Are you frustrated with your digital marketing efforts not getting the responses you hoped for? It could be because you are not easy to contact. Being easy to reach is essential in today’s world, whether you’re looking for a job, trying to grow your business, or staying connected with friends and family.
But how do you know if you’re easy to contact? First – a few things to check:
- Your email address. Is it up-to-date and easy to remember? If it’s not, consider creating a new one that’s easy to share.
- Your phone number. Is it listed on your website and social media profiles? If not, add it so that people can easily reach you.
- Your social media profiles. Are they active and up-to-date? If not, start posting interesting content and engaging with your followers.
If you think you have the above already nailed down- read on for a deeper check and prepare to be surprised!
We realized that businesses did not pay attention to whether they were easy to contact some years ago. Here is the backstory:
We were running a Google Ads campaign for a manufacturing client. The client wanted potential customers to call the company phone number. The analytics reported that calls were coming in from the ads. Yet the client was reporting far fewer calls than our analytics. By chance, we called the client company number and found that the whole “Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed. Click 1 if you know your party’s extension, Click 2 for the names directory, 3 for HR, 4 for Sales, 5 for Service …” took 2.5 minutes or 150 seconds. There was no way that today’s prospect was to wait on a phone call for that long. We had the client CEO call their number at our next meeting, be dismayed, and then fix the problem!
It turns out that in many professional settings, we never check if we are easy to contact. Here is a checklist:
- LinkedIn: Our experience is that 80% of LinkedIn users do not have contact details filled out. And unless you are an academic, you do not tend to have at least one email on a public university website or a journal article you might have written. So you are tough to find or reach. This is further complicated as many people do not have the LinkedIn app or LinkedIn messenger on their phones. Thus, we request that our dear readers update your LinkedIn profile with at least one email you check. Here is how to add your contact details to your LinkedIn profile.
- Are your emails on your cell phone? Americans checked their phones 96 times a day and unlocked them 150 times a day in 2022, according to Zippa. You might have 5-6 or more email accounts for various purposes like family, work, job search etc. You need to have all of them on your cell phone because you are unlikely to log in to each account daily from another device, like a laptop. And responding to an important email after more than a day is too long.
- Do you have voicemail set up on your cell phone? Not having your voicemail set up is a problem for many people of all ages. You don’t want to take a junk call but need to receive a phone call message from a prospective client. Here is a YouTube video on how to set up your voicemail for iPhone and Android devices. Do not set up the phone number automatic voicemail if you have any digital marketing campaign with this as a “Call Now!” option. Just imagine how comforting it is for a prospect to find voice confirmation of the brand after calling a phone number from a digital marketing piece.
- Do you have Social Media Apps on your phone? If you use Facebook, Instagram, or other social media, you must have the associated app, e.g., Facebook Messenger, on your cell phone. Why? Because you need to know quickly if there is something you need to respond to.
- How to deal with junk or near-junk individual messages? Junk messages are sent in bulk by voice, text, email, or social media. Sometimes they can be very relevant and mean a lot because the other party is interested in doing business. So these relevant ones are worth replying to. And then some individuals reach out and don’t know enough, i.e., haven’t researched enough, about what they are asking. If you have the resources, developing a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page and directing them, there is good.
We hope the above checklist helps our dear readers to be more accessible professionally as well as personally.