customers around the web, is one of the most proven digital marketing tactics. This is accomplished by targeting particular browsers with ads that they have previously seen on a website.
Promotional Example:
A company that sells sports apparel can target customers who have viewed their website and clicked on "lead" items such as t-shirts and shorts in their online store.
People can search for different things. They may not know what they want, but they know they want it to be less expensive or closer to their home. That is how businesses are sometimes found online.
This is why SEO is so important for lawyers who want to rank higher in search results. However, that is not always as easy as it seems. There are many things that come into play when it comes to law firms and SEO ranking, which makes this a difficult topic to cover in just 4 tips.
The following are just some of the many tips and tricks that law firms can do in order to rank higher on Google's first page:
Competition is a huge factor in any industry, and SEO is no exception. We're going to take a look at the competition in this case and break down their strategy.
So what do we know about the competition? They are currently ranked on page 1 for their target keyword, so they are doing something right. The top 3 pages all have less than 10 backlinks pointing to their site. So do they use guest blogging to generate more links? And do they content to syndicate to drive traffic?
Some firms have to have a very specific niche or area of expertise in order to succeed. For example, a law firm specializing in maritime law or a personal injury lawyer. One way to stand out from the competition is by adding long-tail keywords with high search volume into your website content.
Long-tail keywords have higher search volume and lower competition. In light of this, it's important to know what long-tail keywords to target.
Keeping in mind the long-tail keyword strategy is a good way to start driving traffic to your site, but it can be difficult figuring out what those words are.
The more potential clients you have, the more revenue you will generate. With social media platforms like Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter it is now easier to reach a wide audience that could potentially become your customers.
To make sure that your social media campaign is successful, it is important to have a well-thought-out plan in place. Your strategy should include who you are targeting and what type of content these people would be interested in.
For law firms, one of the best ways to generate buzz on social media sites is by posting updates that show them in a positive light. For example, if they recently helped someone with their immigration case then they should share this news on their social media pages so other people can see what a great job they did.
Website usability is an important aspect that needs to be taken into consideration when developing a website for a business. It is an indication of how easy it will be for your visitor to navigate through your site and convert.
There are a few strategies you can implement in order to improve the usability of your website. You should optimize the page load time by using different web optimization techniques, such as reducing the number of scripts and images on the page, decreasing server response time, or even reducing the number of HTTP requests. Another strategy may involve making your site easy to scan by breaking up content into clear sections with headings and short paragraphs, using white space effectively, and creating clear navigation options on each page.
Website usability has been proven to increase conversion rates because it removes the confusion from browsing a site and helps people find what they are looking for.
In today's time, exposure is the key to success. With the SEO tips outlined above, you might have more exposure than your competitors!
The four SEO tips we’ve described—Competitive Analysis, Long-Tail Keyword Research, Social Media Buzz, and Website Usability—will create a strong foundation for your law firm’s online visibility. It’s important to measure your success and learn from your mistakes. By doing so, you can tweak what needs to be changed to continue expanding your reach. Don’t tweak too quickly, because some strategies need a little time before they take effect. When needed, reach out for professional SEO help. A trusted agency will be able to map out the best solution based on your needs and goals.
Lead management software is an effective tool for companies to make sure they are not wasting time and resources on prospects that don't convert.
Lead management software is an important part of every marketing strategy. It helps marketers stay on top of their leads, nurture them into paying customers and identify the most promising leads in their database. Lead management software is a crucial tool for companies in affiliate marketing, sales teams, and even B2B/B2C marketers who want to generate more qualified leads.
Lead management software can help you keep your team organized by giving you a central hub for all your data. This way you can know which leads need follow-ups and which ones you've already contacted about your product or service. You also get insights about which lead sources provide the most conversions.
Businesses and agencies are inundated with calls each day. They review thousands of leads on a daily basis in order to generate more sales.
The introduction should not be too long, and it should provide a brief explanation of what the section is going to be about. It is important that the introduction engages the reader so they are excited to read more.
Lead management is a vital part of marketing because it provides the organization with an opportunity to convert the leads into customers.
Lead management solutions are used for different purposes such as lead scoring, lead management, lead nurturing, and lead generation.
Many marketers have found that these solutions help them to define their target demographic and identify potential customers in their industry. It also helps them to generate leads and capture them through campaign automation tools.
Lead management software for marketing agencies and startups is the future of business growth. Every company nowadays needs to chase leads to get any type of conversion. This software helps them understand where they are wasting their time and resources and what type of lead is best for them.
The quality of lead management software will grow over time, as more conversations are happening on the internet it will continue to be a competitive space that requires innovation and creativity to stand out from the rest.
Landing pages have the potential to convert visitors into customers. The information on the landing page should be geared towards the visitor's interests and needs. A good landing page will also convince visitors to take the desired action such as signing up or making a purchase.
Some of the key elements of a successful landing page are:
- The headline and message should be compelling enough to capture the attention
- The content provided must answer all questions that are asked
- Images, videos, and other media should be used on the landing page
In this section, we will go over email-based marketing for companies that want to increase the number of conversions.
Companies often use email for their marketing campaign. They find out what their customers like and email them information that is related to what they already know. The first step is to build an interest profile for your customer and then use it as a baseline for future communications.
Email campaigns are effortless and can be used in tandem with other marketing tactics to increase engagement and conversion rates.
The lead management software will act as a single point of contact for all your marketing activities and will make the workflow easier.
The most important benefit of this software is time-saving. You can save a lot of time by automating simple tasks like lead qualification and lead assignment. In addition, they reduce errors and make reporting a breeze with their automated features.
Companies that are looking for a way to keep conversion rates high and costs low should consider implementing an automated confirmation email. This email will confirm the customers' purchase order and include details about their purchase like the cost, product, delivery date, etc.
This email creates a sense of urgency by reducing the time between an initial inquiry and purchase. Customers will also feel more reassured by having all their questions answered before making any purchases because they know what they are getting into.
lead management software that lets you view data across channels is an essential part of a lead to money process.
Lead management is the crucial link between marketing and sales. A user-friendly interface for lead management software would allow you to find and organize leads based on their contact method, record their interests, and monitor the entire customer journey as it progresses through the various stages of conversion.
A user-friendly lead management software will help you generate more leads with less effort because it will help you better understand your target audience and present them with content tailored to their needs.
Marketing agencies have to make sure that they have the right software to cater to the needs of their clients.
Marketing software is a tool that can help in boosting the productivity levels of marketing agencies, which is not possible without it. The software helps them create content, analyze data and get insights into their customers and business much more effectively.
Marketing agencies need to be able to find a model that suits all their needs and provides all types of features. This can be done by evaluating what tools are required for what type of work.
Inbound marketing is an internet marketing strategy that draws potential customers to a business’s website by providing information about its products and services. Inbound marketing relies on creating content designed to pull prospects in and then convert them into customers.
Inbound marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on attracting customers to the business. The goal of inbound marketing is to create content that attracts customers and then convert them into leads.
Inbound marketing is a term originally coined by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2005 who used the phrase "inbound marketing" to describe how their software company HubSpot uses the internet, social media, content creation, SEO optimization for organic search engine discovery, blogging, e-mail marketing, podcasts, and video as lead generation tools.
Inbound Marketing has been interpreted by some as an alternative for outbound sales methods such as cold calling or telemarketing which are often banned under an organization's Do Not Call List policy. With inbound marketing, there is no need for interrupting potential customers with annoying reach-out campaigns and advertisements.
In its most basic form, inbound marketing is a strategy where businesses create content as a way to provide information about their product or service. However, there are many ways for a business to implement this strategy and all the different tactics can be classified as one of three categories.
This article discusses how the different types of inbound strategies work and what they can do for your business.
Inbound marketing is an excellent way of generating leads and traffic to a company. It creates personal connections with customers by delivering relevant and interesting content to them.
Inbound marketing is all about attracting potential customers and buyers through content. The goal of inbound marketing is to generate sales leads through any channels that are not paid, such as social media posts, blogs, videos on YouTube, etc.
It's estimated that in the US alone, companies spend over $450 billion dollars on advertising every year. This is money that could be invested into more efficient means of marketing like inbound.
Inbound marketing is a technique that attracts customers to your company by creating valuable content that is distributed online. It uses the same tools as traditional marketing like SEO, PPC, and social media. It's all about using the internet to create an audience for your company and then encouraging them to buy from you instead of someone else.
Inbound marketing provides businesses with a way to interact with their customers in an informal way that builds trust between them. It also gives more control of the relationship with their customers because they are in charge of what information they share and when it’s shared.
People are more persuaded by content online than they are by advertisements. Inbound marketing focuses on generating content that attracts the right audience for a company's products or services. This allows marketers to not only generate leads but also create people who will advocate for them online.
This type of marketing strategy focuses on attracting potential customers through content rather than the traditional way of relying on expensive advertisements.
There are many types of inbound marketing. They include webinars, blog posts, infographics, and podcasts. But there is one type that stands out from the rest-content marketing.
Content marketing is a newer form of inbound marketing that has become incredibly popular. Content marketing is a type of online promotional strategy that uses various forms of content to attract and keep customers. The goal is to create content that entices customers, teaches them about the product, creates an emotional connection with them, and helps the company build trust with the consumer.
Inbound marketing is a strategy that has become increasingly popular in recent years. It is designed to attract customers with the help of content and social media marketing. The field is constantly changing, so it can be difficult to stay on top of new trends and techniques, but in order to be successful with your inbound marketing strategy it is important to:
Most importantly, you should bring passion and creativity into your inbound marketing plan.
Website design UI& UX includes how a website looks and what it feels like when people use it.
The UI (User Interface) is what you see on the screen when you go on a website, while UX (User Experience) is a person’s reaction to the site and its features.
It's not just about the colors or images on the screen, but also about how fast pages load, how easy it is to find information, and overall satisfaction with your interaction with the site.
The design of your website has a big impact on the reputation of your company and how people perceive your brand. It also affects the user's experience because it determines how they interact with the content on your website.
Poor design can lead to poor user experience, which is why it's important to hire a professional firm that knows what they're doing when it comes to website design. A good design for a website communicates a lot about the company, and this is why more and more companies are investing in web designers who complete projects from start to finish.
Websites can be designed in such a way as to boost SEO and rank higher in search engines.
There are many ways to design a website that will boost its performance on search engine ranking pages. One of the easiest ways is to utilize keywords in the content and metadata, which makes it simpler for search engines to find them. Another way is by designing with the user experience (UX) in mind. This means that you must think about how your users will interact with your site and ensure that you have created a site where visitors can easily find what they are looking for without having to spend too much time searching.
Designing a site so that it does not take too long for visitors to find what they want also boosts its performance because this means that users will not get bored and instead continue looking through.
The importance of responsive design cannot be understated. It is the way to keep up with the changing world of technology and make sure that your website is on all devices, whether or not they are mobile or other types of devices. Responsive design should not be an option but a requirement for every website.
Your site should be flexible and responsive to any device, screen size, browser, and orientation. This means that your site responds in a different way depending on what device is being used to access it.
Text formatting is an essential part of any content writer's toolkit, but it's especially important when composing blog posts or articles online because readers tend not only to skim but also scroll.
