Feature Article
All Roads Lead to Your Website
Like it or not, your website plays a key role in your marketing.
Here’s how to Leverage it.
By: Jim Rafferty
No matter how a prospect first learns of your company, chances are they’ll check out your website before they call you. And then, whether they were referred by a neighbor, heard a radio ad, or passed one of your trucks on their commute, when your phone personnel ask the million-dollar question: “How did you hear about us?” the caller will respond, “I saw you online.” So when every lead seems to be a website lead, how do you know where your money is being spent wisely?
For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll set aside digital advertising—talk to a web professional about tracking clicks as well as how many of those clicks are filling out the Contact Us forms on your website.
As to better tracking of your traditional (radio, TV, print, direct mail) advertising, here are some suggestions.
1] Dig deeper: The first step is a heart to heart with your phone-answering personnel. Explain the problem and the solution, which is asking follow-up questions. When a customer says she found your company online, you then need to ask “… and how did you happen to find our website?” Go for “unaided recall”; in other words, don’t prompt the caller with, “Did you hear a radio ad or did someone recommend us?” Not at first, anyway.
This is equally important for outgoing calls to someone who filled out a website form. Funny as it sounds, make sure they don’t assume that a lead sent from your site is a website lead. The main goal here is to get your phone answerers out of their check-the-box mentality. Be certain that they understand how vital it is to the business that they get this right.
2] Crack the code: Online shoppers are increasingly conditioned to use coupon codes to save money, and nearly every e-commerce site has a place to enter a code. Leverage this behavior by assigning a brief code to each of your ads. For example, if you’re sending a Valpak insert in September, it would prominently feature promo code VP-9. This works best in print but can be used in a radio or TV ad as well. Train your phone folks to ask for a code, and add a code field to your website forms as well.
3] Use tracking: For as little as $25 monthly per phone number, companies such as CallSource will provide unique phone numbers to assign to each campaign. These can be local numbers in your area code or toll-free 866 or 877 numbers, but they will forward to your main number. (Even in the cell phone era, some businesses like to use toll-free numbers for a more “big time” appearance.) Many media outlets—especially in direct mail—offer these numbers free with your advertising contract.
Besides the obvious benefit of knowing the source of each call, calls are recorded so you can listen to them online and make sure your phone personnel are doing what you expect. (This feature once led me to fire an answering service when I caught them telling weekend callers to call back on Monday, with no attempt to capture contact information.)
But there are a couple of drawbacks. If you’re using these numbers online, be aware that Google likes to see a consistent NAP (name, address, phone) for each business. Plus, any number of directory sites are crawling the web at any given time and may display a discontinued number for a long time.
Further, a customer who first calls you on a tracking number is likely to save it in their phone and use it throughout the cycle of the project. You’ll need to play back the calls to make sure they’re actually leads and not existing customers (or salespeople from other media; you’ll get plenty of those as well).
One more caveat: As traditional media has been squeezed by online options, some have taken to offering pay-per-call arrangements. So, for example, instead of paying traditional column-inch rates for a newspaper ad, you’re billed a fixed amount for each call to a tracking number. These can be a real boon for your budget, but be warned: The devil is definitely in the details. Look carefully at what constitutes a “qualified call” in the agreement, so you’re not paying for wrong numbers or calls from media salespeople.
4] Offer them a landing: I hope you know by now that any digital ads should point to a landing page specific to that product and promotion, so users aren’t just randomly dropped into your website where they can wander around and forget why they came. You can also use landing pages to improve tracking of your non-digital advertising. Keep it simple; you want the call to action in a radio ad to be easy to remember, such as “yourcompany.com/radio,” not “yourcompany.com/fall-window-and-door-half-off-sale.” Simple analytics will show you how many visitors a given page has had.
Will everyone who sees or hears an ad remember to use the special URL? Nope. Some will just Google search your name, go to your website, and tell your phone answerers that they found you online, which takes us back to that first item above. So train your phone answerers.
And remember: There is no single “perfect” solution here. With some combination of the suggestions above, though, you should be able to get a much better handle on how your marketing efforts are converting.
This article was originally published in Professional Remodeler 2016.
