Four easy (and free) ways to win new business before christmas

I’ll cut straight to the chase with this post – I’m writing simply to give you some ideas on how to drive new enquiries, in the hope of adding some revenue to your bottom line ahead of the Christmas break (which will be here before we know it!) and to give you momentum to take into 2022, which should be a prosperous year for us all business-wise. 

The beauty of these four strategies is that they’re all free, easily implementable (you can start today) and that I’ve used all of them in my own marketing to win new business this year, and so they come with my own personal seal of approval – they’re tried and tested and the proof is most definitely in the pudding. 

So let’s not mess about and dive straight into strategy number one…

Referrals

We’ve built our business to date pretty much entirely on referrals – it’s something we pride ourselves on. Across the last ten years, we’ve consistently done a great job for our clients, who’ve then referred us to their clients. The more clients we have, the more referrals we get – it’s been brilliant for us. 

But when was the last time you *asked* for a referral? 

Your customers and clients all have vast networks of decision makers / business owners, and within these networks are your ideal customers and clients too – all you need to do is ask. 

I’ve done this myself and it’s worked brilliantly well for me – I’d 100% recommend giving this a try. 

I recorded a short (1 minute) video on this from an event a couple of years back – you can give it a watch here. 

Google My Business / Bing Places

This continues to be a vastly overlooked / under-utilised element of most people’s digital marketing strategy, which is shocking given quite how powerful it can be when used properly, and also how easy it is to use. 

It may well be the ‘World Wide Web’ but the majority of Google / Bing searches for services revolve around ‘local’. 

What I’ve searched for recently on Google, for example: 

• Where / when I can see the new Bond movie
• Vegetarian restaurants in Kingston 
• A local plumber
• Places to park near the O2 Arena 

If you’ve already got a Google My Business account – have you optimised it fully? Have you covered all of the categories in terms of the services that your business offers? Are you posting to it with an update at least weekly? Google LOVES it if you do!

Could you ask for some more reviews? We did this last year and it worked brilliantly.

There’s almost certainly more you could be doing to maximise your local exposure on this channel. 

If you haven’t got a Google My Business account – where have you been?! 

You can sign up for one for FREE here: https://google.co.uk/business. 

You can do all of the above on Bing Places too – more people are using Bing than you might be think… it really doesn’t hurt to be there. It’s also free and you can sign up here: https://www.bingplaces.com/ 

Search Engine Optimisation

There are lots of simple things you can do to improve the basic performance of your website, you don’t have to be an expert.

A really simple way to get started is to request a free audit of your website using the form on this page. We’ll send you a report detailing a whole bunch of things you can do to improve your site performance and ultimately your rankings too. There’s no obligation or hard-sell or anything like that – it will just highlight some areas for improvement. 

Other things you can do quickly and for free – 

• Post a new blog and publicise it on Social Media – Google loves this and it gives you a chance to get more keywords into your site, plus a reason to send new content out to your followers. 
• Create a new Case Study. Case Studies are amazing for SEO! If you’re an electrician, and you create a case study about a re-wiring in Hammersmith, then the content by default will contain keywords such as ‘Electrician / Re-wire / Hammersmith’ – giving you a great chance of ranking on Google for a combination of these keywords should someone search for this. And the best bit is that if they do, they’ll find incredibly relatable content there waiting for them – they will be looking at a real-world example of exactly the service that they’re looking for. So the more case studies, the better! 
• Check your page titles have the appropriate keywords included. If you’re an electrician in Hammersmith – your homepage title should ideally include this terminology, rather than just say ‘Home’ for example. 
• Interlink between pages on your website. Google is all about user-experience, so make it as easy as possible for visitors to navigate seamlessly around your website. Link blog posts to static pages where applicable. Make sure your navigation is well-structured. Double-check that all of this works just as well on a smartphone as it does on a desktop. 

Have questions about any of the above points so far? You can book a free one-off digital audit with myself or a member of the team right now – choose a date and time to suit you here.  

OK, here’s your final tip for today 😀

Email Marketing. 

Sending a mailshot out to your list and adding as much value to this as you can is a great thing to do. You’re the expert in what you do, so you’re in a great position to offer free help or advice to clients / prospective clients / suppliers / partners.

Email marketing is a brilliant way to do this. And if you’ve managed to read all the way down here to this point, then I’d hope that you’re agreeing with me! 

You don’t need to ‘sell’ via email marketing.

Every time we send a mailshot out to the database it produces some kind of response, but the main thing we’re looking to do is add value and build trust.

Not everybody on your list will be looking to buy right now, but when they’re ready, they’ll know where to come. 

So how do you do it?

I’d recommend Mailchimp, which we use to send emails out for loads of our clients, and it works brilliantly. There’s a free version available if you don’t mind the Mailchimp logo being on the footer of your email and your list isn’t huge, but even the paid version is affordable to most small businesses. 

It’s very intuitive to use, with drag and drop templates, all GDPR compliant (just follow their guidelines) and great reporting too, so you can see who’s opened your email, who’s clicked on the links and so on. 

You can even combine some of the above points by writing a blog post, publicising it on Google My Business and sending an email out to your database for them to read it! 

Thanks for taking the time to read this, I hope you’ve found it useful. 

If you have questions or want to discuss your marketing in more detail, just a reminder that we are offering free one hour slots for you do to do so (you don’t have to take the whole hour of course, but it’s there if you need it 😊). 

You can book in using the link here. 

Cheers and enjoy the rest of your week! 

Matt 

PS if you do implement any of the tips mentioned above then please let me know – I’d love to know how you get on.