Advertising: The Intelligent Way

Back in the old days, you’d run ads in 20 magazines every year with no real idea if any of them would work. It would take years of trial and error to see if stopping any particular ad had any impact on sales. Of course you could always ask the potential client “So how did you hear of us?” but most people can’t remember what they had for dinner last night never mind which magazine they tore your ad from. With that said, it’s so vital in this day and age to understand exactly where your clients come from. Let's take a look why: Let’s say you’re using Google Adwords and spending £500 a month driving traffic to your website with no response, you’d be wasting £6,000 a year so obviously you’d re-think it and try again. The benefit is you don’t need to wait until the end of the year in order to cancel the failing ad, you just switch it off if it’s not working, which heavily reduces the amount of money wasted. That’s the power of modern day digital marketing. Almost every major platform allows you to track the effectiveness of your ad spend.

How to track ads in magazines

This doesn’t mean that if you use print ads you can’t track the results. Tom Aitken at Enhance Services runs a number of ads in magazines but has given each ad a different phone number and web address. He can then log into the control panel and look at the number of calls each number gets in order to track the effectiveness. The web addresses forward to his website but in the process track the number of visitors the ads get. Any enquiries that he gets are then passed directly into his Business Automation CRM with a note for the advert it came from. This smart use of technology enables Tom and many others who do a similar thing to make smarter marketing decisions.

Make smarter marketing decisions

On the flip side, there might be some advertising or marketing that you’re running which is producing epic results, which you have the option to increase. If you can see that a free listing in a directory or a cheap ad in a magazine is producing sales and you can increase the size of it for example, then it would be worth you doing exactly that. Without tracking this information you’re flying blind and will waste considerable amounts of money.