Just OK is not OK for your advertising
Have you seen the recent “just OK is not OK” campaign? Think for a moment if you can remember who the ads are for.
I personally like the ads and think they’re well-made and funny, but I’ve informally polled friends and colleagues and over fifty percent couldn’t remember who it’s for and some aren’t even sure what the product is.
The answer is that the ads are for AT&T and they’re discussing how good their network is.
The reason I bring this up is that we sometimes hear customers insist that they would only use a phone number that includes their company name because they’re so well known in their market. If people can’t remember AT&T, one of the most famous companies in the world, what are the odds that they’re going to remember Tom’s Plumbing? What customers can remember is what they’re looking for. If a customer is looking for a plumber they’ll remember 1-800-Plumbing, if they want hair they’ll remember 1-800-I-Want-Hair, if they’re injured they’ll remember 1-800-I’m-Injured.
You’ve got to give customers an immediate and memorable way to reach you. Otherwise, your response rates will continue to be low and your advertising will never live up to its full potential.
Imagine someone who’s impressed by the main idea of the AT&T campaign, but can’t remember who ran it. They’re going to have to go online and look up “best network” or “best carrier”. They might find AT&T, but they will definitely also find other carriers claiming to be the best. For Tom’s Plumbing, they’ll look up Plumbing in their city. Who knows what they’ll find there.
Before you run your next campaign, please see if we have a number for you. You’ll get much better results.
We’ve greatly expanded our inventory. If you’ve reached out to us before, we might have some better options for you. Call 1-800-STRONG-SALES (1-800-787-6647)
Remarkable Results Radio Interviews our President about 1-800-MECHANIC
Ignition’s President, Bruno Tabbi, was recently interviewed by Carm Capriotto for his podcast “Remarkable Results Radio.”
Listen here: https://remarkableresults.biz/e356/
The Internet is Designed to Beat You
The internet is designed to beat you.
They surround your ad with other competing ads.
They charge you by the number of people who inquire, whether or not you are successful in monetizing that inquiry.
They even sell your own name to other people.
The internet cannot afford to allow anybody to dominate a category or an area or a location. If it did, the dominant player would eventually drive all others out, weakening the internet’s economic base. The dominant player would be driving the truck instead of the internet and social media giants.
The internet will always defeat you. It is designed to do so, so that it can retain control over its own income. Do you think Google would allow one company to take over the national spotlight and dominate? No. Every time you gets close, they change the algorithm and you’ve got to spend money trying to figure out how to do it all over again.
How do you defeat the internet?
By overshadowing it and not putting yourself in the position where you have to rely on it in order to grow your business. You do it by having a marketing campaign that ingrains your company into the hearts and minds of all the people in your community so that when they think of your product or service they think of you and call your unforgettable phone number. If people know your phone number, they don’t have to go to the internet and be exposed to the gauntlet of your competitors, directory sites and review sites.
Plus, when you drive people to your phone you sell more. Plenty of data shows that calls convert 20-40x more than web leads, which only convert 1-2% of the time. Even Google is pegging the value of a call at 10-15x more than a web form submission.
You can choose to fight a never-ending battle with your competitors for internet supremacy (a battle that you can never win), or you can build a lasting advantage that your competitors can’t duplicate. The choice is yours.
Your mobile marketing: How vanity phone numbers are integral to call commerce and increasing O2O conversions.
It is no longer up for debate: inbound phone calls are an important and increasingly valuable lead form. A recent study by BIA/Kelsey shows that calls convert to sales 10-15 times more than web leads. Thanks to smartphones, mobile calls to businesses are now totaling 85 billion annually with trends indicating that this number will swell to a staggering 169 billion by 2020. Mobile calls currently account for $1 trillion in U.S. consumer spending.
Calls are the primary form of contact in high-value and sensitive transactions. For these reasons the value of these leads will continue to grow, particularly because of today’s on-demand economy. Put simply, people want instant answers through human interaction. They want to have a quick and easy sales and customer service experience. This is why, according to a recent Accenture study, eighty-three percent of U.S. consumers prefer dealing with human beings over digital channels to solve customer services issues and get advice related to making purchases.
