For example, look at the number of pages of advertising for the category Chiropractor in the AT&T yellow page directory for Lancaster and Palmdale.   In the July 2007 directory AT&T sold 6 pages of advertising and 4 specialty items.   In the July 2008 directory they sold 3 pages of advertising and 2 specialty items.  This represents a 50 percent drop in sold space.

The move away from yellow page advertising is premature.  Compare the results from a full page ad in  July 2007 and July 2008:

Results provided by resultstracking.com.

As you will note, the 2008 AT&T directory is generating a 20% increase in results.

Consider this:  Less pages of advertising creates a stronger opportunity for your advertising to be seen.  More importantly, it is a powerful opportunity for you to design an ad that will stand out against a smaller field of competitors. As a result, well designed advertising will generate a much higher return than in previous years.

Yellow pages are still heavily used by the older population. This market is the heaviest user of healthcare services. They are also the best insured (thanks to Medicare). This market also has large numbers of Empty Nesters with large disposable income.

Perhaps most interesting is the negotiation opportunity that exists with the yellow pages. As demand for yellow page advertising wanes, the negotiation opportunity increases!  While some will think that negotiation means fighting for a better price, I’ll suggest that the cost of printing and distribution has gone up.  A better negotiation strategy is to dominate the medium with both large and small ads in the same section (more about the power of this in an upcoming article).

As more advertisers use emotions to guide their advertising choices, they will mistakenly continue to abandon yellow pages. The tactical marketer will use this window of opportunity to capture a larger share of the local leads generated by the yellow pages.

The typical approach is to track the results ( a good reason to use Resultstracking.com). Change the content of the ads, and see if it changes the results. Other simple and logical steps are to change the size of the ads or change the media.

Tracking is not always easy, but technology certainly helps. Over the last few years we have tracked thousands and thousands of calls. We not only tracked the source, we tracked what happened when the call was made. We actually listened to the call.

We have tracked the marketing of Dr. Frye’s Chiropractic Office ( a top rated Southern California Chiropractic Office) and watched how they tested yellow pages. We have tracked the clients of NearMe Networks (Chiropractors like Dr. Jeffrey Garafalo in Bolingbrook and Dr. Michael Gabrielson in Pleasanton who use the internet to reach new patients). We have even tracked flower shops.

So want is the easiest, fastest and cheapest way to increase your ROI?

Believe it or not it is answer the phone. Answer the phone during off hours. Early morning, late afternoon and even weekends. Most people who work for a living work during office hours. Their availability to call is during lunch or after hours.

Simply look at the results of the phone calls to Dr. Michael Dorausch. You will see the number of phone calls on weekends and after hours.

How hard is it to answer the phone. It’s easy. Get a cell phone, give it to your staff. Pay them a few bucks or give them a bonus for every contact.

The tag section allows you to categorize calls. This way you can identify existing customers, wrong numbers, new customers, etc. You can also assign a rating to the call to value how well the call was handled or how strong of a prospect the caller is. The assign to allow you to track the success of different employees. Finally at some point you can assign the revenue generated by the call.

As might imagine, the power to track this sort of information can really empower your decision making process.

• Identify which media generates more leads
• Identify which media generates better quality customers
• Identify which staff are better suited to handling telephone calls

Most importantly, for the first time ever, you can truly track how much revenue your advertising dollar generate

In this case, a chiropractor uses resultstracking.com to track the amount of response he gets from his internet marketing efforts. The raw data of number of calls, length of call, repeat or unique calls is all very interesting and valuable from a local perspective. The qualitative data of the content of the calls is what can help reveal trends.

This particular caller happened to be a small town medical doctor, who had a patient in crisis. He needed assistance from the patient’s chiropractor in helping diagnose the condition. Instead of turning to the phone book, he turned to the internet and looked for the chiropractor on the internet. What makes this interesting is that the medical doctor probably not only knew the chiropractor, but also had the chiropractors number available in a variety of places in his office. For sure it was in the phone book.

Small business faces the challenge of not having the resources of a large marketing department to test and continually track their efforts. Most advertisers can’t tell if one ad works better than another let alone if a particular media is returning a decent return of investment. We’re going to look at how a very highly regarded Chiropractic Clinic in Lancaster, California uses Results Tracking to maximize the results of their advertising and lower their overall advertising costs.

Background: AV Spinal Care chooses to try cable television advertising to promote a special treatment that they offer utilizing a piece of equipment called a DRX9000. They choose to rotate 2 different commercials throughout the schedule. One commercial featured a male personality, the other a female. In order to test the effectiveness of the media they place ResultsTracking telephone numbers on the commercials. The ResultsTracking numbers are directly forwarded to the clinics office. In addition, they chose to further test the campaign by having a separate number for each of the commercials.

The results:

The most obvious result (by viewing the graph on the left) was that the commercials were not providing a great return. However the more interesting result was that one of the commercials generated three times the result of the other commercial.

Conclusions:

• The creative content of the ad you run makes a huge difference in the return on investment.
• By testing your creative, you can select the ads that work better.
• By cutting the weaker ads and spending more money on the stronger ads you can radically increase the profit of a campaign.

While it would be unfair to suggest that Cable TV is not a good media, it would be very fair to suggest that the creative used was not very powerful.

Have a spectacular day!