It’s been encouraging this year seeing businesses having their doors opened again and people really trying to support local.
We’ve also seen an increase in marketing from businesses in order to generate more enquires and more sales.
But at a recent meeting, one local business owner posed a question that gave a lot of other businesses a moment of realisation…
He said – “I’ve increased my marketing spend and the overall return has been great because our enquiries over the phone have massively increased - resulting in more sales - but I don’t know which pieces of marketing are working best and which ones could be doing better.”
The good news is that the answer to this problem is so easy now-a-days and it reminded us about a tool that we’ve known about for a long time but haven’t talked about for a couple of years now.
We can all get a pretty good handle on how effective our marketing and advertising is using Tracking Numbers...
Tracking Numbers simply allow you to track and monitor how many calls you receive from each individual piece of marketing that you do.
It works really simply:
You acquire a set of new, different phone numbers, assign each one to a different marketing piece - and you point them all at your existing phone line. It’s really easy to do.
Don’t panic. YOU DON’T HAVE TO CHANGE YOUR PHONE LINE, OR YOUR PHONE PROVIDER AND YOUR EXISTING NUMBER WILL STILL WORK AS WELL.
Everything stays the same. Your existing phone rings in just the same way. You answer it in the same way. The only difference is that now you know which advert or piece of marketing generated each call - because you can go online and see, instantly, at any time of day or night, how many calls you’ve received on each number.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you have a flyer, you also have ads in three local magazines, you have a website that you drive traffic to via Facebook Ads, you have a brochure and also business cards that you hand out at networking events.
That’s 7 separate pieces of marketing:
With Tracking Numbers, you buy 7 separate phone numbers - all local STD numbers - and allocate one phone number to each stream of marketing. Then you’ll know for sure, over time, exactly which bits of marketing are working best for you as they’re generating the most calls.
But you will also know which pieces aren’t working and need amending or changing, as they’ll be the ones that have a low number of calls.
You’ll keep your existing number as well, so any existing customers can still call you on that and all these new numbers will ring on your same existing phone line (you don’t need seven phones!).
Simples!
Seriously, it works like a dream - and it’s one of the most under-used tools available to businesses in the UK.
Poor media players are frightened to death of tracking numbers. The last thing a magazine wants is their advertisers being able to track precisely how many calls their ad generated. That would make them accountable and they don’t want that - which is one of the reasons why so few businesses know about Tracking Numbers.
But you know about them now - and I urge you to use them in your business.
Oh, when you log on to check your stats it will also tell you how many calls you failed to answer.
Imagine that!
You’ve placed an ad, a potential customer has seen it, called you up...but no-one picked up the phone. You’ll know exactly how many calls you (or your team) aren’t answering.
That’s powerful stuff and you can have all that info at your fingertips 24/7 which is really useful if you’re serious about growing your business this year and beyond.
Give us a call if you’d like to know how to get this working in your business.
