How this came about and why you should implement it...
A few years ago, one of our contractors, Jacob Carr of
Nottawasaga Mechanical in Wasaga Beach Ontario, asked us to build some email submission forms in his website so that customers could fill them out and have their submissions counted as votes. When we asked him why he was doing it, he said that he was so tired of throwing money at marketing that didn’t produce results, he figured he’d rather give the money to charity instead. He decided to create a contest in his website where he could have a few local charities compete for a $1,000 cash prize by simply getting their supporters to visit his website and vote for their charity. The rules were that they could vote as many times as they wanted to—but only once per day. At the end of three months, the charity with the most votes got the prize.
As simple as this contest was, we saw his web traffic increase from an average of 30 visitors a day, up to well over 120 visitors daily—all local! Jacob later told me he doubled his service business in the first year after he started doing it—without doing anything else different in his company. What Jacob had discovered, was that instead of trying to drag customers into our world by advertising and marketing, by positioning his company within the traffic of what his community was already passionate about, the engagement with the community this created caused his company’s brand to explode.
In July of last year, when Google released its Local Services platform, it became apparent that the landscape would be drastically changing when it came to getting leads from local search. At that time, we decided we needed to totally expand our programming focus to make our websites less dependent on Google for success and find a way to use the web to engage our clients’ communities more. Because of this, we took Jacob’s program and reinvented it.
Since we never take a product to our clients that we haven’t thoroughly tested and evaluated, we have spent over 13-months of testing to get this right. During that time, the program has gone through many improvements, changes, and additions that I’m sure you will appreciate as you read on. Best of all, we have automated almost every part of it to make it easy to implement and scale. You can read about how the entire process works
here.
As a company, we are extremely excited to finally launch it, not only for what it will do for our clients, but for all the great local organizations that will benefit from it as well - dave
David Squires - President, Online-Access