The way that a webpage is formatted has a huge impact on the amount of organic or free traffic it receives. The more visitors, the more likely it is to rank higher in Google’s SERPs.
Website text formatting includes:
The optimal word count for a web page is 300 words. This is because if the user doesn't feel like they have received value from the content after reading 300 words, they will not continue to read it.
In contrast, pages with less than 100 words are considered to be too short and pages with more than 700 words are too long on average. So if you plan on writing optimized web content, try to keep it under 300 words.
A study by Curata found that blog posts that are shorter in length get more social shares than longer ones. So how long should a post be? The answer is, it depends.
Images are the key to attracting online viewers. They attract their attention and can be used on social media for marketing purposes. Images can also be used as illustrations for blog posts or articles, they make the content more interesting and aesthetically pleasing.
Alt tags and file names are important because they provide additional information about the image to search engines, which helps them rank your content higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is also helpful for anyone who has vision disabilities and needs to use screen-reading software in order to read text that's found on images.
Sites with high domain authority can help attract links to your site. These sites are considered to be credible and share a common goal with you.
There are many ways that you can get a link from another site. One is by bookmarking your page on their site. This way, they are able to find it when they want to link to it. Another way is by submitting guest posts. When you submit them, you are telling the other site that you want them to share your content on their website, and in return, they will share their content on yours.
Websites need to have a high load time in order to avoid hurting the user experience or Google ranking.
The number of visitors and how quickly they are leaving your website is a good indicator of how well it is performing. If you want to optimize your website for SEO, then you should check how long it takes to load your website and make sure it doesn't take more than three seconds.
There are many factors that affect the loading speed of a webpage and one of those is the type of content being loaded. Images, videos, scripts, and other multimedia items can slow down your page so make sure you only use as much as is needed.
The site structure is one of the most important factors in SEO. It helps provide a framework for the user to follow and makes it easier for search engines to index your content.
While there are many different approaches to website architecture, there are a few standards that should be followed, such as:
Blogs and newsletters are the best way to communicate with audiences. They provide a way for companies to establish their expertise and voice, and at the same time, they are excellent platforms for building backlinks that will boost search ranking.
Blogs and newsletters have been proven to be one of the most effective ways for companies to communicate with customers. The blog posts can be used as a platform for answering customer questions while newsletters can be used as an opportunity for customer engagement.
In a Nutshell
Building your website taking into consideration your SEO strategy and ranking organically is the best way to enhance your online firm.
If you like LeadCenter.AI to be your effective lead generation partner, then reach us via message or call us at (281) 377-7925 and we are ready to hold your hands on your business journey!
Are you facing any challenges while generating leads for your business? Feel free to share it with us. We can help you clear it out.
Lead generation, in its simplest form, is capturing someone's contact information and then following up with them. This is one of the most effective ways to generate leads for your business.
What are the possible lead generation strategies? Do you want to know how to build your email list or capture more leads for your company? You will find all the answers you need in this article.
Lead generation strategies are a great way to generate qualified leads. Lead generation strategies can be very simple and inexpensive. You may find that your investment in these techniques will pay for itself quickly.
We can generate leads by targeting the segmented audience through social media, blogs, and marketing campaigns. These lead generation techniques are most successful when they target our audience with an offer that is specific to their needs.
The key to generating qualified leads with these lead generation techniques is to know your audience and what they want. Once you know this, it will be easier for you to generate targeted content that will appeal to your potential customers.
Lead generation techniques have been evolving over the years as the needs of businesses change in response to new technology and innovation. Today, businesses need a variety of lead generation methods in order to effectively generate qualified leads. Such methods include social media marketing, blogging, and traditional marketing campaigns such as telemarketing or direct mailing newsletters/postcards/letters, etc.,
A marketing offer is the set of incentives, such as a product or service, that an organization chooses to include in order to encourage potential customers to purchase their products or services.
The most important part of any marketing campaign is the offer. It’s what drives the sales process and it’s what causes people to say yes.
The best way to start a relationship with a prospect is by going out and meeting them. Prospects will be more willing to meet with you if they know who you are. You can use LinkedIn or other social media platforms to find prospects in your field or industry.
Human relationships are still important in business, but many companies feel it is not worth the time and expense to travel to meet with prospective clients. Meeting people in person allows for more personal interactions, which can help build trust between parties.
Email marketing is one of the most effective digital channels to reach your potential buyers and prospects.
It offers a wider reach, lower cost per person, and higher engagement rates than social media marketing. It's also a personalized form of digital marketing that can be used to deliver messages in real-time. This makes it perfect for engaging with your customers on an individual level.
Some email marketers use automation to generate emails and deals based on the actions of recipients, such as looking at a product page or buying something from the site recently. These are all great ways to make sure you're constantly reaching out to your clients so they don't forget about you!
When it comes to the future of copywriting, optimizing your website for lead generation and conversion rates is one of the most important things that you need to do.
In this section, I will be discussing various ways that you can optimize your website in order to increase lead generation and conversion rates.
The first thing that you need to do is make sure that your page is formatted in such a way that the user can get a quick overview of the content. This will make it easier for them to navigate through your webpage and find what they are looking for. The second thing you should do is provide them with a clear call-to-action button or link so they know where they have to go if they want more information about your product or service.
Many content marketers are now using social media channels and PR outreach to promote their content. Social media is an effective way to communicate with the audience and build relationships with them. It is a cost-effective and powerful marketing tool that should not be ignored by brands. PR outreach helps in connecting with influencers who can help spread the word about the content on social media channels.
Promoting content through social media and PR outreach has its own benefits. However, marketers need to ensure that they stay focused on their goals and objectives while doing so.
In a Nutshell
Practicing effective lead generation strategies is the best way to enhance your online financial advisory firm.
If you like LeadCenter.AI to be your effective lead generation partner, then reach us via message or call us at (281) 377-7925 and we are ready to hold your hands on your business journey!
Are you facing any challenges while generating leads for your financial advisory business? Feel free to share it with us. We can help you clear it out.
Pain points are the points in your prospect's life where they are unhappy with their current situation. Your prospects may be unhappy when they are faced with an obstacle, feeling inadequate or unwell, or not living up to their potential. Every person has a different set of pain points and what may be a pain point for one person may not be a pain point for someone else.
Pain points can occur for many reasons, but usually cause dissatisfaction in some aspect of the individual’s life. The main goal is to find what the pain point is and then address it in your marketing materials.
Tech companies offer bigger opportunities for growth in the future and are worth investing in.
In a world that's constantly changing, the tech industry has been one of the few constants. Most companies invest heavily in new technology to stay ahead of the curve, and it's led to a steady rise in demand for tech professionals.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that there will be more than 800,000 job openings in computer occupations by 2022. And this projection doesn't even include all the other tech-related jobs - such as web developers, data analysts, and information security analysts - which are also expected to see significant growth over the next decade.
This step is to connect with what resonates with your prospect's needs and pain points.
If you're using a traditional marketing approach that involves cold calls, emails, or door-to-door sales, you're wasting your time. All of these methods are outdated and inefficient compared to the power of social media marketing. The key to success with social media is knowing what your audience wants and then giving it to them.
Social media is an indispensable tool for any business, no matter the size. Knowing who your customer is and what they want from you is a must. Once you do this, the key to success then becomes giving it to them.
Second, You want to make the process of writing copy easier for yourself. You need to be able to write quickly and efficiently while still maintaining the quality level that your clients are looking for.
This step is to entice prospects to take the next step in the buying process and contact you for more information.
It is important to ensure that your website has a clear call-to-action button and is properly optimized for conversion.
This is because the first step of the purchasing process is often influenced by what a prospect sees on his or her screen. It’s important to optimize your website for conversion in order to get prospects to take the next step in the buying process and contact you.
Marketing reach-out tactics are used for the purpose of generating interest, awareness, and/or sales. They are not always about products but are often directed at consumers who might be interested in a company's products or services. Marketers employ various tactics to generate awareness and sales such as public relations, advertising, publicity stunts, and word of mouth.
Public relations is defined as the process of communicating with members of the media about a company's mission statement including opinion leaders, trade publications, or other news outlets. It may also include other means of communication such as attending industry conferences, writing articles for trade journals, or contacting influential people through networking events to promote a specific message. Publicity stunts can be effective if they have been planned well in advance and executed effectively during an appropriate event that will attract public attention
You can combine multiple marketing channels like email, social media, and webinars to generate high-quality leads every month. Remember, lead generation doesn't end once you have someone on the phone. You need to keep the conversation going by following up regularly until they're ready to purchase.
Without generating leads, it is impossible to have a successful marketing campaign. And in order to generate leads, businesses need to use different tactics like email, social media, and webinars in an integrated way.
For a business to be able to generate the best leads that help them get more customers, they need to use all three of these channels. Otherwise, they will end up with a few mediocre leads and no new customers.
In a Nutshell
Practicing effective lead generation strategies is the best way to enhance your online firm.
If you like LeadCenter.AI to be your effective lead generation partner, then reach us via message or call us at (281) 377-7925 and we are ready to hold your hands on your business journey!
Are you facing any challenges while generating leads for your business? Feel free to share it with us. We can help you clear it out.
Landing pages are essential to any marketing campaign. But that doesn't mean they should be hard to create! With a landing page builder, you can create and publish beautiful landing pages for your business in minutes. Check out this article to learn more about the 5 reasons why your website needs a landing page builder.
Your website is a virtual storefront. When visitors land on your landing page, your first thought is how much of a good product or service they can get from you. Your landing page should give visitors a reason to take a step further and add your business to their emailing list. When they do, they're more likely to convert into customers. But if you grab them before they're ready, you could lose them forever.
To ensure your landing pages lead them to conversion, ensure your website content, fonts, buttons, and other elements arouse desire in your visitors. This is where the landing page builder comes to the rescue. By automating these elements, you can get a shopping cart to jump in and out quickly. It also helps with coding and accessibility. With lots of trial and error, you can find what works for your landing page builder.
Before landing pages were introduced, old-style door-to-door sales were the best way for businesses to build solid customer relationships. Based on the concept of section advertising, a salesperson would go door-to-door to prospect. The most common types of salesmen were salesmen from legitimate businesses with small shops, as well as local agencies who preyed upon the businesses' insecurities. On their doorsteps, the salesmen would try to create an instant love story between a business and its customer.
Using door-to-door sales has its pros and cons. From an ethical standpoint, there's the potential for companies to make massively inappropriate decisions in terms of sales tactics. There are also doubts whether coming face-to-face with people who were ready to sell was a successful way to sell a product or service. When the door is closed, it's often emotionally painful for salespeople and their customers to part ways.
In spite of these issues, nearly 80% of Americans aged 18 to 79 prefer salespeople in their businesses (Experian, 2020). Therefore, telling local customers about a fabulous local service or product rarely requires the exoticism of an in-person encounter. For most entrepreneurs, businesses don't need to completely remove the human touch from their sales tactics. So, simply adjusting how they present their services online is enough to adapt to changing consumer preferences.
Many marketers today are using more engaging methods to promote their products and services. Landing pages that attract the right visitors can give clients an instant feeling of connection and loyalty. People will act quickly to hire local freelancers when they know the businesses are genuine and not a riff-off of another business selling the same products. By creating a fantastic landing page and speaking directly to the customers, even if they have a hard time understanding what you do or even if they like your business at all, will reap massive rewards.
