For many businesses, the advantages offered by Google Voice can create opportunities to breathe a new life into your existing business. In terms of cost-effectiveness, it’s a great way to expand communication methods to customers, while optimizing and organizing your time.

Google Voice gives you one number to manage all your phones and the opportunity to customize your lines and configure phone lines for callers. Other amenities include customizing your ringtones and voicemail greetings based on specific callers, configuring how and when your calls get ported to other lines, and even the ability to manage your lines through the use of a mobile app. But what does that mean for your toll free number, and all the amenities that stem from it? It only gets better.

By applying Google Voice to your vanity toll free number, you’ll get the marketing advantage of instant recognition, increase response rates, and the ability to brand your company while enjoying the many advanced and cost-saving features of Google Voice. Now imagine your vanity toll free number having the ability to:

·Change jobs, mobile carriers, and even move to the other side of the country without having to worry about notifying your clientele of your new number. Think of how much you’ll save by not having to print new business cards.

·Route calls from specific callers at certain times.

·Advance call-recording options for quality control.

·Send SMS Messages through your toll free number.

·Carry on a conversation with callers by seamlessly switching from your work phone landline to your mobile.

·Customize voicemail greetings for your clients, your boss, and even your friends and family.

For more information on how to streamline your new and existing toll free number services through the use of Google Voice, as well as get the most from your vanity toll free number, come to Custom Toll Free and we’ll tell you all about it. Tell us about your business and we’ll tell you how to communicate your brand better.   View our previous article on google voice and vanity toll free, then search for your vanity toll free number.

In today’s economic times, you may have heard about businesses—big and small—cutting down on amenities to save costs.

More and more are opting for customers to come and pay the tab.

While we understand the need for businesses to stay “lean” and keep themselves in a better position for profit, we also know that by cutting certain amenities, like a vanity toll free number from your business, you are also cutting:

·         An easy to remember, paperless, calling card.

·         A more professional and established look for your business.

·         Instant credibility.

·         A solid foundation for your branding/marketing campaign.

So Are You REALLY Cutting Costs or RATHER Cutting Profits?

Not only will you be losing your professional touch, but when you have customers who regularly call your landline through your vanity number, you could inconvenience this niche audience and lose their business. Even in this day and age, you can’t say how many “likes” and “tweets” can replace a customer and call that converts. A vanity number is a billboard without the advertising space, an extension of your brand letting your customers and potential callers know exactly what they’re looking for.

Not to mention, if customer service is your strongest selling point, then this separates you from your competitors. If your competitor’s service has a vanity toll free number, and you’ve got a 10-digit one with a specific area code, then potential customers will perceive the opposite.

The best business practice for you and your customers is to stay online and stay on the line. Making it harder for customers to reach you is not going to make it easier for you in the long run. 

What do small businesses need to spur rapid growth in the economic landscape?

According to the latest data from the LegalZoom/ Kauffman Foundation index on startup confidence released late last week, 84% of small business owners were confident in profitability over the next twelve months, with 96% of younger entrepreneurs bullish on growth.

Of course that doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges out there today. So how can small business owners push growth regardless of what is going on at a macroeconomic level? What tools, strategies, and help should you be reaching out for?

Before charging ahead horns first, or unleashing a massive PPC advertising campaign, consider structure. You absolutely must have scalability built in or increased popularity could actually be your downfall. Make sure operations can scale up to meet demand rapidly without sacrificing customer service or quality and it can be done profitably without slashing profit margins.

Many experts continue to predict social is where it is at, and in one form or another, this is absolutely true, just don’t let it become a distraction. Recent reviews of startup RebelMouse, which offers a social-centric homepage for brands and entrepreneurs, have credited with pulling it all together and replacing old style websites with a virtually 100% social platform. This of course is an extension of what GoDaddy has been doing for years, just with a new twist.

Paid advertising from direct mail to TV commercials and PPC advertising all have their value and place, and can be an essential part of a smart marketing mix for keeping revenues consistent. However, those on limited budgets or just want to put more into product and business development rather than advertising will find incredible power in leveraging others.

In fact, even those who aren’t on a tight budget have recently shifted back to this type of marketing. Find out how they pulled this off in our blog post: “How Small Business Owners Can Leverage Competition”.

Entrepreneur Magazine also recently promoted the benefits of setting up a board of advisors to fuel growth. No matter what stage your business is at or how small it is, a board of advisors cannot only provide priceless insight and advice but help spawn growth through their own contacts too. If coordinating something like this just seems like too much to take on right now, then at least consider the advantages of tapping into the power of coaching for propelling growth.

Location also seems to play a big factor in the rate of business growth. According to a MarketWatch survey some of the top cities in the U.S. for business growth right now include:

1.    Austin, TX

2.    Salt Lake City, UT

3.    Raleigh, NC

4.    San Jose, CA

5.    Seattle, WA

In terms of tools for pushing business growth, toll free numbers are clearly hard to beat. Toll free numbers offer instant scalability, can dramatically increase advertising effectiveness and marketing ROI on PPC, direct mail, TV commercials and more, while toll free vanity numbers serve up mass visibility.

Whatever you do, do it with passion. This is the secret ingredient that will inspire investors to write checks, create new customers, and spur word of mouth referrals. Just ask DropBox. The hugely successful cloud storage service DropBox went from 100k to millions of users in eighteen months and they were poorly equipped to market in an environment packed with competition, armed with a product no one saw a need for.

Unleash your passion, grab winning toll free numbers, and get ready to scale big time!

© Lightkeeper | Dreamstime.com

Monday’s release of Google Now on the iPad and iPhone is an aggressive move that could be extremely beneficial to small business owners and entrepreneurs. How can small business owners leverage Google’s strategy to leap ahead of their competitors?

Siri’s nemesis has been unleashed!

Google’s version of the digital smartphone assistant ‘Google Now’ is now available on Apple devices and aims to seduce users to the Android platform. Apple struggles to keep up with Samsung and Google Now claims the edge with intuitive coding that doesn’t just serve up search results but learns about users and takes a proactive approach to delivering on their wants in advance.

Some smartphone users may find it overly intrusive, but it shows the huge power of not only leveraging others but even leveraging the platforms and tools of the competition to benefit your own small business.

This is certainly a growing necessity and incredibly powerful strategy for small business owners in all industries. Don’t run from the competition; use them for your benefit. Who can you leverage? How can you use their platforms and social media coverage to your own advantage?

Toll free numbers can be one of the best tools for achieving this quickly and simply. By using back order and monitoring services, small businesses can pick up high value vanity numbers that are already known and can feed a lot of inbound calls right away, or use the ‘law of contrast’ and use your toll free vanity number to be seen as the cheaper, faster or more convenient option in the market….