For small businesses, especially local service providers, increasing phone leads is key to generating more sales. But how can you get the phones ringing? It might surprise you to learn that the best way to get more calls is just simply to put your phone number everywhere! Here are the three best ways to increase small business phone leads:
1. Prominent Placement Online
Putting your business number in the header of your website ensures that visitors will see it no matter where they enter your site. Prominently featuring your number on your website is a great way to encourage people to call with their questions and requests. But instead of designing it into the image of your header, make sure that it’s in text format so that visitors can copy/paste it or click-to-call directly on mobile devices.
2. Offline Printed Materials
No matter what you’re getting printed, you should always include your phone number in addition to your business name, logo, and URL. Put it on pens, banners, business cards, calendars, anything branded that you plan on using for advertising purposes. Putting your phone number into the hands of your target audience is a great way to boost calls.
3. Online Ad Call Extensions
If you run online ads, you can attach your phone number to those ads so that searchers see your phone number in conjunction with whatever value proposition or promotional offer you’re presenting. This is a great way to get people browsing on mobile devices to call your business for a quote, directions, your hours, or any other inquiry.
Google even allows you to schedule call extensions so that your phone number won’t appear when your business is closed if you don’t want to encourage customers to call when there’s not staff to take their calls. This is a real benefit for business owners that use a cell phone for their business line because it means that they can reduce the chance of having family time interrupted with business calls.
Bonus: Follow-up
Small businesses typically have more limited business hours, which means that phone calls may come in when your business isn’t open. Having a good answering message is critical to getting callers to leave a detailed enough message so that you can follow-up with them the next business day. An effective message will include your business name, hours of operation, URL (so that callers can get more information from your website), and the details you’d like to encourage people to leave to get a return call. Encourage callers to leave their name, business (if applicable), contact number, and reason for calling. This will give you a great foundation to start with when you pick up the phone to get back to them and help you to determine how urgent the message is so that you can respond in a timely manner.
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Business Blogging and Web Copywriting. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and son and enjoys cooking, watching sports, and spending time together as a family. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about current marketing trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!
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