Have you ever checked your website and been frustrated by the fact that it doesn't seem to be converting very many visitors into customers? You could be doing a lot of things wrong, but there could also be several important things going on that are preventing your conversions from happening. Today we're going to dive into five of the most important reasons why landing pages should be built and why there is a great landing page builder available now.
Let's take a closer look at each:
Your Website Isn't Designed to Convert: Building a successful landing page is more than just writing a few words on a page and leaving it to Google to figure out whether or not someone is interested in what you have to say. A successful landing page stands out from other websites because it has an element of custom-made design to convert visitors into customers. It's clear that visitors are searching for specific information about you or your services/products on the web and it makes sense that landing pages would be a top-ranking option for this type of search. The truth is landing pages are difficult to design. It's more than just putting up a page with an ad and hope for the best. It takes a lot of work, experimentation, testing, and listening to your visitors. A landing page is one of the primary channels your website uses to connect with potential customers. It can change perceptions of your company in minutes.
1:1 Attention Ratio: The basic idea of a landing page is to get visitors to a web page quickly and efficiently. There are several elements that make up a successful landing page including call-to-action (CTA), eye-catching graphics, functional links, and details about pricing or services. Having a good attention ratio is essential in order for your landing pages to be successful and particularly important for online businesses with limited budgets. Attention ratio is the ratio of potential leads to sales that matters most when it comes to driving high traffic to a business' websites. A great attention-to-detail approach coupled with a compelling script can get prospects flowing through your door rapidly. While there are many different landing page builder tools available, we recommend you consider LeadCenter.AI. A successful landing page will have a 1:1 attention ratio between the number of things vying for attention and the number of things you really need to communicate in order to convert. The more distractions you have on a webpage, the less likely it will be that visitors will convert on that page. If you try to do too many things on a page, you risk overwhelming your visitor and driving them away. When you're designing a landing page, you should identify the areas that distract visitors from your core offer and eliminate them.
Relevant Message: The first step to achieving better conversion rates is to recognize that people don't buy products or services, they buy solutions. So you need to express your company as a solution instead of a conventional product/service. It is a measured concept in marketing research. It's a way to measure how well your message fits your audience. That's why it's also called "message congruence" or "message match." In advertising, the message of a landing page is compared and contrasted with the message of the corresponding advertisement. This is sometimes followed by another approach called A/B testing or split testing. Your landing page builder should make it easy to create a single, strongly cohesive message for all of your company's marketing. If you're trying to make a sale, you need to make sure that your landing page is talking directly to your visitors. A good pitch should be specific to the recipient and should highlight why they specifically should care.
Rank Higher: A landing page builder can also help the search engine optimization of your website. Increasing search engine rankings is a major driving force behind using landing pages. Using a landing page builder will improve your search engine rankings, as these pages are typically much more optimized than standard website pages. We all know how difficult it can be to get a high ranking for search terms. Creating an optimized landing page will make it easier to rank for the right keywords. A well-built landing page increases the likelihood that we'll see it in the search results. Page builders like LeadCenter.AI focus on the user experience, which leads to higher SEO rankings.
Convert Traffic to Leads: You can drive targeted traffic to your business website using a landing page builder. It makes your site more visible to the search engines, and it also allows you to place ads on those pages for maximum effect. One of the most effective ways to drive leads and sales is to have a landing page that your audience will be interested in. You can invite your target audience to a landing page, and then guide them toward the goals you want to achieve. You can make a specific call-to-action to a landing page. You can have dedicated landing pages for each and every concern related to your business. Use forms to capture visitor information, build leads, and direct traffic. By collecting visitors' contact information via forms, you can better manage your marketing campaigns and deliver highly targeted content. You can create forms to target specific visitor behaviors by using our form-builder templates to prompt visitors with important questions before they leave your site. Customers who fill out your landing page builder forms are more likely to become leads. Increasing your marketing leads through forms is a powerful technique that can help you grow your business.
Many businesses don't focus on content marketing. They let the algorithms market the good content instead. In reality, your reputation will suffer as your competitors get more and more traffic from Google. If you want your company to stand out online, you need to tell people about your goal, products, and services. People want to know what they're buying from a reputable company.
But setting up a decent landing page can be time-consuming and pretty hard to get right. Your best bet is to use the perfect landing page builder. It's like a tool with suggestions on how to create professional landing pages.
With our landing page experts' help, you can make landing pages designed for good SEO that stay online. Our suggestions include:
Each of these ideas can be used to create professional and unique landing pages. You don't need to hire an SEO expert or use expensive tools to get started!
With a landing page builder, you don't have to worry about designing good content. LeadCenter.AI helps you create b2c/b2b-friendly landing pages that sit in your website's section. This gives your page more authority and makes it stickier with your website visitors.
For example, you can create landing pages for your subscription services or in-depth guides to your services.
First, you select your services or products. Then, you design and write the content on your landing pages. Finally, you retake and publish your pages to your specific region.
Website visitors are open to new information, so your landing pages give the best opportunity to provide that information. You can use your insights to enhance your product or services through content marketing.
If your site already has content that is leading potential customers to a landing page, you can also make that landing page as part of the website's landing page.
LeadCenter.AI has templates you can use to create your desired landing pages. You can easily publish and manage them from inside the app. Setting up a sales funnel is a complex task. To simplify things, you could use a content-first approach. This approach focuses on educating and leading your audience towards conversion instead of relying on a sales funnel.
1. Before you start working on your design, you first need to narrow down your idea. Who are your biggest prospects? To whom do you want to deliver such a great offer? What form of visitors do you want? What are your deliverability metrics like CPL (Customer lifetime value)? Then, take the top three benefits and their functionality and determine your buyer persona. It is important to know who you're trying to sell to, so you're not trying to sell yourself out to them!
2. Your website architecture matters when it comes to your landing page architecture. What are your content types? Do you have any sections that lead to more than one page? Do you have pagination? Have you added archiving services already? It can make or break your landing page layout. Pages that have a coherent structure are easiest to navigate.
3. Visual branding can help with your skin, so it is important you understand where your audience engages and whether or not features like a header image and a navigation bar are in place.
4. Your website content should have a strong call to action. People want to know it's possible to build their dream brand and business online and what formats can facilitate that.
5. You can leverage navigation with popular headlines and subheadings and structured content like this. It helps to separate user flows.
At LeadCenter.AI, we help new entrepreneurs and local service business owners optimize their digital marketing strategy to generate leads and revenue from their website. Below is our brief answer to a new business in South Carolina.
Hello Davide, first, congrats on your newly established business. It is awesome and you can get places with it and we hope you can grow it to a big brand. It is a .com domain, which is so amazing. There are two parts to your question:
So let's start with the website, You made a good start but so many improvements are needed to generate leads from it:
For organic reach, please make sure it is clear to your customers and more importantly to google your location. for example, check this website we built for a customer: Bargain Moving Company. The words Nashville and Tennessee are mentioned in the right places like the URL of a few pages, title, H1, body, footer, etc. WARNING: don't overdo it, keep the ratio of any keyword at less than 3%-4% of the overall content so you are not penalized by Google for keywords stuffing. This is extremely important to start your ranking journey. Note: don't expect results immediately. it takes 3-6 months to start ranking and there are many onsite changes to be done along with the blog and then offline backlinks. But start somewhere and build gradually.
Even the best website in the world will be like a store in the middle of the desert with no proper marketing strategy. But here are few pieces of advice based on my personal experience:
Once the leads start flowing in, make sure you have a good lead management tool to capture leads and manage interactions with them. That will help increase the conversion rate from leads to business.
Since I came back to Houston in July, I've been very eager to find time to support and contribute back to our great community. I was discussing the same with our Marketing Director and she came up with a great idea: "You will not find free time, how about we help Houstonians with something we are passionate about:- building software. We have a free version of our product, but we charge for onboarding services. why don't we offer onboarding and setup services for free to a number of Houston businesses each month."
Our platform helps small and medium service businesses with an Integrated Software to build a website, manage leads, appointments, eCommerce, and much more. Business owners still need help to set up their website, the pages, upload content and graphics, and get trained to use the software. This comes with service charges from freelancers or a Houston digital marketing agency.
This is a difficult time where COVID19 has impacted so many people; that combined with the fact that a lot are trying to setup their own businesses to make a living, we will be offering our services for free at least one day per week for the next three months. Two team members and I have volunteered to participate. With this time, we can help between 30 and 50 Houston based small service businesses or new business owners to setup online with a modern and responsive website integrated with calendaring and lead management system. We will also train you on using the software to manage your online presence to generate business online.
As part of the program, we will also run free technical workshops on what we learned about effective digital marketing campaigns:- like do's and don'ts with Google Ads, how to build a landing page, how to run an SEO campaign on a budget, etc.
LeadCenter.AI is a cloud-based CRM software for small service businesses to build a website fully integrated with lead management, cloud telephony, calendaring, appointments, eCommerce, chatting, and notification systems. While the various components of our platform are available already in the market, it is expensive and beyond the reach of small service businesses. It can cost up to $10,000 or more to get all those components and related services to integrate them together. With LeadCenter.AI our vision is to make the same software, with the functionality that matters the most for small businesses, available either for free or at price point that doesn't exceed $99 per month inclusive of services.
The free plan includes a Free CRM integrated with a free Website Builder, free hosting, integrated Calendaring and Appointments System, an easy to use integrated Lead Management System, and receiving leads by email and contact forms. The Free plan is suitable for new business owners that wants to advertise about their service business online and get leads and appointments organized from those sources.
We will provide the onboarding and setup services for free for a number of businesses for three months. It will be first come, first served because we will have the capacity to support 30 to 50 businesses each month. We will also run online training to teach you have to use the software to run your business online.
No, you can continue on the Free Plan. It is FREE FOR LIFE. Please check our terms of services for all the terms and conditions that apply to this program.
Yes, you can send any support request to support@leadcenter.ai.
Register for free at app.leadcenter.ai. The first 10 registration each Monday will get into the program and they will have their website ready latest by the following Sunday. You can also send us an email to houston@leadcenter.ai and will enroll you into the program.
Over the last several years, we have worked with hundreds of companies to increase leads and orders coming from their websites. You may be spending a fortune on Google Adwords and other marketing sources to bring potential customers to your websites. However, if your website is not optimized for conversion, fewer users will contact you. Here are the 5 most common mistakes local service companies do that result in a lower conversion. Fix those issues and start monitoring the improved conversion rate:
95% of users coming through Google Adwords will look first for prices. 80% will leave without contacting you if they don’t know your price.
Recommendation: make sure to include prices whenever possible to give the customer the comfort to call you or request a quote. Then you can send accurate quotations based on customer requirements.
Most of the service companies’ websites are not eCommerce enabled. If customers can’t buy your services online and pay online, then they will buy from your competitor. It is the year 2020 and it is time to enable payments online on your website. The cost of integrating a payment gateway with your website is more affordable now and costs less than $50 per month.
