How to determine cost per lead per marketing channel and navigating COVID with Michael Ashford of The Receptionist

Big Break Software Podcast

Michael Ashford of the Receptionist talks about changing the company's marketing and growing amidst economic challenges triggered by Covid. Get insights from the podcast.

Michael has navigated various fields before getting to where he is today. He started in the engineering field before transforming into a sports writer and plunged into project management along the way. He would then end up in the sales and marketing industry. Michael admits that his vast experience in different fields has prepared him to thrive in any field. He tells Geordie about his journey in this must-listen-to podcast.

What you'll Learn

• Importance of working together as a team
• The best approach to adopt as a marketing manager
• Strategy Michael and his team used to identify highly valuable leads
• How to get a precise picture of your marketing activity
• Importance of reviews
• What to do after getting a bad review
• How the visitor management system works

In this Episode

While some organizations experienced hard times at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, others like The Receptionist thrived. However, it took a change of strategy to navigate through the hard times.

Michael talks extensively about the concept behind The Receptionist. He gives an illustration of walking inside a company building as a guest or visitor, where you have to sign in to inform the authorities of your presence. Listen to the podcast for more details.

Michael joined The Receptionist some years back to help build the marketing team. The Receptionist works with numerous businesses that deal with walk-in visitors and have no front office staff, probably because they cannot afford to pay them.

How the system works is that; you are a health practitioner for example, handling a client and your next client is waiting at the front office. The system lets you know that someone is waiting in the line and eliminates the need to keep walking to and from your office to find out whether you have clients waiting.

Michael describes his experience when he first joined The Receptionist, which you can only understand by listening to the podcast. Regardless of the team's efforts to boost the organization's performance, none was designed under the go-forward strategy umbrella.

Michael's first task was to outline everything the company was doing and bring it under one cohesive go-forward approach. Working together as a team is critical even when you are the overall manager.

According to Michael, collaborating with the entire team played a significant role in boosting the organization's performance. Acquiring traffic and leads as a new company can be a difficult task. Michael says that a big percentage of their leads and traffic was from referrals and organic traffic.

He mentions that the company was already excelling from an SEO point of view, and the team needed to focus on getting paid search. Michael also discusses another area they needed to focus on building, and you can get the details from the podcast.

Michael explains how to get started as a marketing manager in detail. If you want to enter the marketing world, you cannot afford to skip this part of the podcast. Breaking down data and separating valuable and non-valuable leads was a straightforward process, in Michael’s words. He explains how they did it, and you can get the comprehensive details from the podcast.

Data is critical when defining the direction a company is taking and what the team should do to boost performance. However, Michael admits that he did not appreciate data before he ventured into the marketing field.

Still, he mentions that other factors are critical for performance enhancement. Listen to the podcast to learn some of the surprises that Michael encountered along his marketing journey. When Michael joined The Receptionist, they did not have a robust strategy to get reviews.

Instead, they relied on natural and organic traffic. He highlights the company's only strategy then was the post-customer drip campaign. The Reception has since evolved and adopted an advanced traffic generation approach. He talks about this concept in detail in this podcast. To acquire reviews, Michael and his customer experience representatives had to work hard and implement a solid strategy. Listen to the podcast to learn more about it.

The Receptionist team values reviews and usually incentivizes clients that leave honest reviews with an Amazon gift card. Michael talks about how they address negative reviews, and you can learn about it from the podcast. He also discusses how the company operated during the onset of the pandemic down to the peak of things.

How did they navigate the challenges? Listen to the podcast to find out. Michael also explains the strategy they used to keep the business afloat in detail. It would be best to listen to this part of the podcast whether you are a startup or an established entrepreneur.

Resources

The Receptionist

Michael Ashford LinkedIn