I am constantly surprised at the answers I get when I ask business owners: “How many phone calls a week are you getting from your (Yellow Page) ad?” Generally the answer is: “I don’t really know, we don’t track this.” My answer to this usually is: If you are not tracking where your leads are coming from, how can you make an intelligent decision on where to spend your marketing dollars? For example, if you spend $400 a month on a Yellow Page ad that produces on average 10 leads a month, of which maybe 2 result in sales, and your average sale is $100, then is this a good spend? Maybe you need to look at other alternatives, tweak the ad, or both?

In my experience, most view advertising as an art or an expression of creativity. Those who think in these terms are missing one crucial key point: The purpose of advertising is to facilitate a prospect’s decision-making process, not to entertain! Furthermore, knowing where to advertise for maximum return on investment is crucial. Running ads indiscriminately and hoping for the best is a costly mistake most business owners can no longer afford.

Having a handle on which ads produce the most returns is like having a magic formula at your disposal. An ad that draws potential customers/clients placed in the right media is your magic formula for success. It’s as simple as
1 + 1 = 2.

Many business owners I talk to are of the opinion that calculating the return on investment of traditional media advertising (for example print ads) is very difficult. After all, how do you determine how many readers have actually seen your ad? Print publishers are only too happy to give you total readership numbers and other demographic data to make their case. And, although this may be good info to have, what it ultimately boils down to is how many calls or visitors your ad produces and how many convert to sales. Period! This is all the information you need to know. Which ad and which media works for you.

Monitoring an online marketing initiative such as a video ad is easy because most websites have means of tracking the exact number of Internet users who have clicked on your ad.

The added benefit of Internet marketing in general and video ads in particular is that it can be changed much quicker if it doesn’t yield the desired results. There is no one-year commitment as you would have in the Yellow Pages. What’s more, in my opinion the easy trackability and ease of making changes are the reasons why video ads are as popular as they have become and because they put the control into the hands of the user (=buyer), not the seller. They can choose to watch the video when they want.

My gut feeling is that more and more businesses will forego traditional print advertising in favor of Internet based advertising because of its flexibility and trackability to gauge effectiveness and make smart decisions.

This article was written by Birgit Rickert of Results Marketing and The Video City Directories, and may not be copied, reproduced or altered without prior consent.