If your Request a quote from the 90s era with email, mobile, name, and a text field for a customer to fill, You will have fewer customers converting to leads. Check Yelp or Angieslist quotation forms; sequential and have very little data entry by the users. Check the quotation forms on one of those websites:
Recommendation: Create dynamic quotation forms on your website for each service following the best practices of Yelp and Angieslist.
Some customers still like to call to inquire about your services and prices. Make sure to have your phone number clearly in the header and footer of the website.
If you will be running Google Adwords, you know how expensive those clicks are. However, most companies don’t create specific landing pages for each service. Make sure to create a separate landing page for each service. Then use this page to run your Google campaign. (example of a landing page: Local Moving Services in Nashville, TN. Make sure the city you are serving is mentioned in the page URL, title, and h1. That will increase your google Adword ranking and reduce cost per click. Do miss reading the article How to Convert a Website Visit to lead in Less than 10 Seconds using optimized landing pages.
80% of website visitors look for references and reviews. If you have served customers and they have great things to say about your service, make sure it is up there on your website. and make sure to add it to the website's top menu (for example: Reviews for Bargain Moving Company in Nashville, TN).
The moving business is getting super competitive lately. Google Adwords is expensive and it is hard to get leads and convert to business.
We will show you how a moving company in Nashville generated more than 100 leads in less than 30 days and cashed $25,000 in moving business without running any Google AdWords.
While most moving companies already have a website, they, however, look old and from the cave era.
This website will hardly convert!
If your website looks like this, then it's about time to upgrade it, it is time to get a modern and easy to use a website
Your website should have the ability to convert a visitor to a lead in 10-seconds or less and in less than 20 words.
Conversion Optimized Website
Here is another example of a conversion optimized website
While most moving companies have quotation forms, they are also not optimized for conversion and ask the buyer to enter a lot of information. The quotation forms system we developed is focused on converting the visit to a lead as soon as possilbe. The moving quotation form must:
What's awesome about these forms is that when they are completed, the information are instantly logged into a lead management system and you get notified through email and the mobile app.
Being in the moving business, you are always on the go, either busy with moving or managing your crew. By the end of the day, you will have many answered and missed calls and you will not know who is who.
The best solution is a lead management dashboard with a virtual phone number to capture, record, and manage all calls coming to you in one place. In that way, you will never miss any opportunity and you can collaborate with your colleagues and engage customers to increase conversion.
What's great about this feature is that you can always download all numbers to send them offers or retarget customers to increase conversion.
15 days free trial - starting at $19 per month
Book a Free Demo
While a modern website will give a professional look to your business, without marketing it, it is like a store in the middle of the desert.
Make sure to share your website link everywhere. Customers that are serious about a moving service, will most visit your website first.
As you may have noticed in recent years, Google Map is first thing that appears on a local search for moving and this is making Yelp and other commercial directory websites irrelevant. To show up on top of google map search, it is not enough to have a listing. The following are the 6 key essential steps to rank higher in Google Map:
Also check this related article: How to Convert a Website Visit to a Lead in Less Than 10 Seconds
If you are frustrated that your social media plan is not going as you anticipated, you are not alone. All marketers managing Facebook and Instagram pages have noticed a sharp decline in reach in 2020.
Free social posts on Facebook will not reach more than 2% of your followers, around 5% on Instagram. With the amount of money to be spent on digital marketing services to do those posts, we are encouraging customers to stop acquiring this service and re-direct those funds to other channels (ex: paid advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, Google AdWords, Local platforms, etc).
In August 2018, LeadCenter.ai discontinued offering free social media posts services with the following internal memo that we are sharing publicly now
"We will discontinue social media services post in all future contracts. We will honor our commitment to existing contracts until the renewal dates, then we will advise the customer on the new policy. This company is about innovation, making technology accessible, and driving genuine leads to our customers. With the adjustment that Facebook made in 2018 to the newsfeed algorithm on Instagram and Facebook, organic and free reach on social media is near impossible now. We will focus our effort on paid advertisements on social media. That is the only way we can guarantee reach in 2018 and beyond as well as converting this reach to genuine leads for our customers.
We have a duty to educate our customers and the market about what works and what doesn’t. Some customers may disagree and it is less profitable for us, but we would have done our job and done it right!"
While we knew this since early 2017, customers still demanded free social media posts, thinking that it will generate leads and business for them. We included it as a service in our digital marketing offering, but we effectively drove leads and business to them through our platform, Google organic search, Google Adwords, and paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
The decline in free and organic Facebook & Instagram reach began in 2014. At the time, Brian Boland, Facebook’s VP of Advertising Technology, said Facebook is simply managing more ad content than it used it, and News Feed space is thus more competitive among marketers. There’s simply too much content being published on Facebook and Instagram, making visibility in the News Feed increasingly competitive.
Knowing that, for LeadCenter.ai's own digital marketing, we nearly abandoned free social media posts in early 2017. If you see our Facebook or Instagram business pages, we rarely share any posts. Without free social media posts, we were still able to reach 120,000 registered users and contacts, and more than 2000 paying customers. That is in less than 2 years!
In 2018, we have noticed a greater dip in the organic reach of Facebook & Instagram content because of a major change to their newsfeed algorithm.
In January 2018, according to Facebook's Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri,Facebook began to "shift ranking to make News Feed more about connecting with people and less about consuming media in isolation." As a result, marketing content is showing less and less in comparison to content by friends and family -- a value that Facebook says it originally had, and that it's trying to return to.
The best digital channels to focus on is the ones you entirely own and control, that is your website and your blog. Spend the time and effort in creating content in your product pages in your website and blog articles in your news pages. It is likely a matter of time before organic reach in Facebook reaches zero.
If you are serious about reaching new customers online, you can’t avoid paid advertisements on digital channels. Facebook and Instagram are not a charity for businesses to promote for free. But even while doing paid advertisement on social media, do it smartly. Use the features of Facebook Ad Manager to do things like:
A practical example by a startup using YC SUS
We are not a new startup as we launched 4 years ago in the Middle East as a services marketplace. Back in July 2020, I relocated to the United States to launch the business here. However, In the US, we pivoted to a different business model which is an SAAS-based subscription (You can check the footnotes to learn what LeadCenter.ai is about and what we are trying to do. But it doesn’t matter. The methodology applies to any startup).
As we are new to the US market, we were trying to get help from multiple places. I enrolled in YC Startup school around the end of June but was too busy to do anything with it as I was occupied with the relocation and settling down. I visited the website again around August 25th, 2020; I gave the material a quality 2-3 hours review and I was stunned and marveled. This is exactly the help we are looking for and we are getting it for free! We had our fair share of mistakes in the first 4 years, and that made the curriculum and content very relevant. So, we can relate easily to the lessons and our experience. While watching the videos or attending office hours sessions, we realized the value of the information.
However, doing the weekly updates can be a bit tricky at the beginning. Also, making an execution plan can be trickier. So, I am sharing how are we doing it: the execution plan for the first six months and the things we scrapped out based on what we learned in SUS.
So here we go:
Objective: Reach to $100 Million ARR in 7 years
Our primary metric in SUS weekly update is Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). We selected ARR vs. MRR because in the first 6 months we are focusing on customers that will pay the subscription charge upfront annually. So, when we look at ARR at any point in time, this is the actual cash we collected in our stripe or bank accounts.
Grow ARR at an average of 24% WEEKLY! for the first 6 months
It took just a couple of hours to build a 6-month weekly forecast vs. wasting days or weeks in building a complex full financial forecast (we said we will deal with that later).
You will notice that there are four critical KPI’s missing: Churn rate, LTV, CAC, and Days to Close. I have added a footnote at the end of this article for those. Our North Star is to grow ARR to $76,000 in 6 months by maintaining an average of 24% weekly growth. We did other changes based on what we learned from SUS. For example:
we split the weekly activities load to 60%-40%:
However, we agreed that this week's target is the top priority and we will do
anything to achieve it. If there is time left, we will work on next week.
For an SAAS, this is the most critical component to establish early on to measure the conversion at various points. You will need to settle on a CRM to manage your pipeline (you can start with a simple excel sheet). For us, the CRM is integrated into our platform. So, we used our tool.
Again, we are doing things that don’t scale to manage this pipeline; but with time, we will be applying more automation to optimize the conversion process.
For the last 4 weeks, the entire team got together every Monday morning to do the following
Below is the latest update. We review the pipeline together, then we launch a new weekly sprint and create the tasks for the week to achieve the primary KPI and weekly objectives.
The last four years taught us that 500 things may go wrong: The assumptions we are making now may be wrong at the next scaling point, there may be changes in the market or innovations that may make our platform irrelevant, we may fail to raise funding, etc. However, two things matter the most for survivability:
Perseverance is that you are in it for the long run. Regardless of the pain and failures, you will endure in the first few years. If you are persistent, you will figure it out eventually. Whether it will take 1 month or 1 year.
Fiscally responsible: if you are in business, startup, lifestyle, or a large corporation, it comes down to one simple formula: Z = X - Y. A company is a Profit = Revenue – Cost.
I am not sure if the first can be taught, but you can definitely learn the second. It took us 4 years to figure out how to operate a profitable service marketplace company. Our branch in the Middle East is generating now Multi-Million Dollars in GMV annually. Our revenue reached hundred of thousands of dollars per year, and we are growing at an average of 15% monthly for the last 7 months, so we are on a path to reach the $1 Million Revenue Magic Mark very soon. Frankly, I have no clue how we got there while making every mistake we should've avoided. The only explanation is Perseverance.
Recently, I came across this quote by Noah Kagan. I love it. Not the point about getting rich. Actually, a lot of entrepreneurs don't give a shit about money, rather pursuing their passion and building things. The ones that are doing it for the money can't handle the pain; they quit and get back to jobs with salaries. The point is it takes many many years of hard work with little rewards to build something meaningful.
We are carrying on for the next 7 years. We may fail to reach a $100 Million in Revenue. We may reach it at later date. However, if we are persistent and fiscally responsible, the worst-case scenario could be a lifestyle SAAS business with $8Million to $10Million in revenue, paying the 4 founders as well, and leaving us with marginally good profit.
Good luck to all of you. One last thing: Thank you YC Startup School team. Amazing work! and highly recommended to all new founders.
For more about our journey you can read:
July 2020: The 15 things we did to avoid closing down our startup because of COVID19!
June 2018: The top ten 10 mistakes we did launching an Internet Startup and how we survived so far.
July 2017: My first year anniversary after leaving a secure job at Microsoft to start my own business. What is it like?.
Dec 2016: The 6 things you have to forget when you leave your job to open your own business.
footnotes :
I was working on porting this query today from Storat UAE to US system. It’s 98 lines of code. I wrote it 7 months ago to help automate CAC calculation for our marketplace at the buyers' side. Looking at it now my thought was “Shit, this is complex, I wrote that????”. As I am **officially** a non-technical founder, I decided to write a story about how I became a programmer again. I didn’t write any code since my first job in Microsoft which was more than 20 years ago.
When you are working in B2B2C (like a service marketplace) the algorithm can become complex. It becomes tricky when 60% of buyers opt to call or chat and the order is placed indirectly through the call center. It is not rocket science, but I wanted to come up with an automated way to track CAC, marketing spends, revenue, and profitability. Also, I wanted to determine those factors at top categories and child categories level where we can slice and dice the data easily in excel. Attached also are two frontend systems that are built on those queries so my team in the Middle East can look quickly at those KPIs without wasting time on gathering data again.
