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.