I hear this all the time from local vendors. It’s frustrating, isn’t it? You spend your hard-earned money on advertising and no one ever mentions that they saw it. Is it working, or isn’t it?
Well, my friends, you’ve hit upon one of the great conundrums of marketing. Whether a bride mentions your ad isn't an indication of whether it’s working or not. It’s only an indication of whether they need to mention it to receive any special benefit or treatment. In other words, if you don’t tell them to mention it and why, they’re not going to. As a matter of fact, even telling a bride to mention your ad isn’t likely to work unless there’s something in it for her.
Just saying, “Tell us you saw our ad in…” isn’t going to work because there’s no consequence, positive or negative, attached to it. It’s not a strong call to action because there's no benefit to them. Sure, you want to know, but she doesn’t care about anything but planning her wedding.
The other thing to keep in mind is that your customers are people, just like you and me. When is the last time you told someone that you saw their ad when there wasn’t a coupon or special offer attached? Probably not often, if ever. Why should you? If you don’t get any benefit, you’re just going to call or go into that business and talk about your needs and what you want from them.
Sales tracking is important to the store, not to the consumer. Why should it be? Yes, as I said, it’s frustrating, but if you really want to know if your ads are working, then you have to do the heavy lifting. They’re not going to volunteer it.
So how can you know if your ads are working? Here are three ideas for effectively tracking your ads. This applies to print, online, direct mail, radio, TV, or wherever you’re advertising.
Since brides are most likely to call you before they come in, the best time to track is when they first call you, not when they come into your store. Once they come in, all they'll care about is their needs, so don’t expect your in-store marketing surveys to yield accurate results. How would you feel if you went into a store and the first thing you had to do was take a test? I’ve asked brides, and that’s the way it feels to them. If you were the customer, you wouldn’t like it; don’t expect that they will.
Very important tip: Ask better questions. You get the answers to the question you ask, so ask, “Where did you get our phone number today?” instead of “How did you hear about us?” or “Who referred you to us?” Asking how they heard about you makes them think of the first time they heard you existed, but that didn’t make them call you today…now…at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. You want to know what flipped the switch on that lightbulb over their head. You want to know what triggered them to call you NOW. Sure, they may have heard about you before, been referred to you, even seen your ad multiple times, but something made them want to call you now. Ask better questions and you’ll get a better answers.
If you’re running ads in the right places and you still think most of your business is coming from referrals, you may be asking the wrong questions or influencing their answers. If you really think your business is all from referrals, would you be willing to unlist your phone number, take the sign off the building, and stop all forms of advertising? Do you really think you wouldn’t see any drop? Since most brides get more than one referral, your advertising supports the referrals she gets and validates them. She doesn’t care if you need to advertise; she wants to see your ad and show it off to her friends to validate her purchase decisions.
Use a direct response vehicle, a coupon, or special offer that they have to bring in order to receive the value. Make sure there's an expiration date not too far out to increase the sense of urgency. I know that most of you don’t like the idea of coupons or offers, but they call these “direct response vehicles” for a reason. You'll know if you get them back, they worked, and if you don’t, they didn’t. Of course, if they don’t come back, it could be indicative of other problems (bad or irrelevant offer, problem with delivery of the message, etc.). If you’re going this route, the less strings attached to the offer, generally, the better the response. This isn’t for everyone, but it's very effective for tracking.
Use a different phone number, email address, or URL in each ad. This is an old Yellow Pages trick. If you can track how many phone calls come in to the phone number, you can see how many calls you got from that ad. You can get different toll-free numbers, and your web master can set you up with multiple email addresses and URLs. You see these all the time on infomercials on TV. The department number you see in the ad or phone extension indicates to them where you saw their infomercial.
A twist on this is a marketing trick a limo customer of mine used many years ago. He would put a call to action in his ad, something like this: “Call Charlie today to discuss your wedding transportation needs, 555-1234.” The trick was that there was no one there named “Charlie.” He'd simply change the name in each ad, and when someone called and asked for “Charlie,” “Phil,” “Tony,” or “Barry,” he'd know which ad they were calling from. He didn’t have to ask. Then he'd note which name they asked for and simply say, “Charlie just stepped out, but my name is Dave and I can help you.”
Was it sneaky? Sure, but it didn’t hurt anyone -- they always got to talk to someone about what they needed, and he got the information he needed unobtrusively.
Lastly, everyone who has contact with your customers has to be on board if you’re going to accurately track your marketing efforts. They have to understand why it’s so important to get good feedback. If they don’t, they'll quickly derail your efforts and you’ll be back where you started…or worse, you’ll think you're getting good feedback and you’re not. So, don’t just tell them what to do; tell them why and why it’s so important. Get them to buy in to the effort.
So, how do you really know if your ads are working? If business is better when you run them than when you don’t. It can be as simple as that.
This article from The Knot Market Intelligence (TKMI) is another way that we are working to support you with education, information, and market research that are beyond the reach of most small businesses. ©2008 The Knot Inc.
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