Are you holding your advertising accountable?

What’s my ROI on advertising?

Think about it… You hold your employees accountable. You hold your vendors accountable. You hold your children accountable. But do you truly hold your advertising accountable? For most, advertising success is determined by feedback from friends and family. You know what I mean. At Sunday Dinner Aunt Mable says she saw your new TV commercial. You think… Hey if my 80 year old aunt saw it, there must be thousands of others who are seeing it… or not.

The average adult is hit by more than 30,000 unique advertising and marketing messages a day. What used to require a prospect to hear or see your message a minimum of three times to have effective impact, now requires an advertising frequency of eight or nine times to accomplish the same results.

To achieve eight or nine impressions in any form of media, you had better have a deep wallet, correct? The answer is a resounding… Yes! But who can afford a $20,000 investment just to achieve that kind of frequency? For every dollar you spend on advertising, your worst case scenario is to break even, but how do you know if your advertising works?

Now there is a technique that can not only make your advertising accountable, but also your employees and managers. It is as simple as 11 digits. It’s unique phone numbers! Something as simple as using a separate phone number for every place where you are advertising can make a big difference in advertising accountability. Radio gets a number, TV a different number, Direct Mail, Newspaper etc… In fact there is one customer of ours who uses 11 different numbers to track his advertising dollars.

These unique numbers roll over to your current number. It is seamless to the caller. All they know is that they are calling the number you have in your advertising. In your offi ce, the phone rings as usual. The difference is that you will know where your calls are coming from by media, by geography, by caller. In fact, some systems like “Valpak Call Tracking” can give you real-time access to these statistics online and even record each call digitally, so you can hear how your calls are being handled. For many companies using a service like this, advertising accountability doubles as a very serious training tool.

Using unique phone numbers or even tracking services will make a major difference in a number of areas within your business. Ever miss a call after hours? This system will eliminate that, because now you will see the missed call, and you will have a name and phone number to call the prospect back, even if they didn’t leave a message. It also reduces errors in your existing marketing tracking. So when someone tells you they saw your billboard, but they are calling you from the number you had on the radio, you will know the real story, especially since you are not running any billboards currently, or ever in the past.

Bottom line is you learn very quickly which of your advertising vehicles are working and which vehicles are not. This service literally takes the gambling aspect out of your marketing and advertising decisions. And yes, the number below is a unique number, issued specifi cally for my article in this publication. When my phone rings from the number below, I’ll know you called because you read my article and not because you saw my billboard. Call me to learn more.