3. Identify your best employees.

As a business owner the most important differentiator between you and the other guy is customer service.  If you do not treat your customers with care then someone else will.  However, you are not always the one answering the phone.  Therefore it is important to make sure that your customers or potential customers are being treated correctly by all employees of your company.

Call recording allows you among other things to listen to the calls your business receives, you will see which of your employees are helping your business most.  If any are not, you can address them before it becomes a problem.  If you find that sales only occur when potential customers are talking with a particular employee, dig down and find out why.  Then use that information to train the rest of your employees.  By doing this you are creating a competitive advantage by identifying how to communicate with your target market.  This will make your business run smoother and make training new employees easier.

At this point if you have read the first and second blog post in this series you are on your way to really making an impact to the profitability and long term sustainability of your business.  You have eliminated poor performing advertisements, invested in the advertising methods that work best for your business, and used recorded client interactions to improve your customer service.

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.

As a small business owner you have to wear many hats, which leave limited resources available for marketing.  Many small business owners think that tracking their calls will take too much time.  This post will walk you through how much time you will need to allocate towards tracking your calls,  and how to use the information to make your advertising profitable.

The reality is that if you are using Ad Committee correctly you should only have to dedicate about an hour a month to significantly improve your advertising ROI.    In the business world the phrase, “the data does not lie” is often used, because it is true.  Pick a day towards the end of the month to sit down and look at the data.  You will know instantly which advertisements produce the most calls, where geographically you receive the most calls, what day you receive the most calls, all the way down to what time of day you receive the most calls.  In addition to call volume and caller location, you can listen to the calls to make sure they are resulting in sales.  

Getting started:

Once you're logged in to your account, click on the "view reports" tab, select all numbers from the drop down box and narrow down your search by clicking last 30 days below the drop down box.  This allows you to see an overview of all your advertising campaigns.  You now have a lot of information to dissect and interpret.  First you can instantly see which advertisements are resulting in the most calls to your business and which ones result in the least.  Let’s find out why.

1. Eliminate poorly performing campaigns:

Let’s start with the campaigns that did not result in a lot of calls to your business.   It is important to point out that just because a particular campaign does not result in many calls to your business, it does not mean it is necessarily a poor performer.  Generally, however the more calls the better.  Click on the “listen to calls” tab.  In the drop down box select the poorly performing campaign and the time period you would like to retrieve calls from.  Now listen to a few of these calls.  The purpose is to find out if there is something wrong with the marketing message with that particular campaign.  Let’s say that after listening to several of the recorded calls you do not find anything wrong with the particular campaigns message or how the calls were handled.  You now know that for whatever reasons the advertisement you paid money for did not bring you a good ROI.  This could be because the message did not reach your target market or a million other reasons.  The good news is you no longer are going to lose money on that advertisment; it is time to eliminate it from your advertising mix, since it has no value to your business.

In the place of the eliminated campaigns, pick another place that you have always wanted to advertise and reuse the same tracking number (make sure to rename the campaign).  In the next month or two, depending on how long it takes for the new advertisement to be published, check and see if the new advertisement is bringing you more business.  If it did, you have eliminated spending money on a poorly performing advertisement and transferred it to an advertisement that is resulting in new business.  You are on your way to making your advertising, and yourself more profitable.

Check back next week for part two of this post.  If you have any questions that are not being answered please leave a comment and we will reply.

A week ago, the answer to this question would have been — No.

We found its very difficult for businesses to know how much tracking their calls will cost.  And while we built our web application to be as simple to use as possible, we were guilty as well.

It became apparent that the only thing that was not simple about our web application was the pricing.  It was modeled after the usual software as a service model.  The typical three tiers called Silver, Gold, or Platinum, that I am sure you have seen before.  So, what’s wrong with this?

The fundamental problem with these pricing structures is the tier system makes it seem like you are being charged less for a product, when you most likely are not.  Think of it like this: You are paying for the Gold package that gives you x amount of lines with x amount of minutes for x dollars.  But chances are that you are not using all the lines or all the minutes.  Well, why should you pay for something you do not need?

In addition there can be so many options, add-ons, and miscellaneous charges that it is nearly impossible to understand the concrete number of how much it will actually cost.  That is great for large corporations that have the time and money for negotiation processes and contract signings, but not so much for the small business owner who wants three tracking lines and some good data to help decide where to advertise.

We listened to small business owner’s confusion and decided to take action.  We believe tracking your calls is extremely important.  It is the only way to know for sure which of your marketing efforts are working best.  The best part is that call tracking puts all the analytics of your online and offline advertisements in one place.

We decided to make our service more accessible and affordable to all businesses.  We think you will agree that our new price, $5 per line and 5 cents per minute is very easy to understand, and coupled with our easy interface, it is safe to say it is now affordable as well as invaluable.  

A recent article written in the Wall Street Journal discussed the Google Groupon deal.  Within the article attention was brought to the fact that small businesses do not spend a large portion of their advertising budget online.  Google of course would prefer they did and therefore is trying to capture advertising revenues from small businesses.   Google feels that Groupon could be their answer.  The benefit of advertising online is the ability to track exactly where your money is being spent, getting reports that outline this data, and being able to adjust your advertising quickly.  The disadvantages of online advertising for small businesses is that it does not work as well as traditional advertising for local businesses the majority of the time. 

The good news is that technology now allows small businesses to capture all the benefits of advertising online, offline through call tracking.  Specifically now with Ad Committee small businesses have access to the same technology that was previously only available to larger companies.  

Tampa now has a local company offering call tracking.  Maxae located in downtown Tampa developed Ad Committee a web based call tracking service for small to medium sized businesses.   Business owners now have the option to support the local economy and purchase this service from a local company. 

If you are involved with Tampa media buying, tracking advertising results in Tampa, or concerned about advertising ROI in Tampa, then our Tampa call tracking app, Ad Committee is the perfect tool for you.

Please have a look around our website and if you have any questions you can call us, email us, or chat with us.  

Access to the maximum amount of information about your customers is more important than ever before. You want effective marketing with a strong advertising return on investment. Do you know what’s working?

TAKE THIS SIMPLE QUIZ and see how many “YES” answers you score:

1. Do you know the name, address and from where your customer called?
2. Do you know from which ad or campaign the call was generated?
3. Do you know what your customer asked for?
4. Do you know if the call was mishandled by your staff?
5. Do you know that the call was handled courteously and professionally?
6. Do you know what time of day the customer called?
7. Do you know how long your customer waited to be helped?
8. Do you have the call tracking ability for all of your call data?
9. Do you have the call recording ability to LISTEN to those calls?
10. Do you have detailed data on all of your ad campaigns and media buying?

If you’re like most business owners, you probably did not score very high on this questionnaire. Phone tracking and phone call recording, along with powerful reporting, is the piece that’s missing to truly measure marketing effectiveness. It also provides quality control and helps with staff training and customer care. Combination media purchasing that can include television advertising, radio advertising, print advertising and print media is already a difficult task. Wouldn’t you like to extract the maximum advertising ROI? Now you can KNOW what’s working. For about $ 0.25 per inbound call, why not finish the job—a few Ad Committee phone tracking and phone recording lines is all you need!