Episode 270 transcription
If you’re doing marketing of any description in your business, there’s a really, really.
Easy way to make sure you don’t waste money. And today’s episode is all about that.
Welcome to this week’s episode of Mi TV. My name is Emma Mills and I help business owners to leverage their time, focus on the fun stuff and win the week. And this week’s episode is how to not waste money on marketing.
If you are asking a prospective to ring you in any way, shape or form, and don’t switch off to check. I’m not just here to talk about call answering. It’s not about that. I’m just going to tell you a story.
So we have a dentist that we work with called Marco, and we’ve been working with him for two or three years now. But I just want to tell you the story of three years ago of how we ended up working with him. And he came to us because he was doing lots of leaflet drops and leaflet drops had worked really well for him. And I know leaflet drops work really. Well for lots of different businesses. So because he’s got a local business. Ultimately, like the people are in a geographical area around him, he wanted to try leaflets and so he did. And he had them really nicely designed up. He got a company to deliver them for him. And he spent a lot of money like 5000 pounds in the design print delivery of lots and lots and lots of leaflets. Anyway, he didn’t get an on it. The call to action was there was a website, but also there was a number to ring. And he knew that people would ring the number because some of his demographic, whether maybe people who weren’t not on the Internet all the time, or some people just like to use and speak to somebody. People still do that. People still speak to other people. So he knew that also people would phone. So he put the phone number on there, his website and all of the leaflets had gone out. Maybe a month had passed and he hadn’t had one single phone call from these leaflets. And he knew that there was something wry. So there’s like a couple of options here. Either the leaflets haven’t been delivered. So he investigated that.
He looks at whether his phone system was working. Okay? So, like, he tried it at all. Different times of the day. And then he thought, okay, I’ll just. Dig a bit deeper into the phone system. And what he discovered, quite shockingly, it’s not funny, is that when he looked at calls over the past month, there were lots of calls, like lots and lots of them. That were 1 second long. And what he found that was that his receptionist, who is there to greet his customers, to deal with admin, to take in your inquiries, didn’t like answering the phone. And now, actually, like, the definition of a receptionist is a person who greets and deals with clients and visitors and phone calls. She didn’t like answering the phone. What she actually realized she did, she enjoyed and thrived off, was people coming into the surgery, and she was talking to them face to face. But she considered, well, one, she didn’t like answering the phone, and two, she considered it not as useful of her time. So she just let the phone ring, or if there was people in there.
She would pick it up and put it down. Now, I know that this story is quite wild, and it takes some doing to employ somebody that thinks that that is okay in your business. And I know it isn’t funny at all. I’m just smiling because it’s just so, like, shocking. And I know that you can say, well, okay, I can hear my receptionist or whoever in the office. I can hear them on the phone. And I get that totally. It’s just all I’m saying is that things happen in our businesses that we don’t necessarily know about.
So what he did was, Marco was not one to go, I am defeated on this. He still knew that the leaflets were a really good idea, and any good business owner should test, improve, test, improve. And that’s what he did. And on it, he instead, he put a tracking number. And so the next time the leaflets went out, he put a very specific number. So it’s like a. So, like in Manchester, our area, Code is 0161, he would have an 0161 number still, but the rest of the number was just slightly different to his office one. And so that went on the leaflet. So then he knew that any of the calls coming in from the leaflets, that they were specifically leaflet numbers. And then as the next batch of leaflets came out, he started to get literally hundreds of calls coming in from the leaflets and the offer that he had on there. And because he discovered this, he was able to do something about it. And so he used us, MiPA to answer the calls coming in, specifically from this marketing campaign, because he knew we could report and capture them.
But today, today’s episode is about how you know, we’re so close to our businesses lots of times that we don’t know what is going on and we don’t spot these things, and it’s all about the reporting and the data and having and now, in our case, us being able to work with Marco and report on what calls are coming in, making bookings, booking people straight into his diary has made that he can confidently now send out the leaflet, so receptionist is no longer with him. You’ll be glad to know.
But it’s just, I just wanted today’s story to be, because it’s like one of those shocking stories I’ve told so.
Many times, but it is true, and it did happen. And so we don’t want that, you know, when we put so much money effort into marketing, we need to make sure that it works.
And so having a tracking number on marketing, whether you use a call answering service like us, or whether you use it internally, a tracking number is really, really helpful. We specifically, we can either provide them ourselves if you’re using our call answering service, or I recommend a company called Invoco, where I can pop the details below on the episode that we, we recommend a lot. And they are brilliant at providing you with numbers specifically for different marketing campaigns to track the results. So don’t be like Marco, get into the detail.
Make sure if you send something out, you have a specific phone number for it so you can track what’s coming in. Because we don’t want to waste money when we’ve put so much effort into it.
So I hope today’s episode helped you.
And I will see you next week for episode 271. See you then. Bye.
