Winning Strategies for Digital Marketing and Business Growth

• Efficiency is Essential: If a lead fills out a form on your website and doesn’t receive a call back or even an email acknowledgement for days, that opportunity is likely missed. Even a simple response confirming “we’ll get back to you in 24 hours” is critical.

• Building Rapport: In the service industry, one effective strategy is sending a Google Meet link so the client can walk around with their phone, providing you with details for a close quotation. This face-to-face interaction helps build rapport and accelerates the “know, like, and trust” necessary to make the sale.

• Advocacy: Leveraging Success Advocacy is often forgotten, but it is vital. You should encourage your most successful clients to leave online reviews and share their positive comments to help prospective customers see how you treat your clients. You can also use email campaigns, finder fees during slow months, and other incentives to encourage them to tell their friends about your company.

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2. Guard Your Brand: Reputation

Once a lead finds you, their next step is assessing your reputation. This is critical because if you have a low star rating (e.g., 2.4 stars on Google or Yelp), your advertising efforts will be lost as customers will likely jump to a competitor.

Reviews and Authority

• Online Reviews: These are critical to your success. Allocating marketing budget toward staff training and efficient processes for requesting and monitoring reviews is highly recommended.

• Authority: Beyond star ratings, customers look for authority. This means having helpful articles and information within your niche or being mentioned in business journals.

• Handling Negative Feedback When you receive a bad review, the way you respond is crucial—not for the disgruntled person (who may never look at it), but for all the future customers reading the thread.

• Take it Offline: Do not defend yourself online with a lengthy diatribe. Instead, apologize for their experience, invite them to call you, and offer to make things right.

• Respond to Everyone: Responding to reviews, even positive ones, shows that you are alive, well, available, and approachable.

Becoming a Five-Star Business The fastest way to increase your marketing budget’s effectiveness is by making your competitors irrelevant through a five-star rating across major review sites like Google, Facebook, Yelp, and trade-specific directories like Angie’s List.

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3. Ensure Discovery: Findability

Findability focuses on how people locate your business, primarily through search engines and local directories.

• Google: When users search using Google’s mapping system, they are pulling results from the Google Map profile. This is where local businesses show up. You must spend time getting reviews, listing your services, and pushing out posts (blog articles) to this profile.

• Siri/Apple: If a user performs a voice search using Siri (“Hey Siri find me an electrician near me”), the search uses Yelp’s directory (which partners with Apple). Therefore, having a claimed and maintained free Yelp page is important.

• Owned Digital Assets While relying on platforms like Facebook is helpful for findability, you must build and nurture digital assets that you own.

4. Broaden the Reach: Awareness

Awareness, or brand marketing, is about making potential customers conscious of your existence. This includes a wide range of channels:

• Digital Channels: Email marketing, text marketing, loyalty programs, and remarketing (where ads continue to show to users who previously visited your website via the Display Network).

• Word of Mouth and Networking: Traditional word of mouth remains critical. Business networking groups like BNI (Business Network International) are highly organized methods for exchanging referrals and building awareness.

• Influencer Marketing: Paying or incentivizing an individual with a large following (e.g., 50,000 Instagram followers) to talk about your product or service can expose your business to tens of thousands of people.

• Strategic Use of Social Media While social media is a key awareness channel, its effectiveness depends heavily on the industry and the business owner’s involvement. For hobby businesses like the discus fish company, videos and photos of their product create a huge, active community. However, for businesses in saturated fields like digital marketing, organic impression rates are now super low unless the page is extremely active, requiring significant engagement (likes, shares, comments). In some cases, investing in paid advertising may yield “way more bang for your buck” than trying to build a massive, active organic social presence.

By prioritizing conversion and reputation before pouring money into findability and awareness, businesses can ensure they are not “marketing for your competition” by directing traffic toward a poorly rated or inefficient operation.

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 For a free consultation to discuss implementing these repeatable strategies, existing and future clients can visit localview.link and click “Free Consult” to meet with us face-to-face via Google Meet.