Please sign up at https://app.leadcenter.ai/registe... and tell us what do you think!
Over the last several years, we have worked with hundreds of moving companies to increase leads and orders coming from their websites. You may be spending a fortune on Google Adwords and other marketing sources to bring potential customers to your websites. However, if your moving website is not optimized for conversion, fewer users will convert. Here are the 5 most common mistakes moving companies do which result in a lower conversion. Fix those issue and start monitoring the improved conversion rate:
95% of users coming through Google Adwords will look first for prices. 80% will leave without contacting you if they don't know your price.
Recommendation: make sure to include prices whenever possible to give the customer the comfort to call you or request a quote. Then you can send accurate quotations based on customer requirements.
If your Request a Quotefrom the 90's era with only email, mobile, name, and a text field for a customer to fill, You will have less customer converting to leads. Check Yelp or Angieslist quotation forms; sequential and very little data entry by the users. We have just created a new moving website for one of our customers in Nashville with a modern quotation form request. You can check it here Bargain Moving Company - Nashville - TN .
Recommendation: Create dynamic quotation forms on your website for each service following best practices of Yelp and Angieslist.
Some customers still like to call to inquire about your services and prices. Make sure to have your phone number clearly in the header and footer of the website.
If you will be running Google Adwords, you know how expensive those clicks are. However, most of the moving companies don't create specific landing pages for each service. Make sure to create a separate landing page for each service like local moving, long-distance moving, packing, and unpacking, assembly & delivery. Then use this page to run your google campaign. (example of a landing page: Local Moving Services in Nashville, TN). Make sure the city you are serving is mentioned in the page url, title, and h1. That will increase your google Adword ranking and reduce cost per click.
80% of website visitors look for references and reviews. If you have served customers and they have great things to say about your service, make sure it is up there on your website. and make sure to add it to the website top menu (example: Reviews for Bargain Moving Company in Nashville, TN).
Coronavirus, Winston Churchill, and Storat. How did our startup survive while being a services focused startup, so far!
Note: I wrote this article on July 5th ,2020 on a 15 hours empty flight from Abu Dhabi to Chicago as I was relocating to open LeadCenter.AI in United States, which is one of the steps we took so our startup could survive COVID19.
In February 2020, our company started feeling the impact of COVID19 and by March 31st, our daily revenue reached ~ $0 per day. Our startup is an online marketplace in the UAE focused on services with a commission-based business model. The country came under a complete shutdown for services. We stopped receiving bookings for swimming lessons, sports classes, salons, laser hair removal sessions, and home services like cleaning or moving. (figure 1).
In late March 2020, the logical course of action was to shutdown the company and let everybody go. However, we had one advantage, we were nimble and got used to pivots as we were still perfecting the business model.
What happened in the next three months is a story to tell and I am happy to share with other business owners and startup founders as they can benefit from some of the tactics we applied. Not only we survived, but we doubled the company revenue and profit by June 2020 and increased the daily booking from 0 to ~AED 90,000 ($ 25k) per day by early July 2020 (figure 2).
Yes, that is correct; while other companies started reducing marketing spend, we did the exact opposite, we tripled our marketing spend! The rationale was simple:
Coronavirus hit the two main categories that drove the majority of our revenue: cosmetic medical and sports. We switched our focus to home and office services (cleaning, moving, overseas shipping etc.). We also considered launching three new categories: grocery delivery, laundry delivery, and disinfection services. We scrapped grocery delivery because of the logistics complexity. We launched laundry delivery and disinfection services in 48 hours around mid-March 2020. We had relationships with many relevant suppliers. We built the relevant forms on the web and mobile platforms, launched a marketing campaign, and we were in business.
Actually, we were pushed into Business to Business (B2B). Storat was focused on Business to Consumer (B2C) services and it represented 98% of our revenue. Before the coronavirus, we were puzzled on how we would enter B2B while staying nimble and lean. In the middle east, B2B requires a field sales force and more traditional tools to gain market share. The coronavirus changed all of that. We started receiving more and more calls from businesses requesting various services. What happened in the first sixty days was:
we stopped recognizing revenue if it is not yet collected
The difference between accrual and cash basis accounting is the timing of when revenue and expenses are recognized. The cash method is a more immediate recognition of revenue and expenses, while the accrual method focuses on the anticipated revenue and expenses. Why was this important to do under the coronavirus pandemic?
With Coronavirus hitting small and big businesses hard, as predicted, those businesses started facing cash shortages with no quick access to liquidity. The force majeure clause in many contracts meant that collection will be a serious problem very soon. Rightly so, within a few days, some of the service providers started sending us notices asking to delay payments or cancel contracts. So we became more rigid on payment terms even with enterprise businesses.
The prepaid subscription model is one of the reasons we are still in business today
In September 2019, we implemented a prepaid subscription model for home service providers. This may be one of the reasons we are still in business today. What is prepaid model? Before September 2019, our model was postpaid. Meaning, we give orders to service providers through Storat.com. If they deliver the service, we issue a monthly invoice that they have to pay within 15 days of invoicing. It was clear within 6 months that this is not a scalable model as a lot of service providers elected not to pay their invoices! Switching to prepaid model in September gave us a level of control over the marketplace transactions. Hence, we were receiving our commission from service providers before they can accept orders through our platform. It took us six months to perfect the business model, implement the related technology (order distribution systems, billing system for prepaid, etc.), and convince enough merchants with it to create liquidity.
With the coronavirus, we decided to expand the model across all categories. As medical cosmetic centers, sports centers, salons and spas started coming back slowly in early June, we switched all subscriptions to a prepaid model. Our decision was that we either control the transaction in the category or we exit that business! The pandemic made it much easier to make hard decisions.
If you are familiar with marketplaces, the two core metrics for success are Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Long Term Value (LTV). For a marketplace to survive and scale, buyers must keep coming back, ordering through the marketplace so it can cover the CAC through higher LTV for each buyer. The problem with service marketplaces is that buyers and sellers must connect directly for service delivery. Hence, they can exchange contact information and do future transactions directly, cutting out the marketplace. This is a major problem for many service marketplaces, they fail to scale, or switch to lead-based model which can’t exceed 5% to 6% of the Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) that is going through the marketplace.
In the beginning, we tolerated leakage, as we were more focused on developing the core marketplace technology, onboarding more merchants, and building the required processes (call center, customer service, etc.). With COVID19, we accelerated building the technology and processes to reduce leakage. We developed a new agreement with explicit clauses about future transactions and related penalties. We asked all our merchants to sign them (200 of them!) or they would stop receiving orders through Storat.
As a result, the CAC for home services dropped from AED 102 ($28) per new customer to around AED 50 ($15). The number of repeat orders increased by more than 500% in the same period.
With COVID19, a week became an eternity. We applied two new principles to our development strategy:
Between March 15th and June 15th 2020, we deployed almost every day. Sometimes 2 to 3 per day. Faster deployments meant less testing and more bugs, which made some of our customers unhappy. Also, the pace of changes was too fast for a lot of service providers to learn quickly and cope with. Merchants came back complaining “why are you changing something that is working?” From our end, it was working, but it didn’t scale!
Also, our deployment process was cumbersome, we ran deployments manually using Ansible scripts and it took each deployment between 1-3 hours to complete. COVID19 pushed us to remove all the none essential components from the deployment process. We migrated from Ansible to Laravel envoyer.io. It was also an opportunity to upgrade our back-end systems to the latest versions of Laravel, Php, Nova, Mysql, Linux, etc. and we optimized our infrastructure to run on fewer servers, which gave us extra computing power that we can use for expanding to a new country without incurring additional cost.
In early November 2019, we implemented a full work from home policy. This gave us a competitive advantage as we didn’t have any operational downtime. While competitors were busy trying to figure out the logistics and operations to run a business remotely, we were set and ready for business. In October 2019, we upgraded the company internal VOIP telephony system from Grandstream to 3CX and we deployed it across the three locations. In the same period, we deployed GSM VOIP technology which gave us a better connectivity with customers while reducing operational cost.
Well this may not be possible for all businesses. But for us, we were 100% cloud-based Internet business. Although we went remote as early as November 2019, we kept our offices in Bangalore, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi as a status of power, to interview new employees, and for internal meetings, if needed. As the coronavirus started spreading in the middle east, we switched to a survivability mode. Those offices became a none-essential liability. We managed to maneuver our company out of three lease agreements in three countries in less than 30 days. That alone saved our company more than $25,000 per month in office rent and other related expenses. It may not be a lot for a big company, but for us, and under coronavirus, this was a large expense.
As a startup with the intent to scale, a large amount of our investment in resources was focused on the long-term objective to scale. For example, we had a subcontracting team working on SEO, merchant onboarding for future categories, etc. We stopped all of that to preserve cash and focus on today’s problem.
Number of positions in our company became redundant or not essential because of the changes we made above. However, it was hard to let good people go, especially if they have developed the expertise in what we are doing and have the motivation to make the company navigate through the pandemic. So instead of terminating people, we moved everybody to sales operations, and I mean everybody! Even HR started taking calls and chats and converting those to orders. We split the sales organization to cover the basic internet web funnel.
We also reduced our marketing channels to two, one for new customers acquisitions and the second for repeat orders. Hence, we needed only one person to cover marketing to generate leads for the marketplace. The rest of the sales team covered bookings, redemption, collection, and after sales customer service.
By mid-May, sales were going well again, we started hiring again in our call center to address the increased demand.
Before coronavirus, We developed extensive business intelligence dashboards to monitor the various aspects of our business. We monitored as many as 100 data points to have a better understanding of key performance indicators and monitor the conversion funnel (figure 5: one of Storat internal BI dashboard).
While it was important, a lot of our employees found it confusing or they couldn’t focus with too many metrics to track. So, we reduced the essential metrics to two and we held everybody accountable for them:
CPM told us how much gross profit we are making after deducting service providers commission. and CAC showed us how much it is costing to acquire new customers. By subtracting CPM from total CAC, we could tell quickly what our gross margin is. As all other cost elements were fixed and all subscriptions were moved to prepaid, the entire company focused in increasing that delta.
Let’s face it, while the UAE is an impressive market, it is a small market. Especially for B2C. The microeconomics for UAE B2C is that there are only 3-4 million people with enough purchasing power to target. With Covid19, that was reduced by at least half. Initially we didn’t plan on expanding to new markets before 2021. If your platform is an eCommerce marketplace, there is much more operational requirements to expand to new markets. eCommerce marketplaces have a skin in the game, we process payments at both ends of the markets, we must meet the regularity requirement of any new country we expand to, and we need direct relationship with banks and local payment gateways.
Our expansion strategy was simple. The next target market was Saudi Arabia and the plan was to open there in early 2021. We would expand there if and only if, we achieved the following three objectives:
Under coronavirus, we have achieved those objectives by end of May 2020. Well, two months of meeting those metrics was not enough time to prove sustainability, but what was happening gave us the urge to take risk and ACT now. All businesses were scrambling to web enable under COVID-19. It was a fulfillment of our vision "Go online or get out of business". So, we made the following changes to our plan.
