Business Directories

     

Traditional print business dictionaries are dying a slow death…. But online business directories are booming right now and they are a GREAT place to find potential social media clients. Using this approach we are going to focus on businesses that have recently added themselves to the online directories, and businesses that have paid to have premium business listing.

Both of these groups of businesses are great prospects for your services. The businesses that have recently created their listings are actively trying to increase their marketing presence online right now, and the businesses that are paying for premium listings are showing that they are investing actual dollars in online marketing right now, which makes both of them perfect potential clients.

It doesn’t matter where in the world the businesses that you target are located because you can make all of the contacts and communications online, and just like the other jobs in our database you will be completing the work from home. You may prefer to contact businesses located in your Country or local area because it will give you a bit more of a connection with them, but for this example we are going to be using business directories from the UK.

Here is a list of the top online business directories in the UK right now:

• http://www.yell.com
• http://www.wampit.co.uk/
• http://www.thomsonlocal.com/
• http://www.mylocalservices.co.uk/
• http://www.freeindex.co.uk/

For this strategy, all you need to do is browse popular online business directories and look for businesses that have recently added their business to the directory. It is very important that you only focus on businesses that have very recently added their business to the website because this is the secret that will significantly increase your response rate because these businesses are actively looking for more ways to promote their business online right now, so they will be much more receptive to your services.

So for example, if we head over to http://www.freeindex.co.uk there is a ‘Live Updates’ section which shows which businesses have recently added or modified their listings. Both of these indicate that the listing is ‘fresh’ and being actively used by the business owner.

Most online business directories will have a similar kind of system where you can view the most recently created or modified listings.

The next thing to do is contact these “fresh” leads that have added themselves in the directory.

When contacting these businesses make sure they have a website because that is how you will find their contact details.

 

 

Here we see that this business has added their website, Facebook page and Twitter link. This is usually a good sign that they are particularly interested in marketing their business online and will need regular content to post to their social network accounts, so try and target businesses like this where possible.

The next step is to identify the contact information for this business, in particular their email address. Remember we are only looking for business who have a website as part of their business listing, so in most cases it will be quite easy to go over to the business website and get their email address from their contact page.

If they only have a web form on their contact page and don’t actually list their business email address, you can easily do a quick WHOIS search using their domain name, and this will usually bring up their email address. For example, doing a quick search for the website http://6stringsbirmingham.com from our example above, tells us that this business owner email address is 6stringsbham@gmail.com.

You can use this trick to find the business email address for any website you want to contact.

The next step then is to send an email to each of these businesses to try and get them interested in your services, however you don’t want to just send out a promotional email to them listing all of your services because they are more likely to ignore a message like this.

Instead we want to draw on the fact that they have just listed themselves on this business directory website and begin by asking how else you can assist them with their online marketing efforts. Just like most people, business owners are far more concerned with how you can help them then they are in how they can help you.

Here is a sample email that you can use:

You will need to make slight modifications to this email template to suit each individual business that you contact. For instance if they don’t have a Facebook page, instead of saying that you can see some changes that could make it more effective, you can inform them how powerful a Facebook Fanpage can be for a business and offer to help them set one up.

The most important thing is that you make the initial email all about them and helping their business grow, don’t mention money in this first email.

When they reply to your initial email, try and get them involved in a discussion about how using social media more effectively in their business could help them grow. Then and only then, send them your proposal document outlining the services that you could do for them as a social media manager.

Strategy 2 – The Featured Ads Method

This second method is just really a slightly modified version of the first one, but none the less it’s very powerful. In the first strategy we were targeting businesses that had recently added themselves to the business directory, because it showed that they were actively looking for ways to promote their business online, which made them great prospects for your social media marketing services.

In this second strategy we are going to be targeting businesses that are paying to have their business listed in the ‘featured’ or ‘sponsored’ section of the site. These businesses may have been listed in the directory for several years, but the fact that they are in the ‘featured’ section shows that they are currently paying money to be there, which in turn shows that they are willing to invest money in promoting their business online. These businesses also make great prospects for your social media marketing services.

It’s usually very easy to find the businesses that are listed in the ‘featured’ section, as the reason they are paying money in the first place is to be placed more prominently on the site. Let’s look at a quick example of how to find them on www.Yell.com.

All you need to do is go to the home page of the site and do a search for any business type in any business area, for this example we are going to search for ‘Plumbers’ in ‘Manchester’:

 

As you can see above, it’s quite easy to spot the businesses that have paid to be there. They will usually have ‘sponsored’ or ‘featured’ next to their name and they will appear at the top of the search results.

Once you have identified these businesses that have paid to be ‘featured’ on the site, you can follow the same steps as in the strategy above for finding their contact details and emailing them.

Both of these strategies can be used on any business directory site in any country, they all operate in much the same way. This method is a great way of finding clients in your own country or local area, which can be an advantage in getting them to trust you quickly.