We receive emails all the time from pros asking to hear about even more clients looking for their services. Specifically, many people want to be alerted to customers from further afield than our Service Areas tool allowed.
“My biggest payer was a job from a PR agency 100 miles from London,” writes one Bark photographer. “If you were able to set it up to within 125 miles of London, that would be fantastic.”
“I am a photographer based in Dorset and have no interest in work in the South East or London,” says another. “Do you have a lead generation service for my area and surrounding 50-mile radius?”
There’s clearly a demand for larger service areas, so we decided to see what we could do about it!
We’ve been working hard behind the scenes over the past few weeks, and we’re proud to announce two big changes designed specifically to increase the quantity and quality of the leads you receive from us:
1) We’ve expanded the maximum service area size you can set in your Bark profile to a 50-mile radius.
2) When we alert you to a job you’re not interested in doing, you can now hide that Bark so it no longer appears in your dashboard.
To hide someone’s Bark, simply click the ‘I’m not interested’ button in their public Bark and it will disappear from the list of matches in your dashboard – leaving you with just the jobs you’re interested in doing.
Better yet, doing this sends us feedback that will help us tailor our service so we can provide you with better quality leads in the future.
This new feature should prove particularly useful if you cover a large service area and are receiving a high volume of requests from us.
(Of course, if you hide a Bark by accident you can always unhide it again by clicking the ‘Undo ‘not interested’’ button that appears in its place.)
We hope you find these changes useful, and that they’ll mean you can start winning more business than ever before with our service. So why not put them to the test right away?
Log into your Bark profile here to widen your service areas and try out our new ‘hide Bark’ feature to filter through the leads we’re sending you.
We’re always looking for new ways to improve Bark for you and your fellow pros, and later this month we’ll be sending out our summer Seller Survey to find out how you feel we’ve been doing over the past few months.
Keep an eye out for it for your chance to tell us what you really think of our service. In the meantime, let us know what you think of these brand new pro features in the comments below!
I like the idea of Bark as I receive a lot of enquiries from it and
has a lot of potential. However, it appears to me that these enquiries are aimed at anyone with a mixer and a set of speakers who do this a hobby and are working illegally, they give a bad service which gives the professionals a bad name. This is reflected at the average price that you quote the client and gives the impression that it’s cheap to hire a professional, after all you wouldn’t go to a doctor or solicitor who did their job in his or her spare time !
Bark advertise that a client can search for a pro but most of the time are not getting one. A professional DJ is someone who does this as a living and are paying their taxes and national insurance. I believe that if Bark are going to advertise pro DJ’s, then they should at least take some steps to make sure that the clients are getting a pro. Other top agencies manage this by vetting the DJ before registration is accepted as we are asked to provide proof which is what you should really be doing if you want to advertise professionals. A simple survey to anyone who want’s to by Bark credits would solve most of this unless of course your only interest is making money and not the interest of the client.
Here are some of the questions that we have to answer and proof that we have to provide when registering with the top agencies:
1 Is this your main job or is it part time?
2 If you are a professional, please provide registration or UTR number.
3 Please provide proof of PLI (public liability insurance)
4 Please provide proof of PAT ( test certificate for electrical items)
Please feel free to give me a call anytime if you would like to discuss this further as I would be happy to talk. Phone: 01225 762704.
Kindest regards,
Steve.
(Retro DJ – The Ultimate Party Experience)
Hi Steve,
Thanks for your feedback. We’re glad you’re finding the enquiries we’re sending over to you useful!
We’ll certainly pass your comments onto the marketing team and ask them to take what you have to say on board. That said, adding barriers to prevent certain people from joining Bark is something we’ve historically wanted to avoid. We think it’s important that everyone who wants to can use our service to grow their business, and we feel that one of the great strengths of the platform is that it makes it easy for our users to compare the quality of different pros who contact them.
Pros can promote their services through their Bark profiles, and we find that pros with the best profiles also secure the most business using our service. Your Bark profile is already looking pretty damn good, it has to be said. But one thing that will certainly help is if you could ask your next Bark customer to leave you some feedback after you’ve DJ-ed for them, as reviews from verified Bark users will contribute to your company’s Bark star rating. (This star rating will also show up in Google when people search for your Bark profile.)
Thanks again for getting in touch, and we hope this answers some of your questions.
All the best,
The Bark Team
I would like thank Christian for all the great work he done at my home very satisfied a great worker thank you