By mid June 2020, we freezed development in the UAE platform, I handed over the operations in the Middle East. Our small R&D team started working on the US version of the platform. In July 5th, I relocated to Houston and I started setting up the US operations.
The most important aspect of survivability is to keep your team super motivated. In our All Hands monthly company meeting in April 1st ,2020, my team didn’t know what to expect because of the grim results in the previous two weeks and the bad news that was flying all around us. Some people were whispering about their fear of being let go today as this is what happened with their peers in other companies. I started the meeting quoting Winston Churchill 1940 famous quote about the UK policy fighting until the end and never to give up.
I made sure to read every sentence to them loudly, so it is clear to all that we are not giving up and we are in this fight until the end. Regardless of any strategy, there is nothing in the world like a motivated and determined team. What my team did in the following three months was extraordinary. Ironically, the best three performing months in more than four years in business!
Like many, I am not sure what will happen next, and what is the future impact of this virus on businesses. But even in the grimmest moment, opportunities will always exist;
It is about being nimble, lean, and adaptable to change!
Two weeks ago, I was honored to speak at Glassqube, one of the coolest coworking spaces and startup incubators in Abu Dhabi. The audience consisted of entrepreneurs and working professionals looking to start their own business. My speech was about the top 10 mistakes we did launching an internet startup; The mistakes that almost killed our startup in its infancy. The fireside chat covered topics such as pricing strategy, startup business model, driving traffic & SEO, measuring wrong KPI’s, and selling to customers.
The startup, Storat.com is an online marketplace based in Abu Dhabi, UAE for the past two years. (Storat means shops in Arabic, well its a combo of Arabic and english). We were able to grow the user-base to 60,000 users and over 1,500 paying customers and expanded our back-office operations to two additional countries: India and Egypt. However, we realized that a productplatform company needs many years to find a productmarket fit. We are still in the second year and have a long way to go.
USP (unique selling point): Storat.com offers a unique technology compared to other marketplaces in the middle east (at least that is what we think!). A seller or a business can open a store on storat.com, list all their products and services, and upgrade the profile page to a bilingual website at their own domain in less than 5 minutes, Server-less! Their products and services will be listed on their website, Storat.com marketplace, and connected social media profile pages. The solution has key features to generate and manage leads online including cloud-telephony to capture leads by phone, Lead Management System, integrated chatting, SEO friendly landing and advertisement pages with call to actions to drive leads and inquiries, etc. The entire technology is proprietary and built by Storat development team. (E-commerce integration is coming before the end of 2018).
What I realized, as a founder of a startup, is that my main job is to balance the hundreds of conflicting decisions with extremely limited resources. Mostly, the conflict between scaling a business vs making it survive on its own. A main distinction between building a service-oriented business and a platform/product business is scalability. We focused on scaling fast and we rushed decisions ahead of their time. It took time to realize that scaling fast may accelerate revenue, but it puts us on a dangerously very short runway. We were losing resources much faster than we can recover it with revenue. We were making a lot of mistakes because we were not stopping long enough, analyzing, and thinking things over. Ultimately this could have crashed the startup. We survived so far. Below is our tale from the first two years. We hope this could help other startup founders, specially in the Middle East, avoid those mistakes to increase their chances of success.
The biggest mistake I did before launching Storat.com is not knowing or appreciating the most important asset in the world: time. When planning and building a business, you consider resources like people, money, space, customers, and products! But later you discover that the most precious resource is time. You can’t speed it up, or slow it down.
For example, a lot of startup founders will execute decisions based on saving financial resources, money! Meanwhile, wasting too much time. You may not have the luxury of sufficient funding, if so, doing it yourself could be the only option.
To give a simpler example, in the first year, we were building the platform with no income. It was difficult to spend money. To save, we used free software. We spent hundreds of hours deploying products like ERPNext, Zimbra for email, and others to run our operations and save on spending on commercial software. Now, we scrapped most of the free software and run our back office operations on commercial cloud software. For accounting, we adapted a simple commercial accounting software: Quickbooks! (Get it to your head quickly, you are a small business! Regardless of your scaling plan, use quickbooks instead of a full scale ERP to save time and money!). The time wasted can never be recovered. It could have been used in customer acquisition, core product development, or a more strategic aspect of the business.
A more disastrous example is our early investment in SEO and organic user acquisitions. Again, in the early days it was hard to spend money. So instead of hiring an SEO expert to help us develop a search engine friendly product, we decided we will save the money and figure it out later. It was a huge mistake, leading to the loss of thousands of hours and eventually hundred of thousands of dollars.
Lesson learned: When you can, save time instead of money.
Conflict point: However, it is still a delicate balance between time and money to keep a runway! Your job is to find that delicate balance.
Early on, we realized that our vision would take time to build. Therefore, we decided to accelerate the release of an MVP that resembled a classified marketplace. I hacked the first MVP based on an open source classifieds script in less than 12 hours in August 2015. (Yes, our first MVP took 12 hours to build). We ran a marketing campaign based on that, gathered some user feedback, and then hired a development team to build our real MVP back in April 2016. We launched it in September 2016 as a free classified marketplace were anybody can register and post their products and services for free.
A free/freemium business model may work for you if you have a clear plan on how you will make money. But for us, we didn’t have a plan for that and we discovered few hard realities about free/freemium for a marketplace: While it is important to build liquidity and the network effect, it shouldn’t be at the expense of the marketplace quality. When you make your platform free, you open it up for everybody who wants to trash their stuff for free. Which in turn makes the buyer experience horrible, ruining the reputation of your platform.
If you want to build a trusted marketplace that has liquidity while preserving a great buyer experience, you have to:
Lesson Learned: There is no shortcut to a marketplace liquidity. If you do it at the expense of quality, your platform will just be another trash classified site!!.
Conflict point: if you are bootstrapped like our startup, you will not have the resources to invest in quality and liquidity simultaneously. We are living with the reality now that it will take 4x more time than what we anticipated to build liquidity in the target categories.
In the first 2 - 4 years, you need to live with the reality that your Internet business is not an Internet business. You will have to run it like a traditional business until you build the processes and brand to scale.
When we launched Storat.com, we built landing pages to demonstrate our products and services. We also launched a paid marketing campaign on Google and social media. In the first 2 months, we closed zero deals!! We quickly realized that a startup without a brand will not be able to sell online or even generate leads. So we hired a field sales executive to meet customers directly. Within 3 months we were able to close 80 paying businesses on our platform. Great!!! Not really, check mistake number 4 below about pricing strategy.
Lesson Learned: You have to deal with your internet platform like a traditional business in the beginning.
Conflict point: You may not have the resources to hire sales people, especially qualified ones. You either do it yourself or find another idea that your paying customers are savvy and educated enough to buy friction-less from you. In the Middle East, we realized that there is a large gap between small businesses and the internet. We are winning business from large and formidable competitors because we are on the ground and they are not!!
When we launched the platform, we built our pricing strategy as a friction-less online business at scale!!!! The average price for the product was $300 per year.
we came to know three hard realities:
1- We managed to gather a lot of feedback from paying customers (Our product development is driven by this feedback now). While all the customers validated our vision “somehow!”, we had a gap in understanding middle east small and medium businesses capacity and willingness to invest upfront in building and driving a business online.
2- Small and medium businesses in the middle east don’t want to pay for software, period! They will try to avoid it at any cost. Combine this with a freefreemium model and you will reduce your chances further in monetization. When I worked at Microsoft, it was hard to comprehend the astronomical piracy rates in the middle east (well I worked mainly in the enterprise and I rarely interacted with small businesses!!). Speaking to hundreds of small business owners in the last couple of years I came to learn some of the reasons why. Small businesses are small for a reason. They can’t scale their business for one reason or another. While they can run a successful life style business for many years, majority of them have limited capacity in one area or another. They depend a lot on basic instincts to manage their business. They will not invest in anything that doesn’t have a direct and immediate impact on their bottom-line. They will also not invest in something that is hard for them to understand or use.
3- The sales cycle and on-boarding for a $300 deal is the same as $10,000 deal. So we came to know early that signing up businesses in the Middle East on a SAAS model required field sales. The problem we faced is that a $300 deal took the same amount of time to close as a $10,000 deal. While we were able to close around 80 deals in the first three months, we were going to run out of money in less than 6 months!!!! Each deal required a visit by field sales and an extensive amount of on-boarding. Whatever simple the technology, small businesses found it very hard to write content, describe their services and products, do graphics and videos, or even come up with simple marketing slogan.
However, there was one common feedback among those first 80 customers. I am quoting one of the customer exact words that resonated deeply and became a flagship of our next pivot.
“Mustapha, I will pay you 100 times more than what you are asking if you can bring me business and genuine leads online. And you can do it using your platform, it is a win-win situation.”
And that is exactly what we did. We increased our average price from $300 per year to $15,000 per year!! Then in another three months, we increased it again to $30,000 per year!!!!! The number of offline transactions reduced from 30 per months to 3!!! A lot in the VC and startup community will challenge that as it hinders growth and scalability. However, we kept the online (friction-less) acquisition engine running. Offline, we succeeded in on-boarding 60 paying customers at an average subscription of $12000 per year. Online, we acquired 1,460 paying customers as of May 2018. Online customers pay $27 to start advertising on our platform, then they convert to higher subscriptions if they see more value (up to $3200 per year) or they pay per lead as the platform bring them business.
This approach meant that we are not the fairy tale of a smashing success startup that rose from 0 to hundred of thousands online customers in few months. However, we felt this is the right strategy for our current situation as it gave us the following advantages:
1- We can survive on our own for much longer without external funding. While the number of transactions were low, it contributed to the platform as it was not a side business.
2- It gave us the opportunity to engage paying customers in deeper discussions and feedback loops which resulted in a clearer product roadmap and features development that can be scaled across many industries.
3- In the first few months, we faced few issues related to SEO and technology. Those high value subscriptions gave us a breathing room to work on fixing the platform and technology while keeping the company running.
4- Deeper engagement with customers gave us the opportunity to learn. When we started, we didn’t have any SME’s in critical areas like creative design, SEM, SMM, SEO, and ultimately lead generation. Those few contracts were big enough helping us hire resources and spend quality time in building capacity in those areas.
While we are very supportive of lower transaction value to increase volume and build liquidity, we learned that we need to build a dynamic pricing strategy to support our cash-flow requirement for each stage of the business. We are in the process of dropping our prices now, while increasing the value of the platform to both buyers and sellers.
Lesson Learned: If you are bootstrapped with no VC funding, build a Dynamic Pricing Strategy. Focus on high value transactions in the first few months to self-fund your business, then start lowering prices to increase the volume of transactions. Run your business like a traditional business for the first few months (years!!) while continuing to invest in your strategic goalobjective.
Conflict point: High value transactions are heavily service oriented. You will still need to find the balance to spend more of your time in product design, development, and building a scaling strategy.
We considered the technology we are building a breakthrough! as it helps middle east customers build an online presence very quickly while resolving the problem of driving traffic to that online presence and convert it to businessleads.
