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:
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
- because the research data backs this up, and
- 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).
- So what was your response?
- How many people bought from you?
- How many people contacted you?
- 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
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