How to gain clients for your Call Center: Pay-Per-Click!

You down with PPC? Yeah you know me.
Remember this song from the 90’s? I do. Or was it the 80’s. It is all a distant memory. Actually, it was OPP, not PPC, but close enough, right? People ask me all day long how to get clients for their call center. The truth is that there are hundreds of ways, and PPC is one.

Google and other mediums offer pay-per-click programs.
You can pay for clicks on particular keywords. You bid how much you are willing to pay on particular keywords, and you can set a daily maximum budget for ad-groups which are groups of keywords which supposedly are in the same category (for best results). Easy, right? Actually, this PPC system requires a lot of time and expertise. I recommend that you learn something about it so that you are in control.

Yes, you can hire an online marketing specialist to help you out.
Whether they are any good or not is something you will not know if you are keyword illiterate. You might get screwed, or just receive mediocre work at great expense. Or, you can master the ancient Chinese art of keyword identification, selection and ROI analysis. If my memory serves me correct, Sun-Tze made references to this art in his literature… Actually, scratch that — I’m confusing Sun-Tze’s psychological warfare techniques with my keyword warfare techniques and my memory is playing tricks on me.

The basics you need to know are:

(1) What your keywords are.
This includes keyword variations, and combinations of geographical terms and keyword variations. If you promote Twitter campaigns in Noida, then you might like terms such as:
Twitter Noida, Twitter Promotion Noida, Social Media Noida, Noida Social Media, Noida Twitter, Online Marketing Noida, eMarketing Noida, Internet Marketing Noida, Internet Marketing India, Internet Marketing Delhi

Pair geographic words & industry terms
These are just the tip of the iceberg (or the heap of discarded coconut husks in the case of Noida). Each geographical term needs to be paired with industry terms — forward and backwards — with the geographical term before and after the word. Include nearby cities, metro names, country names, and more. Include related industry terms like Call Center, Social media, Online Marketing, and more. Additionally, Google has a bunch of suggested terms, and estimates for how many clicks you will get bidding on their recommended terms. Get an account and the possibilities are as endless as you can pay for.

(2) ROI…
You need to know if certain words are getting you customers. This is not so easy to predict. But, you hire a professional to configure the ROI system on Google, and then you can see how many searches for particular terms make it to your contact us page. If they fill out an inquiry form, then that qualifies as a LEAD, and leads are worth money, and are a metric. You need to figure out how many contacts equals a new client, and what a new client is worth. Also please keep in mind that if your company learns to better at retaining clients through better customer services, you might keep your new clients longer and get more referrals — hence making them 10x as valuable. Smart… very smart…

(3) Adjusting your bids
Once you can guess the ROI on your terms which can take a few months in some cases, you need to adjust your bids. Beware, google adwords has some bizarre twists. I find that if I bid a particular amount on a term, I can slowly lower my bid, yet get the same traffic. Why is this? That is because Google slowly acquires analytics on my ads performance and CPM revenues that they are getting. If I get steady clicks, then they lower my price to be in the same approximate level in the paid search results. Additionally, if my ad is out there longer, then people recognize my company name and click on my ad more which increases my CPM click rate — and google LOWERS my per click price at a particular level the more clicks per 1000 impressions I get — a very interesting fact which you need to write down your notebook.

(4) Add more ad groups
As your campaign grows and prospers, you can add more ad groups, more terms, and refine your campaign. You can even be more aggressive and try new offensives.

(5) Geo-targeting 101.
Learn this. If you are an Indian Call Center, and want clients in America, Google allows you to target certain geographical regions of the world. Target towns, cities, zip codes, countries, or even continents. You will pay more for clicks from America, but that is where the high paying clients are. Keep in mind that Americans are also more demanding, and often more berating or hard to deal with than your friendly and agreeable compatriots in mother India. If you are going to pay big bucks to Google (which has made me very successful by the way), make sure your website is attractive enough to get conversions (sales) from the traffic that Google gets you. Presentation comes before promotion — got it? Also, make sure your staff who answers the phone can deal with American clients gracefully. You might consider an American phone #, and answering the phone 24 hours a day.

(6) Lessons to be learned.
I used Google PPC to find companies as well as to advertise my own company. I learned that many overseas companies, particularly a company in China NEVER answer their phone. That means that all of the thousands that they waste in PPC costs go down the drain. I wonder what Sun-Tze would have to say about that?

Pretend to be weak when you are ready to attack — Sun-Tze (rephrased by me)
Throw your money down the drain when you desperately need it to hire staff members who speak passable English — The opposite of what Sun-Tze would say.

Remember…. business is war. If you fail, you go broke and suffer being socially ostracized, poverty, disease and other horrible fates. Use Google Adwords the right way and you could become a millionaire. Use it wrong and you can lose it all.

You might also like:

How to attract clients to your call center — Linked In
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/08/13/how-to-attract-clients-to-your-call-center-linked-in/

How good is your salesperson? How much difference does it make?
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/04/11/how-good-is-your-salesperson-how-much-difference-does-it-make/

How to attract clients to your call center: don’t deal with people who use personal email accounts. http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/08/27/how-to-attract-clients-to-your-call-center-dont-deal-with-people-who-use-personal-email-accounts/

How to get clients for call centers — contracts!
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/04/05/how-to-get-clients-for-call-centers-contracts/