All businesses need to make sure that potential customers can find them. As a result, it’s obvious that advertising is an important element of your business, whatever size you might be. Whether you’re self-employed and working from home, or a mega-corporation with a finger in every pie, if customers don’t know that you exist, how are they going to pay you for your services? Especially as most companies tend to run a number of advertising campaigns at once, it can be hard to tell which of them is working and which of them is simply wasting your advertising budget. Did your new customers find you from your radio advert, your social media campaign or the billboard poster on Main Street? Did they find you on Facebook but phone you on your mobile number? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then there’s a good chance that you are throwing money away that could be better spent.
Solving the issue
Keeping track of your data can be difficult, especially if someone has phoned you up; how are you supposed to know where they got your number from? Instead of guessing, companies such as Ringba offer Inbound Call Tracking, which is a way of breaking down what is working and what isn’t. It works by simply designating a different phone number for your business depending on the location of the advert, and records the data. So if someone spots your Google ad but doesn’t click on it or contact you through your website and instead decides to call you, you still have the ability to know which of your advertising campaigns attracted that customer. Simple, right? It can save a lot of confusion and a lot of worry if you know straight away just how a customer found you, and whether you retained that customer is a good indication of the worth of that advertising campaign. It’s all well and good that you get your customer analytics through your website, but a successful business is always to be the one that uses as much data as possible to improve the customer experience and the company’s profit.
Thanks to the myriad number of ways that businesses are able to analyze their data, it is now possible to adjust any advertising campaign at a moment’s notice. This is giving every business the opportunity to target their exact target demographic, and alter elements that aren’t working. This all works for your business. You are able to see at a glance if your advert in the local paper is worth the cost just by clicking a button, and be able to make the informed decision to cancel it and channel that part of the advertising budget into a more useful campaign. There’s no reason to pay all that money for an advert on the side of a bus if nobody ever decides to check out your services because they saw it there. Much better to channel that money into an advertising campaign that you know (and can prove) works. This, of course, means that you are optimizing your ability to advertise, to reach more of your customer demographic and ultimately generate more profit. Too much waste can kill a company very quickly, and money spent on advertising might seem like a long-term investment, but if it isn’t working, then it’s throwing your profits in the bin. Every marketing campaign needs as much information as possible in order to judge its effectiveness, and discovering what is workign best for your company can save you money as well as time and effort.
