How can catalogues like Clutch help to get more clients?

Zlata VerzhbitskaiaFeb 26, 2020

Clutch and GoodFirms may be good sources of leads. What is more, they can become brilliant ones, if you apply creative thinking and know a couple of simple hacks.

NinjaPromo team is sure that the following tips will make your catalogue work out effectively:

• The company should be on the top of the list. It’s human nature to click on the top lines. The position is determined by the rating and the money spent (sponsors are higher in the list by default).
• The catalogue should be popular. Basically, the most crucial factor here is the popularity of the sections required. You may be number 1, but if the potential customers can’t see the section — it’s useless.
• It’s vital that after clicking on the company’s site the potential buyers can quickly get all of the necessary information. They should not need to have to put lots of effort into understanding what you actually do, and how your company can be useful.

The main advantage of the catalogue is its target audience. It’s focused on the leads that are currently being searched for. The search stage may be an early one (just asking for something) or a later one (evaluating the requirements). In most cases, the aforementioned clients are almost at the stage of buying. And now we gonna how to get the most out of catalogues by using your brains, and not your money.

1. Don’t spoil the rating “by chance”.

One of the main success factors on Clutch is a good rating. Let’s have a look at a typical “lower-than-deserved” rating scheme:

1. We warn a client whose project we have polished that Clutch will reach out to him to ask a couple of questions.

2. Then, our client is actually asked about the work, and here we have the problem. There are several criteria to evaluate the company (quality, price, deadlines, etc). That’s the point at which some clients start having strange thoughts like “I can’t give them five stars, nobody will believe that; the site will think that I’m a bot”.

As a result, the client gives you five stars on almost all the criteria, except the “unimportant” one for which he gives you this hateful four or even three star rating. Unfortunately, it makes the final rating lower. Furthermore, as popular pages are full of competitors, even 0.1 has a big effect and can lower your position.

If at the end of the project, the budget has become five times larger than expected, a manager made a call to the client during a party, or instead of an iOS game you created a Drupal portal as usual, don’t share the client’s contact details with a Clutch representative.

Usually, clients aren’t prepared to give a review. Everything may seem to have been okay as the client didn’t say a word, but in reality he wasn’t quite satisfied. That’s why you need to get the feedback yourself first (during the project and at the end), and only then recommend the client to Clutch. Otherwise, the customer may share what he wants, and it may not be what you expect.

2. Look for the most popular pages and sections

Catalogues don’t usually share the data from their analytics, that’s why we can only make guesses about the efficiency (or we have to test it). But there’s a way to make a rough estimate about the popularity of the catalogue, or even separate sections. This method can be used in two cases:

1. You found a catalogue with the price of “only $500” (or $5000) for getting to the top, or receiving millions of leads. However, the statistics and the catalogue views seem to be questionable. Or maybe you’re planning to buy Sponsorship on Clutch but still have some doubts.

2. You’re an all-rounder with a wide range of services and are thinking which sections are suitable for you.

Our method is based on the fact that the biggest volume of traffic is received from search engines. For instance, according to SimilarWeb, Clutch got 52% of its traffic from search systems:

Of course, SimilarWeb can be a liar sometimes, but the basic data should be very close to reality.

So, here’s how to evaluate the catalogue and sections’ views:

Register at Ahrefs, they offer a free full-function trial!

Advice: You need to enter your card number and remember that if you forget to unsubscribe, the money will be charged in two weeks (set a notification in Google Calendar in advance).

Enter Clutch.co at the Site Search, go to Top Pages and have a look at the Traffic column:

Here we can see which pages get the biggest traffic from the search engine.

Note: it’s obvious that the numbers aren’t 100% correct and exact, but they give us an overall picture.

You can enter the URL of the page that seems to be interesting in the Search in results to see the approximate number of users and the keywords that made it visible.

3. Don’t forget about Location

When filling in the profile, you can provide the company’s address (even more than one). If you’re planning to buy a virtual address in the USA and you don’t have a preferred town or city, choose a city on Clutch that has:

• good traffic
• not many companies with Sponsorship that are at the top of the list

That’s an easy way to appear on the top. The algorithm is the following:

1. Take the cities that have separate pages (right here).

2. Enter them one by one in Search in results and check if there’s a section with decent volumes of visits that you like:

3. Register a virtual address in the city and add in Location.

Note 1: Of course, you are taking a risk. There’s no guarantee that there won’t be an out-of-the-blue inspection by Clutch to check your credibility.

Note 2: Don’t over do it. If a company that has 1–10 employees with a rate of 0–25 has 15 offices all over the USA, your scheme will easily be discovered!

4. Make the user-friendly landing page for Clutch

In the catalogues it’s possible to share a link to your website for the client to learn more about your company:

The thing is that you don’t have to make the link connect to your main page. For example, your company offers multiple services. But in the catalogue you’re on the third page in almost all the sections, except for one. Why don’t you personalize this page for the users that follow the link on your top section?

3 lifehacks to convert Clutch visitors into leads

1. Be specific. People who look through the list of potential contractors are aware of the service type they want. That’s why it’s important to convince them of your company’s ability to help them.

Wrong: We are building the future of a digital world. The phrase is too broad to explain what your company does. You may sell servers, or set up printers.

Correct: We build iOS and Android apps which are ranked at the top of the AppStore and Google Play listings.

Can you spot the difference? In the first case, our precious customer gets to read some abstract phrase. Imagine that in the supermarket you ask if the bread is fresh and get an answer like: “The bread is the future of your appetite”.

2. Contact form. Everybody puts it in a visible place or makes a bright and vivid “Сontact us” button. Clutch visitors are usually “warm” and their conversion rate is quite high, but why not make it better?

3. Say “Hello” to the client from Clutch in a different way, for instance: “Hi, Clutcher” or “Hello, Clutch visitor”. This will personalize the page and make it more “familiarized”.

Important note: It would be naive of you to think that your company is the one and only one. A potential customer won’t wait for an answer from your salesperson. Usually, buyers send an RFT (request for proposal) to a couple of companies. To win the client you need to answer immediately, to get ahead of your competitors.

Sum-up

1. Be very careful when choosing a review-writing client.
2. Analyze the effectiveness from different catalogues or sections.
3. Get into the top list of the city where you have an “office”
4. Convert users with the help of your website.

Obviously, there’s no guarantee that these life hacks will be useful for your company. We faced many different situations — hacks that worked for one team, didn’t necessarily work for another. Anyway, they’re worth trying!