When times are tough, it is so tempting to look at the budget and say "Well here's a bunch of money! Problem solved!" At Impact, we set five percent of our revenue aside for advertising (radio, billboards, etc). We could cut that back, but we know from experience that for each dollar of advertising we cut, we could lose up to ten dollars in revenue as a result.
$1 - $10 = $-9
That kind of math would snap anyone back into their senses.
However, not all advertising is created equal. We shift dollars from non-performing ads to performing ads all the time. How do we know which ads perform? CALL TRACKING. If you do not religiously track your calls, then you are leaving that crucial investment up to guesswork.
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Running a business without advertising is like trying to dig yourself out of a hole.
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The Two Questions
Just "tracking your calls" is rarely good enough. HOW you track them makes all the difference. Case in point: I had a customer call a few months ago asking to cancel her contract.
"I track all my calls," she assured me, "and hardly any come from the phone book."
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| They had to get your number from somewhere.... |
"How do you track them?" I asked.
"I just ask where they heard about us," she explained.
This is probably the most common way people track their calls. Unfortunately, it is also one of the least effective. People "hear" about your business in all sorts of places, but when they are ready to buy, they need a phone number to call.
I challenged her to track her calls in a different way for one week, asking two specific questions:
- Are you looking in the phone book right now?
- What page number are you looking at?
When you ask a direct question, you get a direct answer. The first question asks where they got your number. The second asks which phone book and heading they are looking at. When I talked to her again a week later, she was no longer a skeptic. More than seventy-five percent of her calls came from her ad in our book.
There are lots of good ways to track your advertising, but our customers have found these two questions to be more effective than most. Give them a try this week-you may be surprised!
Thanks for your business, and happy tracking!
Reed
