Do you use these powerful marketing tools?

Sales and Marketing Activity

If you use the telephone as a tool to take orders and field enquiries from your marketing activity, how do you know how successful you are?

It was Viscount Leverhulme who said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half.” 

The trouble with traditional marketing is that you know that you have to do it and with an eager air of anticipation and expectation you spend money on using Yellow Pages, weekly free press, monthly gazettes, web sites, email marketing, letters, leaflet drops, radio, TV, street adverts, brochures, 4N, BNI etc. Generally as businesses, we usually only ever have one main telephone number that is used and if you only publish the one number on all of the above options you will hopefully capture the sale, but unless you are rigorous in asking the question – " How did you hear of us?", you will never know what is the source of your sale and if your marketing is actually working!

What is important is how to capture the hard data and to understand how effective each marketing activity you do is and so help you to justify expanding some areas of advertising and cutting back others therefore increasing the effectiveness of your lead generation.

Yellow pages have for years monitored the usage patterns of its users and have identified that the readers will call telephone numbers in the following order of priority:

• Freephone (0800, 0808) numbers 
• Local Geographic Numbers (01392 Exeter, 01904 York etc.) 
• And the rest 0845, 0870 are avoided because of the perception of the company benefiting from the call 

Therefore it is recommend that you use 0800 and 0808 numbers for a number of reasons

1. because the research data backs this up, and
2. that prospects prefer to make a call that they know that they are not paying for. 

So you need to measure your advertising using evidence based reporting.  The simplest and most effective way to measure the response is by using telephony platforms to collate the call data. This means that once you decide that you need to measure your marketing campaigns, you will need to look for a supplier that will provide the right telephone numbers to publish on your individual marketing pieces and then a solution that provides you with the detailed information on inbound calls to maximise your lead generation activity.

Converting Sales to Leads

Not only is accurate and live data on your marketing performance necessary, you also ought to record each inbound call so that you can ensure that all staff responsible for making the sale are fully trained and following your sales procedures/scripts to maximise each opportunity. If one person, including yourself, is off track then potential orders can be lost.

Results are what business are all about, so the system you choose to employ needs to allow you to measure how many leads your marketing is generating and how your business is handling these sales calls. You need to obtain all the information you can possibly get to help drive your business forward.

Accurate and Instant Marketing Data

You have spent hours getting your creative right, wording, font type and size, the message, the call to action and everything else you have learned from the Marketing AIDA (Attention Interest Desire Action).

1. So what was your response?
2. How many people bought from you?
3. How many people contacted you?
4. How well did you do at converting those who called into those who bought?

The first step in this process is knowing who reacted to your marketing. This is the measure of your marketing effectiveness. All your individual telephone numbers can provide you with detailed information about who called and when, all you have to provide is the – 'what marketing item each number refers to'.   Clever eh?

Cost Benefit Analysis

As you have collected so much more data than before you can now begin to collate the financial data for each marketing activity carried out and begin to understand what works and what does not.

Using the call data you can determine the value of each activity and the most cost effective way to attract customers and clients to your business, ensuring that you get better value out of each pound spent on marketing your business services and products.

Knowledge is Power

When you have the information available to make decisions based on fact and you then act on this information you have the power to make a massive impact upon your bottom line.

What has been outlined here is not rocket science, although it can and does to many look like a dark art, the reality is that by simple use of telephone platforms you now have the ability to capture the data with which to measure your marketing. You can then use it to make significantly more money than you currently are, because you are focusing on what works, rather than like Viscount Leverhulme all those years ago knowing that half worked but not knowing which half!

 

The Merlin Team 

080087788

www.merlin-telecom.co.uk

Image courtesy of Kromkrathog at FreeDigitalPhotos.net