Advertising is tough for most small-to-medium size businesses since it is expensive, difficult to connect with your target customer, and hard to measure for effectiveness. However, there some tricks when setting up your advertising campaign to ensure that the campaign’s effectiveness can be measured. The simplest method for tracking advertising is to ask the customer how they heard about your business or product. Most of the time, your customers will tell you exactly how they found you; this could be because of advertising or not.
If your campaign requires or allows them to call in on the phone, set up a separate phone number. When that new line rings, you obviously know that the advertisement created the opportunity. If this is a large-scale campaign that has different customer segments or different advertising mediums involved, you can create multiple phone numbers for tracking purposes. For example, if the scale of your campaign is large enough and you are using multiple magazines as your advertising vehicle, you could set up separate phone numbers for each magazine. This tracking data could prove powerful when choosing which magazine to use for your next campaign.
Another trick for tracking the incoming calls is to have your customer call requesting different names or aliases; in this case, the customer calls asking for a specific individual to hear more about the special offer. When the phone rings and the customer wants to speak with “Bob,” you know that the caller saw your ad in FIELD AND STREAM (not GOOD HOUSEKEEPING).
Coupons or special pricing can also be keyed to separate advertising methods. On a postcard mailing that has a mail-in tear off, the tear off can be color coded or marked to indicate which magazine worked. Separate mail addresses can be effective for advertising campaign tracking efforts; add a P.O. Box for the campaign. The same technique works on the web; set up separate sites for each campaign. Or, on your website, have them indicate how they found your website when they fill out the permission documents.
Most of these suggestions are inexpensive and simple to implement for tracking advertising. The data should be helpful when making choices about your next advertising campaign.
John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2006 All rights reserved.
My new book “First, Best, or Different” is now available at www.firstbestordifferent.com!
Please buy my book!