In the first few months, our pitch to customers was not perfect!!! We talked about how their website will be cutting edge, the website will be server-less and practically running on hundreds of servers around the world, how we used the latest Algolia search to deliver sub-second search speed for their website. That their website will be using the most modern Content Delivery Networks (Akami) to deliver content quickly to their customers. How we used advanced caching technology in various layers of the platform for performance. How it is SEO friendly out of the box with proper URL, tagging structure, etc to surface quickly in google search. All of that meant nothing to middle east small businesses!!! One customer asked me after I finished the pitch: What is a website??????
So we fixed our pitch, speaking a language that is more suitable for our customer to understand our product and how can they benefit from it.
Lesson Learned: Please save your time and money printing brochures or building landing pages until you speak and successfully sell to hundred of customers. Adjust your pitch and reflect it online.
Conflict point: There is no conflict point, you either speak the customer language or you are out of business.
If you are wondering what is SEO, then you are probably reading the wrong article :). SEO is search engine optimization. It is about your website showing in the first page of search engines (in the middle east google is the one that matters!). When we started building the platform in April 2016, the team had 3 developers and 1 graphic designer. By the time we launched the platform around September 2016, the company had 6 developers and 1 marketing specialist fresh out of college (no prior SEO experience). Although we knew that SEO is an area we have to focus on, we thought we can postpone it until we finish the core development as we were not making any money. The hard reality we faced later is that Onsite SEO is an integral part of website development. If you are building a new platform, there are many trade-offs and technical decisions driven by SEO: the age of the domain you are buying , number of domain hosts, URL structure, tagging structure, design of pages for placing content correctly (above the fold, below the fold, etc), dynamically generated regional URL’s, etc. Everything your platform engine is dynamically generating should be SEO checked before commencing in development. We have made hundreds of mistakes, we spent thousands of hours trying to figure out what is wrong. What added salt to the wound is that many customers turned us down because we are not ranking in google first pages.
The common slogan for our company in 2017 was “what is standing between us and becoming a $100 Million company is SEO!!”
Off course ranking is not enough to build a successful business, but it was an important slogan to mobilize the company around fixing a strategic issue for an internet platform.
Storat.com organic traffic in the first 2 years
Today, SEO continues to be strategic channel for us to acquire customers and leads. But we know it is not a compensation for building a known brand.
Lesson Learned: Invest early in hiring an SEO specialist before commencing in building an online marketplace.
Conflict point: Hiring an SEO specialist is one of the most difficult hiring exercises. Alot of people will claim being “SEO experts”. But SEO for a marketplace is one of the most complex projects. For example, India has the highest number of SEO specialists in the world. We prepared a list of high value target SEO directors to headhunt. The list contained 50 names! Meaning, in all India, the number of SEO specialists with prior successful experience in marketplaces was only 50!!! At least the ones that we were able to locate!!! So, prepare for a challenging task ahead.
We built our mobile app, after few failures and sizable investment. So, what is wrong with building a mobile app in a Mobile First world?? Well, there is nothing wrong with it if you found your productmarket fit. We did the first trial to build a mobile app only 3 months after launching the platform. The platform was far from mature and we were doing updates and changes everyday. Going web first was the right strategy as we could build features quickly to experiment. However, trying to launch a mobile app very early was a big mistake.
Lesson Learned: postpone building new channels for your products until you find a productmarket fit. A Mobile app should be part of a scaling strategy, not a “me too strategy”. Don’t do our mistake.
Conflict point: The mobile app gave our brand more value in-front of potential customers, helping us close few more deals. However, it is not contributing significantly “yet” to our core KPI’s.
Frankly at the beginning we didn’t know which KPI’s to measure. Or we knew the obvious ones. We were measuring business, financial, and technical KPI’s: number of new user registrations, pageviews, bonus rate, sessions, organic traffic, etc. While those are important, but not the most strategic for a bootstrapped startup. Among the KPI’s we didn't measure in the first few months are:
Lesson learned: A key factor of maturing your platform is building data gathering and analytics tools to measure important Key Performance indicators (KPI’s). Those KPI’s will have critical input for decisions making like which category to focus on, pricing strategy, development of product features, etc.
One of the biggest mistakes we did was scaling too fast in number of areas. an example is that we should have stayed in shared workspaces and business centers for many more months, if not years. We invested in moving to permanent offices in three different countries in less than 16 months. That created a burden on us for managing facilities, spending scarce capital on office furniture and equipment. There is a logical explanation for each decision. For example, in India, it was really hard to attract top talent when you are based in a shared space. With a high number of failing startups in Bangalore , we had to give a sense of stability to new prospects. Renting our own offices gave that sense and helped a bit in attracting top talent. However, we could have invested that money in paying higher salaries or flying our employees more to develop further.
Mistake 10: Finding a productmarket fit will take many years, not months…
Unless you are funded by Rocket Internet with a strategy of copy, scale, dump and virtually unlimited amount of funding, building a platform and finding a productmarket fit may take many many years. I am spending quality time now building this into our company DNA. Great things take many years to build. I personally take my deepest aspiration in “struggle” stories like Microsoft hardship in the first five years , Intuit founders being turned down by many VC’s and spending more than 7 years to build serious traction. Now Intuit is a $50 Billion business. Basecamp focus on profit slogan, and MailChimp Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make It as a Start-Up. If you don’t have domain expertise, like us when we started, anticipate 24 months to learn and another 24 months to start fitting your product into the market.
I created a rule before launching the company and i called it the 5-years rule. I said:
“I don’t know much, so I will build a company that can survive for 5 years without any income. Along the way, I will figure it out”
Translating this, build your financial plan anticipating a long time to generate serious revenue. While we generated revenue early, the company couldn’t have survived the many experiments and mistakes without a sufficient runway, luckily self-funded or from close family angel funding. I continue to maintain the 5-years rule. At the beginning of each quarter, I measure the burn rate and the financial resources the company has to check if we are maintaining the 5-years rule. Then I adjust spending decisions based on that.
Take your time in scaling your business. A startup is a war of attrition, it is not a kamikaze attack!! Plan to be in the trenches for a long long long long long time. Focus on building a healthy revenue, profit, and cost control. For example, be careful with the KPI of growing your revenue 20%–30% per month. It may work for some, but it could be a recipe for disaster that will put your startup on a runway to crash without proper cost control.
“ LinkedIn makes broad claims over users' content, giving it the ability to "copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, process, analyze, use and commercialise, in any way now known or in the future discovered…" LinkedIn applies this claim not only to users content, but also all data, concepts or even ideas passed through their service. “ (1)
The golden rule on the web
If it is free, you are the product!!
As we help more customers in UAE with Digital Marketing and web-enabling their business, we are sad to know the number of businesses that fell into the trap of shady digital marketing companies that sell them into the idea of buying fake fans and followers for their business pages on Facebook and Instagram. Fake Fans and followers not only will not benefit you, but they will also hurt your business, up to the level of making your business page completely disappear from people's newsfeed on Facebook and Instagram. Here is why:
Let's start with what Facebook says about fake fans:
"Facebook takes into account Page engagement rates when deciding when and where to deliver a Page's legitimate ads and content, so Pages with artificially inflated like counts are harming themselves, making it harder and more expensive to reach the people they care about most."
..... from Facebook for the Business guideline on fake fans
A lot of business owners have decided the best way to show that they are popular and credible is to have a high number of fans and followers on their Facebook pages. This wrong perception has been enforced by shady digital marketing companies trying to make money without regard to how much this will hurt their customers by selling fake fans and followers for as little as $100 for 5000 fans.
Even without fake followers, it is becoming harder and harder for businesses to show their products and promotions on the Facebook newsfeed and Instagram storyboard. There are two main reasons causing that:
This was stated clearly by Brian Boland, Facebook's VP of Advertising Technology:
“Over the past few months, I’ve read articles and answered questions from many people who are concerned about declines in organic reach for their Facebook Pages….. First, there's simply too much content being published on Facebook, making visibility in the News Feed increasingly competitive. Second, Facebook is deliberately trying to show people the content that is most relevant to them, as opposed to surfacing all the content available "
So even without the fake fans and followers issue, your free posts on Facebook will probably show to less than 5% of your followers. But with fake followers, you are making it impossible for genuine followers and fans to see your free posts.
If your business is in the UAE, a fake fan is someone who resides outside the United Arab Emirates. has a generic profile picture, no posts, activity, and friends. But they’ve liked and followed a very large number of business pages.
So If you buy 5,000 fake followers and Facebook or Instagram delivers your post to 10% of them, which is about 500 fans, but none of those ever engages with the post by liking the post, commenting, or sharing, then the Facebook algorithm will begin to suspect that your fans may not be real. With zero engagement day after day and month after month, it will make your page drop in Facebook and Instagram rankings and will eventually disappear from Facebook search.
The reason Facebook and Instagram algorithm works like that is that they want to keep delivering interesting and socially engaging content to their users so they can keep them around instead of going to competing for social platforms like Snapchat or Pinterest. So Facebook & Instagram keep updating their algorithms to make sure that they deliver content that their users will like "You may have noticed that the more you like a post or comment on a certain page, this page post will show more and more in your newsfeed".
1- Remove all fake fans from your pages. It is a long process, but very rewarding in the long term.
2- Don't only post advertisements and products on your page. Apply the 80/20 rule where 80% of your post should be a socially engaging content and 20% advertisements.
3- Mobilize your workforce, your friends, family, and colleges to like, comment, and share your content to help improve your ranking with Facebook and Instagram algorithm. You may be lucky with one or two posts that they become viral.
4- Always link your post to your website. Setup Google Analytics on your website so you can monitor traffic and social engagement (figure 1 and 2).
5- As stated earlier, Facebook and Instagram are a pay-per-play. So you are encouraged to use social media promotions to reach more followers outside your network. However, Facebook and Instagram advertisement platform is becoming more complex to use if you want to reach the targeted audience, drive conversions, or do segmented targeting. For that, you can depend on a real digital marketing company with certified experts in social media promotion.
6- Build a Website for your business as a cornerstone of your online presence. Our single best advice to all businesses in UAE is that while social media is a great medium to drive traffic, but it is not a substitute for building your own website at your own domain with your own identity. You need a place to drive that traffic to where that place is exclusive for your brand and business. At your own website, you can capture your customer's attention and deliver your messages to them. No wonder businesses with websites and digital marketing strategies are able to convert online traffic to business 40 times more than businesses without!
A year ago, just before quitting my job at Microsoft to catch-up the entrepreneurship train. While it is not easy to work 18 hours every day when you are reaching your mid-forties, it is the most intense and rewarding experience to be part of a technology startup building an innovative eCommerce & a deal explorer in the Middle East. My only regret is that I didn't start earlier. But later is better than never! The main picture was during my trip to Bangalore, India setting up Storat Development Center.
Mixed emotions walking out of Microsoft office for the last time after serving the company for 19 years. While it was a hard decision, but I felt my life was going nowhere. I was making a lot of money and was successful in my role. But there was that emptiness where I came to a point realizing that life is not only about money, a secure job, and vacationing! Actually, the more secure your life becomes, the more boring!!
It is mid-July 2017 now, and instead of the usual lavish summer vacations in Europe, I am spending my time in Abu Dhabi shuttling between customers in a 50 degrees heat trying to close deals with small businesses. The rest of the day working late trying to accelerate things. While I can no longer afford shopping in Saks Fifth Avenue, it is the happiest period of my life. Whoever said "Money Doesn't Buy Happiness" is right, at least beyond food, shelter, & clothing. I was lucky enough to understand that early in my life so as not to get locked by golden handcuffs!
