Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Cut your advertising budget!

Things seem to be a little tight with everyone right now. Even dealers who are still growing are probably watching their budgets a little more than usual. One of the first places to cut seems to be the ad budget. I say - go to town!Cut all the advertising that isn't working. You don't even have to wait for an economic downturn to do this! That brings up the million dollar question (literally for some of you)-how do you know what to cut?How can you track all your different types of marketing? Here are a few ideas, and if you work with me, I can help you out with several of them for next to nothing. Just ask! 1. Add a different call tracking number to every form of advertising you do. Then (here's the hard part) take the time to look at the reports and see what type of call volume is coming in from each marketing form. 2. Add a landing page to everything too! A "landing page" is a fancy name for a website. It might be something like 'www.abcford.radio.com' (this is not a real site!). When people go there it will take them to your website, but now you'll be able to pull a report and see how many people went there off your radio commercial. 3. Don't assume! Set a system in place to spiff your sales people or someone working as a greeter to really ask each person how they came to be at your store that day. Sometimes, you've done such a great job with name recognition that they really did just stop in, but a lot of the time, they've recently seen, read or heard something that made them choose you over the dealer down the road. 4. Use MarketVision on your mailers, almost 90% of our clients do! If you work with Tri-Auto and aren't taking advantage of this exclusive technology to track who is coming in, where they are coming from and what sales rep they are talking to...you are missing out! We make mail the easiest marketing to track. After you know what's working, and what isn't. Why not cut your budget by eliminating the things that aren't producing for you, and taking some of the extra money you are saving to beef up the forms of marketing that are. How do you track!?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great article and sage advice. At AdSymetrix we have combined all of your recommendations into one easy to use interface. We can also handle pURL's (personal url's) and variable data printing with unique numbers in the mail piece itself and on the landing page. Check us out sometime, you will like what you see.

Anonymous said...

The content you have provided is pretty interesting and useful and I will surely take note of the point you have made in the blog.

While I was browsing the Internet for ways to boost my website exposure, I read about how effective offline media is for getting additional exposure. Since online media advertising has become so competitive, I thought I will complement the online marketing efforts of my products with offline media advertising like newspaper and magazine advertising. This can be the best way to get a wider coverage for a website and draw additional traffic. I think it is a great marketing strategy to use both online and offline advertising to get more customers.

I thought this information might be useful for anyone looking for solutions to get me-ore traffic to their website.

Direct Mail Diva said...

Hi Randy, I totally agree. With one on one marketing becoming increasingly more popular & effective I believe we'll start seeing all kinds of hybrid marketing. People are online every day and people still check their mailboxes every day, by combining landing pages, personal websites, text messaging, etc. along with stong websites & a strong online presence automotive dealers and all business will beging to see a real shift in the type of traffic they're producing. I'm very exciting what the future holds!

Anonymous said...

Great advice for #2.

I can't stress this enough - it is all about tracking. With proper tracking of what is and isn't working, we can cut the bad performers doing these rougher times.

Thanks for the article.