Thanks to the post Trackable Telephone Numbers for Franchise Direct Mail on Ifbyphone’s Cloud Telephony blog, I discovered a great article from Franchise World’s May 2010 Edition about how franchises, or really any business can use different marketing channels to boost their success in reaching target customers.
Why are franchises struggling?
The basic problem that the article addresses is that customers today do not usually leaf through the yellow pages when the time comes to seek a service or product to match their needs. Instead, franchises must reach the customers at the right place and the right time, and catch their attention while they are making the purchasing decision. The strategy behind locating the target and creating a real quality lead is quite complex.
Let’s go back to the basics and look at 3 steps to boost your marketing and advertising results:
1) Find Your Target’s Time-of-Need
John Jorgenson’s analogy here for optimizing the timing of your marketing message really hits home:
Imagine a two-year-old child in the back seat of the car who has done a great job with potty training, but sounds the cry of a need of facilities. The first business with facilities to put a marketing message in front of Dad, at his time-of-need, is getting his patronage. Take that rationale to real-life business applications and you will see that you have to have your message in front of a prospect at their time-of-need.
2) Analytics and Tracking
As powerful as the potty-training analogy might be, the reality is that it’s much harder for many franchises or businesses to determine their ideal audience when developing their marketing message. Analytics can provide the demographics necessary to reach your prime customers through the right media channels. Once you develop your marketing campaigns, you also need to track their success. They key word here is accountability.
No longer can the creative team blame poor campaign results on non-trackable pieces…
Now with automated marketing systems that track lead generation by media channel and by campaign, franchisors can prove to franchisees that programs and campaigns are successful by pointing to the reports on the automated system that disclose the lead flow to their store. It is very easy with pass-through trackable telephone numbers, PURLs, unique micro-sites, text-message cell phone numbers, and other technologies to determine how a customer was acquired.
Imagine that You’re a Retail Clothing Store
One good powerful example here is Hosted IVR. Ifbyphone’s Cloud Telephony Blog gives a great example of how this works. Franchises or retail chains can use the Store Locator tool together with their Hosted IVR to route customers to the retail chain closest to them. You could even combine this technology with a Voice Broadcast. Let’s say you’re a retail clothing store and you want to run a new promotion, where you offer customers to come into their local store for a private sale. You first call all of your customers in your database, and you then route to their nearest store (which the system recognizes through their zip code or area code) to talk to the salespeople about the specific event at their store. On the day of the event, you track the purchases of your cardholders, and compare these to the telephone analytics from the initial campaign.
3) Be Ready to Change
Accountability means more than the ability to demonstrate the success of your past marketing and advertising campaigns. It means that you constantly believe that you are adapting your advertising strategies in order to maximize your success within a given budget. The good news is that by tracking your advertising campaigns with the right analytics, you can determine where and how to change your strategy to boost your marketing and advertising results.
Good Luck!
Related posts:
- 3 Steps to Improve Your Email Marketing
- Phone Marketing Insider’s Greatest Highlights
- BP Buys Targeted “Oil Spill” Search Results
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