The Mayoros Agency Advertising Blog

We’re getting to that time of year again when a decision has to be made about what to do with your local phone book advertising. Unfortunately, because the phone book is published annually, business owners have to make this decision for an entire year in the future…months before the book is ever published. That can make planning difficult, especially when you can’t predict economic downturns like the one that happened in October 2008, just as many new phone books were hitting driveways and doorsteps across the country. So what should you do with your phone book ad this year? Think about the following before you renew:

• 47% of users reported they used the Internet above any other source to find information about local businesses, according to The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project.
• There are numerous reports and surveys that suggest for many business types, phone book advertising is no longer providing a large volume of leads.
• Internet advertising is more flexible and can potentially outperform phone book advertising if done correctly.

Here is some quick math to think about.

How much are you paying per lead?

If you are paying $1,000 per month for a larger phone book ad and getting only 10 calls per month, you are paying $100 per lead. Even very competitive search engine pay-per-click costs don’t approach $100/click. Many local search engine campaigns average less than $5/lead. If your cost per lead in the phone book is reasonable, then keep it, even if it isn’t generating lots of leads. If not, consider cutting back on your phone book ad costs.

Options for changing your Phone Book Advertising Plan.

1. Cut back the size of your ad for a year and see if it makes a difference in lead generation. Don’t worry about losing your position in the book. If your competitors are paying attention they’ll be reaching the same conclusions you do, if they haven’t already.
2. Go from full color to spot color or no color. You can calculate whether this has the potential to pay off by re-calculating your cost/lead if the number of leads you get stays the same as last year, or declines a bit.
3. Dump the display ad entirely. Try a bigger “box” listings in the directory, which grabs attention in a different way than display ads.

How to spend the savings?

We suggest you take any savings from cutting back your phone book ad and roll it directly into Internet advertising. Search engine ads will help bring in those customers that you’ve been missing. Setting up your own campaign and managing it requires a lot more work than signing a new contract with the phone directory company, but you don’t have to do it yourself. Hiring a professional manager handle your Internet advertising campaign will make it simple and improve your results.

Some interesting news from Google this week.  The company has been testing telephone response tracking for AdWords and is now starting to roll out the service to more users. 

The Good News
We’ll soon be able to attach a unique toll free number to our clients AdWords ads and track those calls at no additional charge.  Google is making the service free for now, while they get it rolling.  This is excellent news because in the past we have often used a phone number in AdWords text or display ads but there is significant additional cost involved in setting up a seperate phone number and then tracking calls coming into that number.  This integration will be seamless and at no cost, the price tag is perfect for local advertisers.  Not only is the toll-free number and the tracking free, Google does not initially plan to charge for calls made in response to its ads.  So every call made instead of a click will be added value for the advertiser.  Not only that, but callers are more likely to be purchasers than clicks, so the conversion rate on calls should be much higher than those clicking to the website.

The Not So Bad News
Unlike other Google services which serve to keep people exposed to ads or provide platforms for ads to be shown on, this one probably won’t remain free.  Google is clearly looking to leverage its technology to take back dollars being spent with third parties to track AdWords phone responses, and that will mean charging per phone call.  The question is how much?  Our guess is that Google will run the service for free for a while to gather enough information to determine what a fair charge per call would be.  There’s no way to use an auction style system to price calls like ad placement, so it would probably have to be a standard rate.  Most likely, though, it will still be a lot cheaper than many companies are paying right now to track phone calls from AdWords.

A Side Effect
Tracking phone calls will be a benefit to advertisers and makes AdWords an even better value than it has been in the past (which is still pretty good).  But, it also stands to make display advertising on Google’s network more valuable.  In general, display advertising is more visible, but suffers from lower click-through rates than search advertising.  However, our guess is that display ads will generate more calls than text ads, making them more attractive to advertisers, something Google has been working on for a while now.

We’ll be adding this service to our current advertisers accounts as soon as it become available.

Internet Retailer reports that 83% of the companies it surveyed earned more than 5% of their revenue as a direct result of search engine marketing.  While 27% of respondents said they received more than 50% of their sales from search engine marketing, most companies reported between 6 and 40% of their sales were from pay-per-click ads primarily on Google, Bing and Yahoo.

While the study dealt only with retail businesses, where online transactions allow for easy measurement of results, Internet marketing plans for service businesses should also include search engine advertising because it will also help new customers find your business.  Done correctly, search engine marketing builds upon website traffic driven by search engine optimization to bring even more customers your direction. 

Email gets all the glory in terms of ROI and it should.  But many small businesses still lack search advertising plans.  We’re talking about ads that show up along with the results of a search in any of the major search engines.  According to the Direct Marketing Association’s most recent study, email marketing returned $43.62 for every dollar spent on it.  The second highest ROI came from Internet Serach advertising, which returned $21.85 for every dollar spent on it in 2009.  

Some small businesses don’t run search campaigns because they are too busy, too confused by all the options for keywords and bids, or just don’t realize that search marketing is as fundamental as phone book advertising once was.  Don’t miss out on potential revenue because online searchers don’t find your business.

A recent survey by Citibank of small businesses showed 28% are using email marketing to reach customers.  While we believe that nearly all small businesses can benefit from cost effective email marketing, it has to be approached in the correct way.  Not all email marketing is created equal.  Here are some of the capabilities we can provide if we handle your email marketing. 

• Automatic signup forms for your website or blog that send an automated confirmation email upon signup.
• Unique Designs
• Ability to automatically send a series of emails at a scheduled interval.  One example of how this is useful would be to automatically send a new signup an email with a coupon.
• Ability to segment the list by various standard and custom data fields.  A photographer could, for example, ask for wedding date and send emails about wedding photo services until the wedding day, after which they might switch to sending emails about portrait services.
• Ability to create multiple email lists, if you’d like to provide customers with an option to receive just special offers, just newsletters, etc.
• Ability to mail merge customer’s names and other important information, such as a sales representative’s name and phone number into the email.  
• Alerts you to subscribers who have marked your email as spam and removes them from your list.

Can your email do this?  If you’d like to learn more about what we can do for your email, please contact us.