The last year has been really challenging for most practices and businesses with the worst recession since the Great Depression. The most important questions you can ask yourself as a small business owner is, “What am I doing RIGHT NOW to quickly adapt my marketing strategies and tactics to attract my ideal target client?”, and “How can I Double my ROI and make my advertising investments really build the practice or business of my dreams?”
When we study survival, we of course are reminded of Charles Darwin’s studies in the Galapagos Islands, and “survival of the fittest”.
But most people forget what is even more applicable to your practice or business right now was that Darwin found that it was the species that had the ability to quickly adapt that was even more important to survival than the species fitness. So what is even more important to survival of your business is your ability to quickly adapt to our new changing and emerging economy.
So how does a practice or small business adapt their Yellow Page ad design and small business marketing quickly to outperform their competition and rake in more than their share of the profits?
The first thing you need to do is look at your marketing and advertising budget and make it accountable. What is your Return On Investment (ROI) on your advertising?
You should be able to accurately track what each ad each campaign returned 1) in number of incoming calls generated, 2) in number of incoming calls converted to a sale, and 3) what dollar amount of sale was generated by each advertisement? This is Marketing and Advertising 101, but many people ignore what is going on in their advertising and marketing only to find that their marketing consistently underperforms their expectations.
So what is the first step to making your advertising accountable and a lot more profitable? The first step I use in my marketing agency is to use the new special call tracker phone numbers that are now available. This allows you to accurately track what each ad is returning automatically by simply putting a different “tracking phone number” in each ad. You can actually track in real time on the Internet how each ad is performing with the best call tracker phone numbers.
But not only that, these call tracker phone numbers also record all your incoming calls automatically. This lets the business owner know if the person who answers your incoming calls is doing what you want them to do to turn the incoming call into a sale. So the second thing you want to do is begin treating the incoming call as priority #1. And you want to make a very specific incoming call script that is used EVERY TIME by your top incoming call person to try to convert the incoming call to a sale.
Now having these calls recorded is ingenious for several reasons. The first reason is the one I already mentioned that you can listen and learn if your incoming call person is sticking to the script. The second reason this is smart is you can improve and upgrade the incoming call person’s results by studying where they are losing the sale and make adjustments to your incoming call script.
And the best reason to record the incoming calls is now when you have to train a new person to be a shark on closing the sale on the incoming call; you already have calls for your new person to listen to for training purposes. This makes training a new person for this valuable position a breeze.
There are a lot more things I use in my marketing agency you can do to quickly adapt to attract your ideal target prospect and build the practice or small business of your dreams. I’ll cover the next one, “How to Upgrade Your Marketing Message” in the next blog post.
Tags: advertising, advertising agency, business marketing, Larry Conn, marketing agency, marketing strategy, small business marketing, Yellow Page ad design