At the end of the day the goal of all advertising is to make more money back than you spend by earning customers who want to work with you now, and in the future. If the work you’re doing, or money you’re paying, isn’t accomplishing that in some measurable way, it’s not worth it. But to determine if it’s working or not, you HAVE to measure the results. This is easy for digital marketing (google, facebook, etc) – when set up properly through an analytics platform like GA4/Google Analytics, it’s fairly straight forward to see when $45 brought in 3 different calls from people looking for lawn care services.
But it gets more difficult when working with traditional advertising forms like newspapers, radio, billboards, etc. They can work, but you’ll need to get creative with how to track results, so you can, you know – see if it’s actually working or not.
One way you could do this is to open a separate business phone number through a service like Grasshopper. Then use that new business line EXCLUSIVELY in specific advertisements. So, if you’re running billboard ads with your number on them, use the new one you just opened. It will be your exclusive “advertising phone.” If anyone calls, you know it’s because they called from that ad. If no one calls… you know the ad didn’t work.
The same could be done for newspapers, billboards, magazines, or even TV commercials.
But you want to be careful here. If you have two different ads up, or two different types of ads, like a newspaper AND a billboard, at the same time, you may not be able to tell which of the ads was working.
So if you use this strategy, make sure you don’t ruin your KPI (key performance indicator) measurements by giving it multiple data sources.