Since
1992,
NSPG has been providing the tools that allow contractors to
increase profits and minimize business hassles. With our
simple-to-use-tools, you can make being a business owner
what you always wanted to it be -
successful, profitable and rewarding.
Is Your Advertising
Paying Off?
In our last
Newsletter, we wrote about the need to use
performance benchmarks to know where your business
really stands. We emphasized the importance of knowing
how your techs are performing and how that benchmark
could be used to directly improve profitability.
This month we'll look at another important business
benchmark: Advertising Efficiency.
 For
most of us, the days of relying on a yellow page ad are
over. Technology has made alternatives much more
attractive for both businesses and customers.
Direct marketing, web pages, web ads, search engines,
cable and radio ads can all fit into the budget for many
companies. Most successful businesses rely on a
mix of old and new media to keep the phones ringing.
Because there are so many options to choose from, most
businesses have a hard time deciding where to spend
their limited advertising budget.
There is only one way to
really know the best place for you to put your
advertising dollars - track where every call comes from,
and link the cost for that source to the sales and
profits generated. Last year we highlighted a
successful business,
Plumbline Services, that uses this technique.
They track the cost and performance of all forms of
advertising directly to the customer and the related
sales.
The process of tracking
the performance of your advertising dollars can be done
using an integrated tool like our Performance Dispatch
Plus, or it can be done with the software you already
use combined with a few spreadsheets to track and link
the information. How you do it doesn't really
matter, as long as you do it.
Let's take a simplified
look at how the process works.
-
Make all of your ads
trackable.
-
 Train
your people to make ad tracking a part of every
initial customer contact.
-
Track the outcome of
the customer call.
-
Quantify and review
the results for each type of advertising you do.
Make your ads trackable.
You must include some sort of unique identifier in each
ad. In a print ad, this is usually a number that
the customer can easily find that matches the specific
ad. Your online and media ads may require a
distinct description that your staff can use to prompt
the customer.
Train your people to make ad tracking a part of every
initial customer contact.
Near the beginning of every phone call from a customer,
your people must ask how they found your company.
Do not rely on your field personnel to gather this
information. By the time they talk to the
customer, how they found your company will be forgotten.
Call source information
must be gathered even if the call does not result in a
sale. An ad that generates lots of calls but few
sales can give you valuable information. It may be
that you have a problem with your sales process, or some
other issue. Without the lost call information,
you won't know where to look.
Track the outcome of the customer call.
 This
is where your software really helps. If you want
to track using your own spreadsheets, you will need to
set up a system to link the call source to the job
ticket and then the invoice. This will allow you
to track a number of important benchmarks. You
should be able to learn things about your advertising
performance like the number of calls generated, cost per
call, cost per client gained, total sales, and return on
investment.
Quantify and review the results for each type of
advertising you do.
Once you have the information entered into your system
and the proper calculations set up, you can review how
each form of advertising is performing for you.
Reviewing these performance benchmarks on a monthly
basis will allow you to see how your advertising dollars
are paying off.
For your electronic
advertising like web and radio, you can make changes
quickly if your ads are not paying off. Your print
ads can't be changed so easily, but poor performing ads
should be changed or eliminated as soon as possible.
With hard facts about your ad results, you may be able
to negotiate a better price or placement for the print
ad to improve profitability.
Remember that a simple
measure of calls received does not tell the whole story.
If your business is not making a profit on the calls
received, you must find out why, and make appropriate
changes. This can include a rewrite of the ad,
improved phone scripts, or even abandoning that type of
media altogether.
Building advertising that
consistently works for you requires time, effort, and
patience. If you don't measure the performance of
each of your ads, you could be wasting all three.
Whether you use a commercial product or build your own
tools to benchmark the performance of your advertising,
is up to you, but you must measure how your various
forms of advertising are performing, or you could be
throwing your money away.
- - - - - - -
Give Mike Conroy a call to
discuss your business, your numbers, your performance
benchmarks, or your flat rate
books. Take advantage of his experience working
with hundreds of companies like yours to help you achieve your own business success.
Measure Monthly, Adjust Quarterly
& Achieve Annual Profit Goals
|
Finally! Your business can be easier to
manage every day. |
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