Experts in the advertising industry have different perspectives as to which media strategy is most effective. Your product(s) and/or services play a major role in choosing the most effective advertising. All advertising media you incorporate into your campaign must effectively convey a positive and memorable message to your customers so your business will stand apart and ahead of your competition.
With $153 billion to be spent on advertising this year are you prepared with the vanity numbers you need to compete?
Extensive research by leading media companies has revealed the most competitive marketing channels for the next 12 months. In addition, they also revealed the predictions of significant growth in advertising expenditures in the U.S. Regardless of which industry you are in, it is going to not only take acquiring great vanity numbers but really putting them to work in order to win a significant amount of the business. Are you prepared?
Every business needs marketing and advertising to promote themselves and their products or services. Though if you are not careful and get caught up in illegal methods of advertising you could find yourself fined out of business in no time at all.
Advertising is basically the act of promoting your business using paid methods. Online advertising is the same as traditional advertising in many ways, but it also has its own distinctions. For example, online advertising is usually more responsive to the comments and feedbacks of users. Since feedback is immediate, mistakes can be corrected quickly as well. Another distinction of online advertising is its significantly lower cost compared to traditional advertising.
In the online world, there are three players in the process: the advertiser, the publisher, and the middleman (Google Adsense, Yahoo Advertising Network, etc). Depending on the format chosen by the advertiser, the publisher will receive different levels of compensation. The amount the publishers receive would also be based on the niche's competitiveness - basically, how much advertisers are willing to pay to get better advertising than their competitors.
The following types of advertising can be displayed by publishers:
Many other online advertising methods exist. For example, on Facebook, you can make use of both text and graphic to get viewers' attention. Social media has definitely become important; be sure to explore the opportunities in others mediums as well.
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1. Missed Branding Opportunities
Whatever type of marketing campaign you are launching, a vanity number offers instant branding. Even if your prospects do not take immediate action, an easy to remember vanity number will stick in their minds until when they do need your product or service. This truth applies to PPC advertising, direct mail, email marketing, and display ads.
2. Increased Response Rates
It has been proven time and time again that toll free vanity numbers consistently provide significantly higher response rates. So, considering the small investment it takes to get a winning vanity number, why anyone would ever dream of running an ad campaign without one is a mystery. Otherwise, you are not just throwing away money but handing those prospects over to your competition.
3. Improved Closing Ratios
Vanity numbers not only help increase the response rates to your advertising, but more importantly, they also improve the actual closing ratios from your campaigns. That is where you really put profits back into your pocket. Ask yourself how much a closed deal is worth, not only now but also in terms of the value of a lifelong customer and the referrals you will receive. Easily in the tens of thousands. So with some shared use, vanity numbers are available for as little at $19 a month. That small amount can provide at least two or three times the closed deals from a campaign. It is really a no brainer.
4. Tracking & Testing
Toll free numbers offer the ability to track and test easily all types of metrics and variables involved in your marketing. Those tools mean the ability to identify easily what is working well and what you can improve on so you can hone your marketing into a well oiled money making machine.
5. Maximizing Marketing ROI
These compounding factors of increased advertising effectiveness through better brand recognition, higher response and closing ratios, and well-tested campaigns means being able to see the maximum return on investment from your marketing budget. What you do with the extra profit is entirely up to you, whether it is expanding your marketing efforts, handing out bonuses, donating it to charity, improving your products or services, or just treating yourself to a well-deserved vacation in the sun. Going to the market without a vanity number is the equivalent of handing over large slices of market share to your competitors. Win or lose - it is all up to you.
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As with anything done well, your business success will generate people who want to feed off or piggyback on your success. This situation is especially true for web domain names and business phone numbers.
On one hand, you certainly can’t blame competitors for maximizing their own marketing ROI with this smart strategy. But it can be extremely frustrating and may mean losing potential deals and clients despite all of your hard work and dedication to growing your organization. Fortunately, you have the ability to stop the situation before it even begins!
First, you must understand how competitors can feed off your business phone number. Just as with having similar Internet domain names, other businesses can feed off your advertising, reputation, and marketing budget by acquiring similar business phone numbers to yours. For numeric numbers, this situation could mean obtaining similar numbers that could be incorrectly dialed. In terms of vanity numbers, competitors may try getting their hands on the same vanity numbers with different prefixes since dialing the wrong prefix is a common mistake by customers trying to call you, especially if you do not have the 800 number version. Worse, if you have a well known company name, but you do not have the matching vanity number that spells out your name, competitors might acquire it and be able to take large amounts of prospects and even current customers who were actually attempting to call your business phone number.
To protect yourself, begin by making sure you have a unified brand, including an easily recognizable vanity number. Then just as with reserving a domain name for your website, try to reserve as many variations of your business phone number as you can. Start with the 800, 888, 877, 866 and 855 prefixes and then move on to any other obvious combinations.
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“Advertising” is usually confused with marketing, promotions, sales, and public relations. But what exactly is it? Basically, advertising is about bringing a product or service to target market's attention. It is focused on getting customers' attention in order to increase awareness of the brand (or product, service, or idea) in question. Advertising comes in different forms: brochures, television commercials, online ads, signs, direct mails, and even personal contact.
To get a better understanding of what is advertising, it may be best to look into the definition of other terms with which it is usually interchanged:
Promotion: After gaining brand awareness through advertising, promotion acts as a stimulus for further demand. It involves ongoing advertising, sales, and public relations activities.
