This question was first posted in 2008, but continues to generate response. So this is Part 2 of the discussion thread:

 

Question:

Does anyone have ideas on how to get more customers. What do you guys do? I have heard of salesmen, Yellow Pages, fliers, restroom signage and Internet ads. What else is there? Does having a lower price work? Maybe talking about the service works better?

 

Answers:

Every few years, I bomb the Internet with ads. And things haven’t changed one bit, the Net will burn your phone up with callers looking for the cheapest price.

 

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I’m managing and tracking where all my leads come from. I just took over the business, and since 1978 this company has used Yellow Pages as if it were the answer to the new customer prayers, and it was for many years. For the past two years, I’ve been tracking how much money comes in from Internet advertising versus Yellow Pages and I get as much from the Internet on one-tenth the budget. I manage my own Google AdWords account, and have my domain provider manage another set of ads, but they do not compete with each other since they both link to the same Web page. So for the next round of Yellow Pages advertising, I’m going to scale way back and no longer put my money on that horse. I forgot to mention that the Yellow Pages is netting me a loss every month, whereas my online advertising approaches are all yielding a very nice gain.

 

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We continue to reduce our Yellow Pages presence. We recently had our website overhauled and I keep a Facebook account for the business. I have a couple of videos on YouTube as well. We are thinking of changing our website to a blog where we can change the content ourselves and keep it fresh and keep pricing current.

Another thing that we do to self-promote is put fliers in our billing. With the portable toilets we send out a lot of bills, so we will put a flier in about our other services. It’s amazing how many people tell us they never knew we pumped septic tanks or sold RV deodorizer or whatever.

 

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I just had a website built, and even with the simple (but effective) website we have gotten a lot of business. It is only a year old, but I am going to have it redone because I firmly believe it will drive even more traffic to us.

 

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I used tracking numbers for all my markets. All I can say is the phone book in this area is only a small portion of new customers. It costs me more for the ads than I brought in. Word-of-mouth, nice clean trucks and the Web are the way to go. I have thought about direct mail postcards, but it would have to be very reasonable in price to be worth it. The problem with direct mail advertising is people need to see it constantly. Do a good job all the time and you will get work. Remember, you’re only as good as your last satisfied customer.

 

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After I get my website up and running, I’m going to concentrate on the Facebook page and collecting more content (pictures and videos) for both. And I love the idea of a flier with the services you offer.

One avenue we started this year that has really worked is using a website called Service Pro. We pay per lead they generate for us. A lot of times they match us directly with a customer instead of giving a bunch of names. Sometimes it’s just people pricing, but a lot of times people actually want the job to get done. The trick here is to have a nice profile, and to call the person immediately after receiving the lead.

This is not necessarily a plug for the website, and it might not suit your needs (I live in a densely populated area), but it’s something to think about. We started off with $100 a month for our budget and have been steadily increasing it to see if we will hit a plateau.

 

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I beat the phone book drum because it produces the highest-profit jobs for me. I am all over the Internet also. This does make the phone ring, but if I didn’t ask where they got my number before I gave them a price I wouldn’t have gotten the chance because 9 out of 10 Internet callers are shopping prices and I’m far from being the cheapest and don’t hide that fact. But you need to be there in today’s market.

But other than the phone book, I get the best-profit jobs from the Better Business Bureau. It doesn’t ring your phone off the hook, but they typically aren’t shopping for the cheapest prices. After 20 years, I’ve learned the quality leads will keep you in business.

 

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I actually get very few calls off my website, even though it ranks really well. However, the calls I do get are almost never for pumping, but for new system installations, which are worth more to me than 10 tank pump-outs. I built a spreadsheet to track advertising. Every customer gets asked where they heard about us. I can tell you the percentage of calls from each form of advertising (including referrals and repeats) generates, as well as total number of calls, percentage of gross sales, average job value per call per medium, and so forth. Build yourself one and in one year you’ll know where to concentrate your advertising efforts.