So where do vanity phone numbers fit in this equation?
Historically vanity numbers have served as easy-to-remember marketing tools, designed to ensure businesses got the highest response possible from their advertising (which is easier to remember 586-246-1180 or 1-800-MECHANIC?). While still serving that purpose today, their use has matured to accommodate today’s digital marketing needs.
The cornerstone of call commerce is call analytics. In order to have these analytics, advertisers will use different phone numbers in their digital advertisements to determine where each call came from and how the business interacted with that caller. The advertiser gets the satisfaction of knowing where each call came from, but ultimately their advertising dollars stop there, and little to no lasting branding is accomplished. This is because a different phone number in each ad doesn’t leave a lasting impression in a potential client’s mind.
Despite the most obsessive data gathering efforts, people are still more likely to buy based on marketing that has drilled something into their memories, such as a great jingle or an unforgettable phone number. 1-800-CONTACTS, 1-800-FLOWERS, and 1-800-GOT-JUNK demonstrate this by still being #1 in their respective industries. Their memorable phone numbers give them an advantage online and offline. Even companies that are more digitally oriented utilize these numbers. 1-800-GO-FEDEX, 1-800-SAMSUNG and 1-800-MY-APPLE are used by their respective companies to stay top of mind.
Circling back to how vanity numbers fit into today’s digital landscape and call commerce, the key is combining Dynamic Number Insertion with an unforgettable vanity number. Dynamic phone number insertion (DNI) is a process that marketers use to measure the impact of digital efforts on inbound phone calls. When a lead clicks through to your site from any advertisement, DNI technology displays a number that’s unique to the specific search engine, web page, keyword or other source.
Currently, companies lacking a vanity number will simply display a different phone number on every ad. But with a vanity number you have the best of both worlds because the vanity number is always displayed no matter what the ad is. When the consumer decides to click the ad and call, they are actually dialing a tracking number instead of the vanity number shown (the click-to-call hyperlink dials the tracking number). So the consumer sees the vanity number, remembers it, but where the call came from is still accounted for.
This is important for multiple reasons: first, digital ads featuring a vanity phone number receive 33% more clicks than random phone numbers. Second, a business won’t have to sacrifice their brand and advertising dollars for the sake of call tracking. And finally, with regard to O2O conversions (online to offline) consumers can recall the vanity number when they are no longer online which increases the likelihood of sales and referrals, because they don’t have to go back online to retrieve contact information. Thus avoiding exposure to online competitors.
Vanity numbers boil down to marketing’s essence, which is getting the consumer’s attention and making sure they remember you. Now you can do it digitally and in traditional media without sacrificing branding.
Risky business
We spoke with a medical practice the other day and their marketing director told us they were no longer putting their phone number on their billboards. This got us wondering how many people will drive past their billboards and think, “I’ll call them when I get home” – and then forget to do so.
By not placing a number on your billboards, you are risking three things when it comes to people who want to act now:
- They need remember to look your number up when they get to their destination. How many distractions do you think they’ll encounter before then?
- By making them go online, you have taken someone who wanted to act at that moment and delayed it. When your billboard got their attention, you were the only business on their mind. Once they go online, they will likely bump into your competitors.
- They may forget to call entirely. You had them for a few seconds, but you lost them.
All of these risks could be avoided with a simple and unforgettable phone number from Ignition Toll Free that consumers can instantly remember and dial. Call us at 1-800-Strong-Sales today.
Consumers 33% more likely to click mobile ad featuring vanity phone number
CONSUMERS 33% MORE LIKELY TO CLICK MOBILE AD FEATURING VANITY NUMBER
People searching online were 33% more likely to click on the ad featuring a vanity phone number compared to an ad featuring a numeric phone number. The test compared 100,000 impressions of two Google mobile ads. One ad featured 877-WINDOWS and the other 877-422-5878. The study found that the Click through rate (CTR) for the ad featuring the vanity phone number was .28%, resulting in 131 clicks from 46,429 impressions, while the ad with the numeric phone number was .21%, with only 111 clicks from 53,940 impressions.
