2. Champion your advertising champions:

In the previous post we eliminated poor performing campaigns.  Now it’s time to reward the campaigns that are helping your business the most. 

Remember the "view reports" section is always a good place to get an overview of how your campaigns are doing.  Once you identified which campaigns are bringing the most calls to your business, make sure that they are also resulting in sales.  Click on the “listen to calls” tab, select the campaign from the drop down box, and make sure that a portion of the calls resulted in sales.  If you are happy with the quality of the calls and the quantity of calls from a particular campaign, you have identified a champion. 

Since you eliminated campaigns that were not helping your business, you have excess capital to get your champions working even harder.  Remember though, just like investing, advertising is all about diversification; don’t place all your advertising eggs in one basket.  The goal is not to find one or two champions, the goal is to have as many as possible, all while constantly improving their performance.  In addition to supporting your champions you are going to have to do some recruiting and find new ones.  Inevitably you are going to stumble on a few non productive advertising methods before you find new champions.  Fortunately, we can quickly eliminate them as outlined in the previous post.

At this point the level of perfecting will depend on the nature of your business and whether you have either hired a marketing manager or have time to do the job yourself.  However all champions will need attention.  The goal is to find out what makes a champion for your business so you can easily replicate it with other campaigns.  You will start learning what makes your potential customers act.  Here is an incomplete list of some of the things you can do:

1. Increase the frequency of the ad
2. Try playing the add different days and times
3. Tweak the message
4. Play with the graphics
5. Play with the size of the add (maybe a smaller one will work just as good)
6. Pinpoint the geographic regions that result in the most business

The goal here once again is to take a campaign that increases business and make it increase business even more.  You want to constantly increase your ROI.  At this point we have learned that in order to increase your advertising ROI you need to eliminate poorly performing campaigns and spend time trying new things with existing champions to make them better.

Quick Example:

You have narrowed down a quarter page advertisement in the Sunday paper that is resulting in a large number of calls to your business, resulting in sales.  You have identified the particular campaign as a champion.  Instead of letting it collect dust, lets try and make it perform even better.  Next week see the effect on your ROI if you pay the extra money to get a half page advertisement in the paper as opposed to the quarter page.  Once the advertisement ran you can log into your account, choose the campaign and set a custom date range to compare the difference in response between the two sized advertisements.  Did the larger advertisement increase sales enough to offset the cost?  Let’s say it did.  You just improved the ROI on your already champion Campaign.

Check back soon for part three of our series.