Marketing: When you think about marketing, keep the 4P’s in mind: product, place, promotions, and price. These are essentially all the aspects involved in marketing. Loosely, marketing involves analyzing customer data and competition. It positions the product in the market through “price” and “place” distribution.
Public Relations: Public Relations is all about creating a public image for the company. It usually involves building a relationship with the media to get newspaper mention, magazine recommendations, and television slots.
Sales: Cultivating prospective buyers (referred to as leads) is the focus of sales. It conveys the features and benefits of a product and service. The sales plan for one product may be different from another even within the same company.
Yes, toll free vanity numbers have been proven to dramatically increase response rates and closing ratios for maximizing marketing ROI. However, the value of vanity numbers goes far beyond that.
Toll free numbers have been shown to reduce charge backs in a big way which means the revenues you reel in, you really get to keep. Memorable vanity numbers enable effective word of mouth referrals. This provides the most profitable form of marketing you could ever ask for and has the viral potential to reach masses of prospects you would not otherwise reach. The residual branding benefits of using vanity numbers are absolutely priceless. A winning toll free vanity number will stick in the minds of consumers and stay with them until they need your product and service providing an ongoing perpetual form of advertising.
Like 1800-GET-RICH great vanity numbers can create successful, industry dominating business empires all by themselves. Just look at 1800-FLOWERS. Even 1800-CONTACTS literally sprung from nowhere over night to becoming perhaps the number one supplier of contacts in the country. If you can get your hands on a premium vanity number for a given industry and come up with a good jingle you could rocket your enterprise to star status in no time at all.
On top of this, good vanity numbers are now not just for picking up revenues or building recognizable branding. They are now absolutely necessary for those who want their companies to survive. When consumers need products and services these days, they often just pick up the phone and try to dial the 800 number with the applicable company name or industry after it. You want flowers - your dial 1800-FLOWERS. You need a new mattress - you call 1800-MATTRESS. If you need cable or Internet service in your home then you call 1800-COMCAST. So it is both important to try and get vanity numbers that match your industry and business name. Should the premium choices of vanity numbers for your industry be taken, you may still be able to take advantage of shared usage plans that allow you to control that number for the geographic areas you are doing business in. Or working with the right toll free service provider you may be able to have a great deal for the acquisition of the number negotiated on your behalf.
Testing before you launch any advertising campaign is essential, and it is especially essential for PPC advertising. In fact, PPC advertising is ideal for testing the viability of the launch of almost all new services and products even if you intend to branch out into other forms of marketing later.
So how should you be testing your PPC advertising? PPC advertising systems like Google Adwords let you find ideal keywords in seconds. However, the real testing is what you put together for your text and image ads. Start by using at least three to four variations of your ad. For text ads, you should be testing your headline, ad copy, and even your Internet domain name. Note that you can use several web domain names, and if you haven’t yet acquired a domain name that includes your toll free vanity number, you may find that having one offers much more volume. When it comes to PPC advertising with image ads, you can also try out different shapes and sizes from animated squares to static or flash banner ads. Try testing different colors in addition to the items above.
A good place to start before even trying to create your PPC ads is to look at other ads that come up for your search terms and see which ones you think are most attractive for customers and how you can differentiate yourself from the competition. You can easily create your own ads in a few minutes in almost any PPC advertising platform, whether it is Google, Yahoo, YouTube, or Facebook advertising, or you can use inexpensive programs like Banner Designer Pro for ads you can use anywhere on the web. Or if you are working with an established company that offers an affiliate program, you may find they have winning ads already created for you to use. You can even take a lesson from one New York Times best selling author and hold a competition that involves having others send your their ad ideas in exchange for providing some sort of free marketing back to the person or company that comes up with your best performing ad. Run your ads for a week, axe the ones that are not producing, and replace them with new ideas. Keep repeating until you have an arsenal of extremely powerful and productive ads that produce big results.
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Without a doubt, the current economic environment requires businesses to be more careful with and more demanding of their marketing budgets than ever before. If you want your company to survive and prosper, you must maximize your business marketing return-on-investment. So how do you calculate your business marketing ROI? What factors are the most important?
Most forms of advertising and lead generation are invested in terms of how many pieces or leads you receive for your money. For direct mail, it is how many pieces you send out; for pay-per-click, it is the number of prospects that click through to your site, and for Internet leads, it is how many actual leads you receive. When calculating expected business marketing ROI from an advertising campaign, it is important to recognize the difference between leads and revenues. It really does not matter how many leads or calls you get on your toll free numbers if none of them are converting into actual customers. In fact, too many contacts not following through will actually begin to cost you more money. While most lead generation companies will shy away from giving you any hard figures on what you can expect in actual closing ratios, the prospective close ratio is still the most important figure when calculating business marketing ROI. However, smart marketing companies and lead generators, who offer direct marketing like direct mail and use toll free numbers for tracking, should be able to show you real numbers from what similar campaigns have generated in actual prospects and incoming calls. These historic results help close the gap between your marketing pieces and actual business marketing ROI, but in the end, it still comes down to your staff to ensure conversion.
When calculating business marketing ROI, what you really need to look at is cost-per-action. In other words, what is it really costing for each new client and each dollar in revenues? Compare these numbers to your other advertising options; then strive to achieve the lowest cost-per-action possible and hone your campaigns to maximize business marketing ROI. This strategy includes doing a better job of targeting your ideal customers and improving the conversion capability of your phone staff or website.
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