I’m currently working with several different companies in a few different industries, Healthcare, Software, Education and Small Appliances. Each industry has their own language and their own differentiation. At the same time there are many commonalities. All of these businesses are looking for qualified leads or qualified prospects to do at least one of the following:

subscribe to a newsletter

fill out a web form

call an 800#

walk into a store

purchase a product online

download a white paper

etc

There are many ways to get people to come to the company web sites. The best way in my humble opinion is through the press. media has the most creditability and bang for your buck. What media also does is give you links. As many of us know Google wants two things: 1) quality content 2) quality incoming links pointing to your site. An article on the New York Times Business Home Page gives you links and creditability and traffic.

Hiring a press agency or PR Firm can be expensive, and the good ones deserve the money they get. I like to teach business owners how they can capitalize on using the media to their advantage. One such client is Intervention Services Inc. Mike Loverde landed a huge interview on CNN just after the Michael Jackson story. I have written a product that teaches people how to get on the Six O’Clock News.

The point here is that Mike took action on this “PR Test,” and it worked. He now not only has more traffic coming to his site and more inquiries but he now has a video he can share and reuse for new clients. The only cost of the “test” were his fees to me and his time which were small. The name of the game is to “test” for as small of an investment as possible and roll out when the test works and do more of it.

In another client situation my customer has an electronic sound machine. It is like a clock radio but also with sounds of sea gulls, a running river, chimes etc. He has found success in selling these products in big box stores, however his margins are much better in a direct sale environment. One area he has had success is in the hospital market. He has found that he is able to get multiple orders in hospitals. What I have recommended to him in starting to exploit this market is to test some advertising in newsletters that go to the buyers in hospitals. Again we have to find a newsletter(s) that won’t cost an arm and a leg (hopefully less than $500) with reasonable reach and see if it works. In the mean time we will be making a new landing page for this specific audience. it might sound like a lot of work but in actuality it only takes about a week to put these together.

In another healthcare related situation I received an e-mail today from a Drug Treatment Center asking my opinion of his videos. (I’m a HUGE believer in Video SEO as a matter of fact I am building a business around it to distribute online videos). But my question back to this prospective client was: “How many phone calls did you get from them?” And his response was: Good Question. I’m not sure what it took to produce the videos but they looked like they were well produced and professional, however, they were missing a lot of things. They were not tagged correctly, I only saw them on one video network, there was no call to action etc. So the point here is I commend this person for venturing out into video and testing it. He might have been better served hiring someone like me before producing and distributing them.

A bigger point to all of this is that testing is an investment. If this is true, then we want to maximize our investment as much as possible and stack the deck in our favor and give ourselves an unfair competitive advantage when we test. Too many failed tests cost a lot of money and it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the advantages my clients have is using my experience and many failed tests in learning what NOT to do. Here is one of my favorite quotes:

“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” Red Adair

Save yourself a lot of time and money, hire someone with experience and results in their given field, it should serve you well.