Our humble start with a single room office in Abu Dhabi Business Center. My son agreed to give up few days of his summer vacation to help us build UAE marketplace categories including beauty and cosmetics, micro services. The first one year was the most difficult as I had to shuttle between Saudi and UAE weekly. I spent the weekdays in Khobar working for Microsoft and the weekends in Abu Dhabi building my own business. That was the only way to do it to mitigate the risk as building an online marketplace is a capital intensive activity with little income expected in the first 2-3 years.
Storat upgrading to a bigger Office in Abu Dhabi in November 2016. We called Abu Dhabi "Ground 0" and we determined that if we don't succeed here, we will not succeed anywhere. The single advice to other startups is to focus first in your local market. If you are not able to sell to your neighbor, you will not be able to sell overseas. Internet and Mobile platform companies are tempted to expand internationally quickly which would bring major scalability issues before crystallizing a productmarket fit. The only reason we opened up our marketplace early to other countries is for a technical reason related to Google SEO. But our monetization strategy is to focus on Abu Dhabi online services market by offering digital marketing services to businesses in UAE.
Abu Dhabi offered everything we wanted. Luckily we are being celebrated as one the few ambitious internet startups with an HQ in Abu Dhabi city.
Deployment at mid-night for key feature at Storat Websites Solution. The first solution of its kind where businesses can design and build an ArabicEnglish RTL website in literally under five minutes without the need for hosting, servers, or custom development.
Goodbye party to American University of Sharjah Interns who joined Storat first summer Internship program for university students. The interns worked in Storat digital marketing department, learning about how to drive business to customers through online presence and building a website with a digital marketing strategy.
I think there is an untold story about the recent acquisition announcements of souq.com by Amazon and JadoPado by unknown local investors (speculation is Noon). Souq.com acquisition deal was so favorable to Amazon, Amazon stock gained close to $30Billion in market capitalization in less than one week after the announcement. Amazon acquired Souq for less than $650Million. A similar acquisition of a leading marketplace in the US would have gone for Billions of Dollars more. Souq.com was able to build a household brand across multiple countries, controlling 75% of the middle east consumers' e-commerce, and more than 50Million visitors per month. Souq built a franchise with a payment gateway company, a shipping handling company, and many other assets. Taking into consideration the hard work Souq team had to put to build a leading e-commerce ecosystem in the middle east, Souq was valued at $1Billion a year ago with $270M of fresh investment. Something seriously should have gone wrong for Souq to sell at such a “cheap” price.
JadoPado acquisition was just announced. We loved the JadoPado platform, we kept following the amazing development and great designs created by a truly innovative team. We were excited about looking at hotcake. However, when we looked at the prices and the features they are stuffing to differentiate the various subscription plans. Local sellers don’t care about disk space, bandwidth, or the total number of listings. They want leads and they want to sell with the lowest overhead margin possible! The sad part of the story the marketplace was open one day and it just closed today without any prior warning to sellers. A lot of them may have depended solely on the platform to sell. Or it may just be that JadoPado is running for the cover because of Amazon's arrival to the Middle East retailer commerce market. They may have learned the lessons from what happened when Amazon entered the Indian Marketplace with the "Take No Prisoners" attitude in dealing with competitors.
When you are looking to reach out to the maximum number of customers for your business, it is necessary that you have a website that perfectly communicates the central message of your enterprise. However, if you are starting out for the first time, you may not know what the critical aspects of building an excellent business website are. Here are some of the things that you need to keep in mind while creating the first website for your business enterprise.
Since every small business is different, the websites that are built for them also has a different goal and purpose. So before actually working on the design and development aspects of your website, you need to figure out the functions that you want to perform. For instance, if you are looking to have a website that offers reliable information to others and thereby entice potential clients, you will have to create a site that aptly fulfills such a function. In order to make sure that your website brings you the maximum benefit, you will need to have a clear goal from the beginning.
Before you actually start to work on the first website for your business, you must develop a precise idea about what ideas you want it to convey. In other words, you must start to work on creating some unique content for your own site. While you can always get a professional content creating company to polish this basic content of yours, it is always you who can communicate the essential message of your enterprise better than anyone else ever can.
While creating the content of your website, you need to make sure that it is never too long-winded as your potential customers can easily lose interest. Your visitors may not always like to go through large chunks of content in order to gather basic information. Therefore it is necessary that you mention the most important points regarding your business firm at the very beginning so that your visitors can easily find out what the site stands for.
Always place yourself in your customers’ shoes while creating content for your website. One of the most common mistakes made by people who are getting their first websites built is that they are most intent on doing what they want to do instead of what would seem to be beneficial for their clients or customers.
Putting up effective Call to Action messages is a great way to invite the right kind of response from your target audience. For instance, if you want them to register or sign up for some survey, product, or newsletter, you can make adequate provisions for such things. This is one of the best ways to generate the right kind of response from your potential customers.
Yes. if you are leaving your lucrative job to make more money, then don’t leave. Especially in the first 2-3 years or maybe more if you are aggressively focusing on growth. When we were doing the business plan for LeadCenter.AI and Storat.com and calculating risks and odds, we have decided to pursue something we truly care about more than money. That is a vision to web-enable small and micro-businesses in the middle east and bringing advanced automation to them. We have decided to pursue that vision although we know the risk ahead with 99% historical failure rate for our flagship product because of the difficulty of establishing the network effect. However, it is that vision that is fueling our engine and giving us unlimited energy to keep on with all the long hours, miss-steps, and difficulties.
Money is only a byproduct of doing something you are truly passionate about.
You should face the reality before you even start. A startup is a business with a shortage of money, no brand, no product, no customers, no trust, no offices, no legal structure, and no employees. You will be confused about your vision and uncertain about your success. You should build all of that along with 1 or 2 co-founders. The volume of work for the first few years means you need to get accustomed to 12-18 hours work shift per day, including weekends every single day for the first few years. You will need to depart from a lot of things you love and care about. You will need an obscene amount of support from your family and closest friends.
“The most impressive people I know spent their time with their head down getting things done for a long, long time. ” - Sam Altman
This will come naturally to most entrepreneurs. Since I started my company I discovered the most important asset in the world is not money, capability, or reach, it is TIME. It will come naturally to you to wake up at 4 or 5 AM every day. The days I wake up after 6:00 AM, It feels like I have lost the initiative for that day!
In the corporate world, we are accustomed to making excuses or complaining about why things are not working. It becomes part of the process with business justification sheets and endless business reviews. When you launch your own business, there is nobody to complain to or make excuses about why things are not working. You are on your own! You must make decisions faster, recover as fast as possible from mistakes or wrong decisions. While you don’t have to spend, endless time building justification for others, you will need an obscene amount of openness with yourself to learn and recover quickly. The simplicity formula we found to correct our path is to stay close and always listen to our customers.
If you care much about your ego, don’t start a business. The ego that will stop you from walking the streets selling your business or cold calling hundreds of customers every day to close no deals or 1-2 deals at best. The ego that will make you afraid of embarrassment, admitting mistakes, or correcting your course quickly. The ego that will stop from listening to customers need because you are fascinated with your product. Unlike established corporate businesses where ego issues can harm, in a startup, Ego is a killer!
You will need to control your fears, mostly is the fear of failure. Fear is a very obsessive force that can cripple humans and society. Focus on the hope, the journey, and the learning. Success is only an accumulation of all your failures.
"What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?" Vincent van Gogh
There are many choices these days with a heated debate about which one is the best programming language to choose for an online web platform. Most of the debate is technical in nature and focus on areas like architecture, performance implications, flexibility, and extensibility of the platform. We have taken all the technical aspects into considerations, but we have bundled that with other business factors to come up with a decision on the programming language to build Storat.com with.
The choices between programming languages look endless, but when you go into a deeper business/technical evaluation, the choices come down to a few. The list of languages we shortlisted was:
For Storat.com, we have adopted a standard LAMP architecture. While LAMP stands for (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), you can replace any of the components with your choice of language or platform based on the needs of your application. For Storat.com, we have built the platform on the following architecture:
For the choice of the back-end programming language, the following were the top 6 factors that settled the debate, yet again, in favor of PHP and the Laravel framework:
Regardless of our decision, we think that there is no right or wrong choice among the top and widely used web frameworks. The lesson learned for us is to map your choice not only based on the technical aspect of the evaluation, but also on the business needs, cost, access to talented resources in the long term, and the value your startup is trying to deliver.
Tomorrow is formally my last day working for Microsoft Corporation so I can dedicate my time and energy to storat.com. In respect of a great company that I worked for more than 19 years, I am proud to share part of my last email to my colleagues.
"Hello All;
I have decided to leave Microsoft to focus on a software startup company that I started a few months back.
When people ask me what is the most amazing thing about Microsoft that kept you all those years, I tell them it is in an HR code that few people, even in Microsoft, might know or remember. The code is “Attract, Develop, Keep”. The most amazing thing about this company is its PEOPLE where Microsoft continues to do a great job in attracting, developing, and keeping great people.
I walked into this company 19 years ago with no skills, but a great passion for technology. I couldn’t have imagined where Microsoft would take me. Providing me generous training and career opportunities to develop locally and overseas across four continents, including sponsoring my MBA. Giving me the space to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, which was priceless to learn and develop.
So from the bottom of my heart THANK YOU so much: my team, my colleges and partners in the Middle East & Africa, Saudi, Gulf, US Gulf Coast District, Corp and all the PEOPLE of Microsoft who taught me and helped me fulfill so many of my dreams. It is really hard to leave such a great company and great people, but it is a passion for entrepreneurship that I need to fulfill.
My startup inherits most of its values, people's philosophy, and vision for a better world from what I learned from many of you over the years in Microsoft.
leadcenter.ai is trying to address a challenging market where 99% of small and micro-businesses in the middle east are not web-enabled, don’t have a business email or a website, have limited access to automation and technology. Small businesses want to make use of modern technology to reach more customers and achieve accelerated growth. While small businesses are fueling the growth of advanced economies in the United States, Europe, and Asia, They represent a small percentage of middle east economies' GDP. Information technology and cloud services represent a unique opportunity for small businesses in the middle east to expand presence, reach more customers, and accelerate their growth using cloud services at a fraction of what it used to cost only 5 years ago.
I have assembled a great and passionate team that is in the process of building a state of the art marketplace that hopes to address some of those challenges. The marketplace will help small businesses build online stores, advertise about their products, share their news and deals and ultimately host their online websites and eCommerce stores on leadcenter.ai with a cluster of other services for free or at a fraction of the cost using simple and intuitive applications hosted on leadcenter.ai
We have just launched the marketplace first version, exclusive for now to UAE residents. We have received very positive feedback from literally hundreds of users with recommendations and requests. The website already has thousands of users registered and jumped in popularity in the United Arab Emirates from site 40,000 to site 1,240 most popular website in UAE in less than 25 days. We are looking forward to launching the portal in full production in early October and start reaching out to small businesses to help them with web-enablement. Please feel free to follow this blog to receive regular updates about our progress.
