Chances are, if you do any sort of local advertising, you’re not sure how to quantify how well it’s working. A local DID number from a hosted phone service provider can help you track the effectiveness of your ad campaigns so easily, it’ll be a small wonder how you lived without such visibility before.
These days, many small businesses are inundated with pitches from vendors promising them easy ways to get more customers, mostly from the Web. There’s so many choices it can be confusing and with more choices than ever before, even the local Yellow Pages ad reps are promising “Google Gold.”
But how can you tell if any of it’s working? And, if you feel some of it is – how do you know exactly how much you’re getting from it?
A local, trackable phone number works like this. Let’s say you advertise in the following places –
1) Yellow Pages,
2) Trade magazine or local paper, and
3) Online through Google (AdWords).
You can subscribe to a service like Halloo and in minutes, have three local DID numbers. DID stands for Direct Inward Dial, but that’s just a fancy way of saying that anyone can get a local number and have it forward to another phone of your choice.
Using a service like Halloo, you’ll have three local numbers in a few minutes –
212-555-0001 (for ads in Yellow Pages)
212-555-0002 (for ads in print)
212-555-0003 (for ads on Google).
You’ll place each of these to correlate to your ad campaigns. Your Yellow Pages ad will display the number ending in 0001, your print ad will display 0002, and your Google ad will display the 0003 number. Over time, you’ll see something quite amazing, something like –
Can we see where we should spend more of our marketing dollars? This service costs so little and takes a small amount of effort to set up. There’s no excuse for small business owners to ignore it.