Click to call: A Small Business Owner’s Secret Weapon

click to call

For many business owners, the almighty phone call still reigns supreme as the main source of leads. More and more, consumers of all kinds are doing their searching for what they want via their mobile phones, often on a smart phone. Therefore, it is incumbent on the business owner who has a site and/or markets online to be aware of the best way to get your potential customers to reach out and call you.

Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

I’ve harped on this before but whether you like it or not, searches on mobile devices now outnumber searches on desktop computers. You have to make your site mobile friendly one way or another because you are losing customers if you don’t. Although Google’s storied “Mobilegeddon” from earlier in 2015 turned out to be overblown in terms of how far your site would fall in the rankings if you weren’t mobile friendly, a site that doesn’t display nicely on a smart phone is costing you opportunities to connect with your customer base. There is debate about what is the best way to make your site mobile friendly so I’m not going to air that here as it is a huge subject. Certainly, there are many supposed online “site builder” applications that people use to make their site mobile friendly that do a terrible job of it. This is something to be aware of when choosing any of the very popular online sitebuilders. Try and check out examples of sites people have created with these “tools” and see how it looks on your smart phone. Caveat emptor.

Whatever you decide to use, display your phone number prominently if that’s the best way to connect with your customer. “Loud and proud” is the operative phrase here and make sure that their phone calls you when they click the phone number.

Create AdWords Campaigns That Are Call Only

Many people are familiar with Google’s AdWords paid search platform from the seemingly never ending stream of ads plastered all over their properties. Well, this platform has two great ways that you can drive people to call your business. First, you can create a Call Only ad. You’ll need to get signed up with AdWords and then set up ads that are designed to have an ad only response. Then you can choose your keywords, set your budget and bids and wait for the searchers to trigger your ad by putting in the keywords you specified. That’s a very simplified explanation but it’s essentially what happens.

Alternatively or in addition, you can ad an “extension” to your regular paid search ad so that in addition to giving the searcher the option to see a page on your site, they can also see your phone number and call you by clicking on it. This is fantastic for giving your potential customers a choice on how they want to learn about you.

Between these two tactics, click to call offers you either a free or paid solution to driving customers to call your establishment. For more info on these concepts, call (864) 399-7920 and let us show you how you can implement it into your online marketing strategy.