Building a web presence for an asset recovery service comes with a unique set of challenges. Due to the nature of the business, it’s inevitable that you’ll be opening yourself up to negative reviews of all sorts. It’s understandable that people get upset when they have their personal belongings repossessed. They never intended not to be able to pay their bills, and when things start to take a turn for the worse their emotions will inevitably skyrocket. They are losing property associated with their livelihood, their lifestyle, or in the worst cases – their home.
As much as you would like to control what people say about your company on the internet, much of the time this simply isn’t possible. As with most things in business, you’re going to have to make the best of what you have and focus on the aspects of your campaign that are soundly within your control. Recently I spoke with a business owner who was facing these exact challenges, and I wanted to share some of the tactics that really made a huge impact on their success.
Focus on Your Customers
The first thing to be fully aware of is that the people most likely to give you negative or even slandering reviews are most likely not going to be your customers. This means you should pay as little attention as possible to common review platforms that are accessible to the everyday person, such as Google reviews, Yelp, and similar platforms. You may even want to remove your business from these listings if at all possible.
Instead, you want to focus your efforts on the avenues which your actual customers are likely to come across your business. Since you will most likely be working with other businesses, the three most prominent avenues for new customer acquisition are likely to be word of mouth, targeted advertisements, and organic search.
Word of mouth obviously comes down to the quality of your service, your relationships with your loyal customers, and the overall reputation of your business. This is was makes you stand out from the pack, and it is the core form of marketing for so many service businesses around the world.
Another form of marketing that many asset recovery services employ is targeted advertisement to businesses that are likely to need valuable assets repossessed. You can look into avenues such as direct outreach, including but not limited to emailing the companies directly, getting business owners on the phone, or even showing up to their physical location to have a conversation. You can also try Google Adwords, but this can be quite a pricey way to acquire customers so make sure you have the wherewithal to make high-quality landing pages that will turn those leads into paying customers.
The final avenue that can really pay off is getting your website to perform well in the search engines for search terms that potential customers may be looking for. This undoubtedly takes some skill and may often require consultation with a professional in the field.
Support Your Web Presence
Once you have found ways to get your potential customers familiar with your business, you want to make sure that your website is up to par. You want to have a professional and modern website that makes it easy to understand the basics about your business. Display your pricing structure or make it easy for your visitors to request a quote, start an online chat, or pick up the phone and speak with one of your representatives.
Getting people to see your website and interact with your brand is one thing, but it’s only truly valuable if you can turn them into paying and hopefully returning customers. Once you have them on board with your service, it’s important that you show them just how awesome your company truly is. As mentioned before, your customer’s experience is one of the most powerful forms of marketing for a service business. It’s no secret that happy customers are highly likely to recommend your business to their peers, and once the ball gets rolling you’ll be seriously off to the races.
