How to Handle Inbound Marketing

The primary purpose of the online marketing is to make your phone ring.  Many things can go wrong if you’re not careful.  You can lose customers by simply not picking up the phone or by using an answering machine to screen calls. Remember, potential new customers who have found your phone number online have many additional choices.  With the click of a mouse they can easily find your competitors’ phone numbers.  Statistics show nearly all potential new customers won’t call back if your phone just rings and very few will leave a message on your answering machine.  Both of these outcomes result in wasted marketing dollars.

Statistics show that over 90% of all buyers do not use price as the primary reason for buying a product or service.  You should do your best to have a caring and enthusiastic person answering the phone.   Your customers won’t buy from you unless they know that you care and that you are working in their best interest. 

If you can’t immediately service a potential sales call and the call has to be transferred to someone more knowledgeable, make sure you get that person back on line with the potential new customer very quickly.  The MIT study below shows that your chance of turning that call into a customer drops off rapidly after the first five minutes!  

Performance Media Placement offers a broad range of positive return on investment (ROI) based online marketing programs for small to mid-sized businesses (SMB’s).  The Company tailors campaigns to fit specific business types and geographic targets.  The Company’s contracts are month to month and all changes can be made at any time, allowing for continual optimization.  All programs are completely turn-key, i.e.  customers don’t even need a website to receive immediate presence online.  Results can be seen as soon as 10 days after the customer places an order.

Performance Media Placement provides our customers open and transparent access to all of our processes and campaign metrics.  We never operate any black hat, scam or fraud  processes.

How to Deal with Stupid Bloggers

Most of the negative information posted online against small businesses comes from past employees or competitors.  Neither is often very smart.  They often make mistakes. In order to successfully combat such attacks on your company’s reputation, you need to capitalize on these mistakes wherever possible.

Case Study:  We terminated an employee who immediately went online and created a fake account with Merchant Circle (a very popular directory for small businesses), and tried to pose as Performance Media Placement.  This fake account showed up almost immediately on the Internet and was intended to make our company look like a scam.  This ex-employee posted a listing as us using verbiage such as “we will rip you off”.  Did we mention how dumb some of these people can be?  I doubt anyone would have taken this seriously, but we continued to pursue this false listing anyway. 

We contacted Merchant Circle and told them our problem.  They verified that we were the real Performance Media Placement and that the other account was a fraud. They then disclosed the email of the person that set up this listing.  This ex-employee had used a Gmail account with their name (name@gmail.com).  This is the kind of mistake that is easy to take advantage of. Having determined their identity, we quickly called this ex-employee and asked that they remove the listing.  They refused.  We then called our local police department, who quickly dispatched an officer. The officer proceeded to call this employee for details of the investigation and in the conversation convinced him to remove the fake account.  Problem solved in less than a day from the day we discovered it. If law enforcement had declined to pursue the action or Merchant Circle refused to remove the listing, knowing the ex-employee’s information will allow you to respond these fraudulent claims by calling them out on their real identity.

An alternate solution would to contact the ex-employee’s current employer and apply pressure there, at the very least by warning them that if they ever part ways with this employee in a negative way, their reputation will be at risk. Be sure not to break any non-disclosure laws your state might have against revealing the details of the person’s employment history.  

If you aren’t sure who is posting fraudulent blogs or calling your company a scam, you can use www.emailfinder.com to try to find out. If you are willing to spend some money, a private investigator with connections to law enforcement can dig even deeper. 

We’d like to thank Merchant Circle for their ability to be reached and their professional assistance in helping us resolve this fake listing very quickly.  What a fantastic company!

Performance Media Placement offers a broad range of positive return on investment (ROI) based online marketing programs for small to mid-sized businesses (SMB’s).  The Company tailors campaigns to fit specific business types and geographic targets.  The Company’s contracts are month to month and all changes can be made at any time, allowing for continual optimization.  All programs are completely turn-key, i.e.  customers don’t even need a website to receive immediate presence online.  Results can be seen as soon as 10 days after the customer places an order.

Performance Media Placement provides our customers open and transparent access to all of our processes and campaign metrics.  We never operate any black hat, scam or fraud  processes.