Finding leads is almost a full-time job in an agency or service-based business. In these businesses, marketing departments must focus first on generating leads and building the brand.
Due to this, marketing departments try experimenting with different tools, systems and strategies to generate more and more leads for the business.
One of these is discovery platforms, like G2 Clutch or Goodfirms. These platforms create profiles for almost every services-based business in a particular niche and then convince the company to come to claim their profile.
Once they claim the profile, the marketing team spends considerable time updating it and ensuring it has all the information a potential lead may want.
Everything goes smoothly till this step; after this step, the actual sales model of these platforms kickstarts.
They allow you to appear on the first page or at the top on a few pages of the listings for your specific category. Categories like “Web Developers” or “App Developers” or even “App Developers in UK”.
This starts fine; that model has been active online for a few years now, and there is nothing wrong with doing so. But just as you thought you paid a few thousand rupees to boost your presence on the platform, they send you an email announcing new sponsorship tiers, which can rank you above the existing first place.
Doing this, they keep bumping up and creating arbitrary sponsorship tiers repeatedly, forcing the companies to keep sponsoring others to get up on the listings.
The big question for you as a marketer exploring these discovery platforms would now be:
Then why go and buy sponsorship at all?
Imagine having hundreds of app development, web development or digital marketing businesses create a page each and fill that with descriptions of their business, which include keywords like “app development”, “web development”, or “digital marketing”.
When someone searches for one of those keywords, a website with loads of pages with these keywords is more likely to appear on the first page than the direct link to a service provider.
So unless you as a service provider are willing to spend a lot of money on bidding for those specific keywords and appearing above the organic listings, you will likely appear on the later half of the first-page ranking or the following pages.
But optimising your profile on these discovery platforms for your audience and sponsoring your listing on these platforms is more likely to get you a bigger audience than from an organic search for generic keywords based on your industry.
Then why do we want to lower our dependency on these platforms?
Because the sponsorship tiers are ever-increasing, and the results feel stagnant over some time. Also, these platforms are for just discoverability, so the general leads from here are only sometimes qualified. It becomes your job as a service provider to qualify them.
Some of these platforms have services that can help you qualify the leads, but the accuracy is never 100%.
Having visibility via a profile on these platforms is suitable for your SEO. Still, as someone who has managed the presence on these platforms for two different service-based companies, I would always advise lowering your dependency on these for lead generation in the long run (unless you are happy to have an increasing budget every year for the ever-increasing sponsorship tiers on these platforms).
How do we lower our dependency, then?
Take control of your online presence. That’s the best way to do it.
Take all that sponsorship money and invest it into a great content writer. Get them to write unique pieces of content that are not just targeted towards your specific audience but also can weave in the story around how you, as a service provider, can make that possible for your audience.
Then, distribute that content well across various platforms, opening up opportunities for your audience to find you for different keywords and other media.
All of this will enable your business to create a brand. This brand, once constructed, will ensure that in the future, your audience is not searching for something like “App Developers in <country name>” but searching directly for “<your company name> app development”.
Then, you as a business can happily leave a free profile on these discovery platforms for visibility and better SEO connections and own all the unique content, which can be repurposed and used for sales enablement.