Your Advertising Budget Should Not Be A Gamble

By Author: James Diorio
Total Articles: 4762
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Your advertising dollars are wisely invested, and should bring in a noticeable ROI [Return On Investment]. You've diversified all your campaigns in media selections, demographics, and geo-targeting. It's a huge investment, given the current market economy, so it had better pay off in sales and profits.

The smart business owners and managers know a recession is one of the best opportunities to take hold of their market. Lesser companies cut back on expenditure (especially advertising and marketing), so it's an advantageous time to boost your own. Keeping your company name, services and products in mind while your competition drops in visibility is key not only to current sales, but also to being in the forefront as the market returns and grows.

It's time to leave your competition out of sight, and out of mind!

HEDGING YOUR MARKETING RETURN

With your ads in place, online and offline, some new calls start coming in. Some of your strategies have begun to pay off - or have they?

Getting a return on your investment isn't really a success if you don't measure the gain (or loss) vs. cost of each campaign. ...
... Which target markets are responding to your ads? Which advertisements have proven to be fantastic value, and which are barely breaking even? How much of your advertising budget is being wasted on little or no return?

If one campaign is missing the mark, while another has generated great response and sales, you need to consider shifting budgets from the poor results to the marketing that is bringing in your sales. You need to track and manage your campaigns, not just hope that each will bring in a little. If you haven't been tracking your calls, then sit down now because you've been throwing away your profits.

TAKING A LESSON FROM ONLINE MARKETING

A website is useless if nobody knows it exists. Companies will spend small fortunes on SEO [Search Engine Optimization] services to be seen near the top of the listings. They'll bid on keywords to paid advertising campaigns to draw traffic to their website. They'll monitor their system to see exactly which PPC [Pay Per Click] campaigns are bringing in the most money, which operates at a loss, and exactly which links are bringing in the most customers.

You need to follow the same strategy with your phone traffic. You must determine which calls were the result of which ad campaign, otherwise you will end up wasting valuable resources on poor return choices, and spending too little on the campaigns that could bring in even more business.

Call tracking should visually present your call volumes, allow you to drill down by source or destination number for specific details, run reports, and provide analytical charts and graphs to narrow your full ROI.

CALL ROUTE TRACING

Cost efficiency can be improved by examining detailed caller records, by source and destination number, and can quickly show where staffing trends may need improvement. See who called, when they called and where the call was routed, will allow you to determine peak periods within and outside your local area.

If you operate nationally, or internationally, the time zone differences could result in an enormous loss of potential sales if your phones aren't manned for out of area calls.

One incredibly valuable utility is auto call routing, where you can set the system to automatically identify the callers source by geographic location or area code, and redirect the call to a specific region or staff. This is an incredibly powerful tool if you deal with foreign speaking clients: you can have the calls instinctively be directed to the staff member who speaks their language without confusion. You've just made it faster and easier to complete that caller's order - and increased the likelihood they'll order again in the future.

YOUR PHONE NUMBER HAS A HUGE IMPACT

While you are using individual phone numbers for your advertising campaigns, you can increase the response rate significantly if you make good use of vanity numbers that really resonates with your audience.

Vanity 800 number branding creates the most memorable retention and active calling, even when your audience can't write it down right away: such as 1-800-ORANGES or 1-800-TAX TIME.

The easier it is for your target market to remember your number, the more likely they are to call (and pass it around to others). It's a marketing strategy that not only pays dividends, but also quickly identifies the source of the ad campaign sales lead for tracking.

Once you learn to use call tracking, its analytical information, and re-routing techniques; you can really fine tune your advertising campaigns to get the best ROI for your money.
About Author:
Dial 800 Communications is a company that specializes in Marketing Optimization. Specializing in RapidRecall vanity numbers and call tracking that are the best in the industry based on your marketing goals, requirements and budget.