Small businesses who engage in any kind of marketing campaign need to have the ability to easily track responses so they will know what works and what doesn't. The ability to only invest dollars into campaigns that have proven to work is one of the keys to small business success.
Tracking sounds pretty straightforward, right? Well, it is if all of your campaigns only use a single-channel (a channel is a marketing outlet). Depending on the industry, the most commonly used channels that small businesses engage in are websites, Pay-Per-Click, phone books, direct mail, coupon books, print ads, radio spots, and sometimes television. Tracking a single-channel campaign is pretty easy when all you have to do is look at your new appointment bookings to measure effectiveness.
If, however, you really want to grow your small business, then you have to deploy multi-channel campaigns that feature more than one marketing outlet from the list above. Because readers of this blog are all hungry to grow their business as efficiently as possible, you probably already do that. The trick to managing multi-channel campaigns is to not get caught up in the process of Creating, Launching, and Tracking your campaigns which has the potential to take your eye off the ball of blocking and tackling...doing the things that as a savvy business owner, you know have to be done every day in order to run your business.
There are two great tools on the market today that helps you easily track your responses: telephone tracking numbers and landing pages with unique URLs (web addresses). When you insert them into the message of your campaigns as the call to action (what you want your target audience to do once they see or hear your ad), you will be able to know how they found you, and to what offer they are responding to.
A telephone tracking number is a special phone number that acts like a gateway to any existing land line or mobile phone which captures information about the caller including a recorded version of the conversation for quality control purposes. Even though the caller is dialing a different number when they respond to your ad, you determine what phone number they dial into when you set it up. The big benefit of this tool is the ability to track phone call responses from your campaigns for around $20 per month and a nominal per-minute usage fee.
Unique URLs are great tools to use with landing pages (a dedicated page on your website that gives the responder information about your product, company, etc, and also gives them a way to "convert" to a booked appointment or paying customer). When used in your advertising campaigns, unique URLs can give you great reporting on anyone who responds to your offer online. If you have access to your website using a CMS (content management system), set up a unique webpage for each of your campaigns and put that into your ads. If you also have access to web traffic reports, then you should be able to measure responses pretty easily.
When used together, telephone tracking numbers and unique URLs will give your small business a lot of visibility into your campaign effectiveness. But don't stop there. Once you get comfortable with using these powerful tracking tools, get more of them so you can track responses to each channel, each campaign, media outlet, etc. Pretty soon, you will be able to market like a big company, but on a small business budget.
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