Using webinars as marketing tools has not only become extremely popular but has emerged as one of the most effective forms of marketing for businesses today, maximizing the ROI of both time and resources. So what can you do to get the best results from your webinars and ensure that they run smoothly?
1. Dedicated Toll Free Number
Obviously you shouldn’t be aiming to profit from the loses of others, however hurricanes do offer a unique opportunity for marketing and helping others at the same time. Check out the following six ideas.
1. Branded Bottled Water
Next week,, Custom Toll Free will be attending the Dreamforce Convention 2011 held in California.
The first Dreamforce 2011 convention will be held in San Francisco, California beginning August 30th through September 2nd. This convention, put on by SalesForce, is said to be “the cloud computing industry event of the year”. This particular convention will show how to use social media and networking to boost business.
Stay tuned for some future blog posts on this convention!
1. Aerial Advertising
Aerial advertising with signs on the back of small planes can be a great way to set your business apart, especially for those in coastal areas. You just don’t have a lot of room so 800 numbers are a must.
2. Temporary Tattoos
Whether you are launching a new start-up or are expanding your already successful business, the name of the game is grabbing up as much market share from your competition as possible. The more market share you own, the less expensively you can market and operate fueling further expansion and growth. Using toll free numbers for your business phone lines can enable you easily and inexpensively to swipe chunks of the market from your competitors and take your business to the next level. How?
Become the #1 Brand
In many industries, there is still plenty of room to get your hands on a dominating vanity number for your business phone lines to position your company as the number one choice. Think 1-800-FLOWERS and 1-800-CONTACTS. Holding this title in your industry will make you stand out as the first and best choice to do business with, and it will make marketing and closing deals easy.
Mirror the Competition
In some industries, you may find the most generic versions of vanity numbers for your business phone lines are already being used, but that shouldn’t stop you from pulling in plenty of new customers. If this situation is the case in your business, you have two options. The first is to grab up toll free numbers that are very similar to your competition or are common incorrect dials by those trying to reach your competition. Doing so will also help you to piggy back off of their success and marketing budgets and gain new clients.
The second option is to take advantage of shared usage for your business phone lines. Shared usage allows you to get control of a premium vanity number for your industry specifically for certain geographic areas, even if others are using it somewhere else. It is extremely affordable and the positioning benefits are obvious.
Take Out One Niche at a Time
The wisest and most affordable way to take over your industry is to avoid going head to head for the pole position right away, and instead, use your business phone lines to take out and control one niche at a time. This niche could be a certain demographic group in your business or you could excel at one area like being faster or easier to deal with. This goal is easily accomplished by using targeted vanity numbers and forwarding them to your business phone lines.
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.
Image Credit: © Vladimir Mucibabic | Dreamstime.com
“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.
Without question, joining a quality affiliate program can enable you dramatically to increase your revenues and help you take your business to the next level. So how do you become an affiliate?
Some companies and directories that offer affiliate marketing programs will accept anyone who wants to sign up as an affiliate with an email address. However, you want to make sure you are joining a quality affiliate program with a reputable company that is not only trustworthy but is committed to your success. At a minimum, affiliate and partner programs that are serious about building a great network will want to know who you are, what your organization is, where you are located, your website address, how much Internet traffic you average every month, and what type of marketing you are doing. Remember, you are going to be a direct reflection of the quality of the brand you are representing, so you wouldn’t want others joining who were not serious and could lower the perception and value of the product or service you are promoting.
Becoming an affiliate is normally a very easy process whether it is for toll free numbers or other marketing and business services. However, you must avoid associating your organization with sub par companies or getting tied up with a business that doesn’t have its stuff together. Telling the difference is actually quite easy once you know how. You can normally tell instantly from the marketing materials a company provides to its affiliates whether you want to do business with the company. For example, a toll free number provider ought to offer basic marketing materials and copy to use on your website and to alert your customer base as well as image ads and banners that can instantly be put into effect for PPC and advertising campaigns. Going a step further, you should also look for an enterprise that has spent the time and resources to develop advanced tools such as search widgets that can be installed on your website or blog. Truly great affiliate marketing programs are also differentiated by the software and tracking systems they use. Many are out there, but Commission Junction is unquestionably the domain of premium marketers and publishers.
Get The Tools You Need
Make sure you have all the right and best tools for the job including high quality lead lists, batches of toll free numbers, and high quality content. Without all three of these tools, you cannot expect to run consistently profitable and successful direct mail campaigns. It doesn’t matter whether you have a great list of prospects, if the message isn’t right. And it doesn’t matter how great your mail piece looks if your business phone number doesn’t close the deal and enable you to track results.
Ensure Correct Mailing
Unfortunately, as with any other industry, any type of marketing mistake can be made or your requests may just not be completed competently. You must keep a close eye on your direct mail, ensure that you receive the lead lists you requested, oversee that your mail is sent out at the right time, and make certain everything goes out. Check all the way through your mailing lists to doublecheck that everything is in order - not just the first sheet. A reputable mailing firm should not only be able to offer toll free numbers as a part of its package but also provide you with proof that your campaign was sent out on time and in its entirety.
Call Capture
Using toll free numbers on your direct mail pieces not only increases response rates and closing ratios but also enables you to capture the number of prospects who have called in but not left numbers or who got disconnected.
Test
Before you launch a full campaign, you must test. Testing in smaller batches allows you to compare the advertising effectiveness of the content of your mail piece, the quality of your mailing list, and whether you are sending at the right times. However, do not be too cautious; you must use tests that are big enough to assess results accurately. Any small batch of a few hundred pieces can either be a huge hit or miss. You should be testing at least 2,500 pieces per run in order to determine future profitability in a realistic manner.
Monitor Call Metrics
Do not judge the success of your direct mail campaign based solely upon how much you think your phone is ringing or what your phone reps are saying. Closely monitor your call metrics to determine the real results and where improvements can be made. Monitoring goes beyond just counting calls. Your toll free number provider ought to give you online access to call details. This information will enable you to see how long your agents spoke with prospects so you can tell whether there are issues with your script and which of your team members are performing the best.
Recalibrate
After reviewing your toll free number statistics and actually closing numbers, adjust and hone your direct mail campaigns for maximum ROI. Then continue to test new factors in order to improve constantly your revenues and profit margins.
Image Credit: © Olgalis | Dreamstime.com
Marketing is not an exact science, but ways exist to make your campaign as effective as possible through targeted metrics. For example, while it is almost impossible to determine the accurate dollar amount generated by your advertising campaign, you can have a rough idea about how well it is doing. The number of queries and phone calls you get along with sales can be used for evaluation.
