Law firms spend so much time worrying about their paid phone book ads, that they forget a percentage of their calls come from the unpaid directory listings.
It makes sense. Phone directory advertising is usually costing you upwards of a third of your advertising budget. You hear people saying phone book advertising is money wasted, but you’re not sure how to adapt an ad that has run for ten years (or if you should cancel it all together).
Kirkpatrick Creative doesn’t kill phone book ads. We put them to the test.
Because all your energy is in the ads, you never really know how many calls you’re paying for, and how many are calling for free. When the phone rings off the hook for a few weeks, you give all the credit to your well-crafted ad. But is that an honest depiction of our ad efficiency?
Not as long as your listing uses the same number.
In order to get an honest look at how well paid advertising performs, Kirkpatrick Creative developed a workflow to hold the ads accountable. We printed the alphabetical, directory listing as it was, but for our paid advertising we purchased a second number to run to our law firm client’s reception desk.
Sure, all the calls were ending up at the same place. But at the end of the month. We were able to say, “Your free listing number rang x amount of times while your paid advertising rang y amount of times.”
We were holding our clients’ paid advertising to a standard of accountability they had never seen before. When we said, “That phone book advertising might not be worth the hefty rate you’re paying,” we had the data to back it up. They were forced to reevaluate the efficiency of their advertising strategy.
Purchasing a second number really is quite simple. Just open an Adwords account and follow their step-by-step program.
The true beauty of a free second number is that third, fourth, fifth or sixth numbers are free, too! Any ad in any medium can run with a different number and by tracking the call volume to that line, you can get an understanding of that ad’s effectiveness.
Download our new e-book
How to Manage Phone Book Advertising – for Efficiency and Productivity!
But what do you do with this new information?
Once you know which ads are earning their keep and which aren’t you can pull the money out of the duds and pour it back into your effective commercials, spots, fliers or phone book ads. If you run this test ruthlessly for six months, your advertising budget will be exponentially more efficient.
Then once you know you are running only the most effective ads, then you can double down and run different numbers for different television time-slots, different phone books, different radio drive times, different television programs. Soon you can generate data analysis proving:
- Which ads are most effective.
- Where they are most effective.
- When they are most effective.
- And Who they are most effective toward.
Before Google AdWords this type of analysis and data would have cost you tens of thousands of dollars, but now the technology is free to anyone willing to do the due diligence and homework.
However, it is time-consuming – weeding out repeat callers, return customers, wrong numbers and other flukes to insure the data is correct. It takes patience and focus to make sure you’re making the correct evaluations on your ads.
And remember – You’re a lawyer.
This isn’t even your job! If you want your advertising strategy to be held to this level of accountability, but don’t think you have the time for the oversight: Contact an advertising company focused on data analysis and ROI.
Contact someone like Kirkpatrick Creative today!
P.S. – If you just want some tips and tricks to help up your phone book ad game, download our free e-book How to Manage Phone Book Advertising - For Efficiency & Productivity, today!