The benefits of Response Monitoring

It seems like only yesterday that Mediahawk was founded to monitor telephone response from advertising. When we started we found that people found the concept of using different telephone numbers in their advertising as simply ridiculous.

Now it is generally accepted practice to gauge advertising and operational effectiveness.

In this brief we look at what has caused this change of view and why using different telephone numbers in advertising can bring significant business benefits from a financial and operational perspective.

	Response Monitoring and Analysis By providing customers with different telephone numbers for their advertising, we can provide daily reporting to show: How much response each advert is generating Whether the calls are being answered and serviced Where all the calls are coming from To find out how Mediahawk could help you, please call us on 0845 120 7442.

Why monitor?

Since the birth of advertising, companies have spent fortunes using the medium to promote their products but the challenge has always been to try and measure the effectiveness of their advertising. Where and advert is brand based this has and will always be difficult to measure. However, were there is a call to action message it becomes much easier to measure the effectiveness. For adverts that require a telephone response, the act of putting different numbers in different adverts will instantly show the effectiveness of individual adverts and advertising channels.

Once a company understands what adverts and creative work, they can channel their spend to reduce their wastage and increase their response. This becomes a virtuous circle as less money is spent on adverts and there is a greater return on investment.

	Case Study A pub company introduced Mediahawk’s response analysis to measure their effectiveness for tenant recruitment. Before they did this the bulk of their advertising was on bill boards, their web site, in the trade press with some tactical direct mail. Following their analysis of what provided their response, they found that nearly 65% came from the pub bill boards, their newly revamped web site generated 20% of their response and the trade adverts less than 5%. They have now significantly reduced their trade advertising and refocused their spend into an online advertising campaign which has transformed their web usage and tenant application levels.

Why companies did not monitor their telephone response

Before using different telephone numbers in advertising became acceptable, the key objections we found were that companies were wedded to using one number in their advertising. This objection was often at its strongest when companies used a “memorable number”. However, over time we have found this objection has become increasingly irrelevant because companies realise that individuals do not remember telephone numbers (however memorable) unless they use them on a very regular basis. As the majority of call to action advertising is to attract irregular rather than repeat purchases, respondents do not use an advertisers number regularly enough to remember it.

An typical example of the lack of memorability consumers have for numbers can be seen if one asks someone to say the telephone number of their favourite radio station and they can rarely remember it although it will be mentioned at least 4 times an hour!

Respondents to adverts do not notice that they have different telephone numbers, they respond to the message rather than the number. When advertisers understand that having different numbers will not effect their brand image or response rates they then start to look at the benefits this approach takes.

	Case Study A car retailer introduced Mediahawk across all of their advertising. By using their online statistics they found that they were missing a significant numbers of calls after 5.00pm even though their receptionist was meant to work until 5.30pm. When they looked into why this was happening, it transpired that the receptionist was leaving upto three quarters of an hour early every day because she was getting a lift home with a friend! By changing round their receptionists roster they managed to ensure that their calls were no longer missed.

Benefits of response monitoring

Once a company has got over the initial scepticism of media monitoring, they find that it has significant financial and operational benefits which far outweigh the concerns of having different telephone numbers across different and adverts.

Financial benefits

As the different telephone numbers show where the response is coming from, an advertiser can instantly see what adverts or creative have generated the response. This then allows the advertiser to either drop certain adverts or change their creative to generate more response. Over the last five years we have seen a significant change in where response has come from and businesses that have been monitoring their media advertising? have followed this change. Thus, they not only can get more response but they stay ahead of their competitors who remain with more traditional channels as opposed to where potential customers are actually interacting and responding to advertising.

We have found that customers who use different telephone numbers in their advertising can instantly make savings of up to 15% of their media budget as they target their advertising more effectively and use the results to negotiate better advertising rates. Telephone response analysis has not been popular with traditional media companies especially those with weak titles that cannot provide a relevant audience for their advertisers!

Additionally, by doing a geographic analysis on where response is coming from, companies are able to understand which parts of the country generate the best responses and focus their spend accordingly. Media hawk worked with one of the car manufacturers to monitor the their response across all their dealerships. Using the geographic analysis they were able to target their national television campaigns to uplift their profile in the areas where they had had a weak response.

Operational benefits

The statistics that telephone monitoring provides helps businesses to be more effective with how they respond to their enquiries. On a daily basis advertisers can see how many calls they have received and whether they have missed any of the calls because the phone has rung out or been engaged. It is remarkable the number of companies who spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on advertising every year and miss up to 20% of all the calls their advertising generates. Using Mediahawk to track their response analysis they can instantly see their operational effectiveness and change their response handling where necessary. Furthermore, using sophisticated call routing they are able to minimise the amount of missed calls.

Where a company outsources its response to a third party, telephone response analysis is critical to see how the supplier is performing. We have worked with a number of companies who have found out that their third party supplier has not performed to the level they required. As the companies owned their own numbers they were able to change their calls to another supplier without customers being aware of any change.

	Case Study A publishing company was looking to try and convince an advertiser to use the classified section of their magazine rather than their main competitor who they had been advertising with exclusively. As part of their proposition, the magazine company provide a two month trial using a Mediahawk number which showed the precise response rates their classified advert provided. The advertiser was delighted with the publisher being able to show the response and following the trial and signed up to a year of classified advertising!

Conclusion

When Mediahawk was founded, using different telephone numbers in adverts was a new idea. However it has become accepted by most advertisers due to the significant benefits it provides from a financial and operational perspective. The key to using response analysis effectively is to be on top of campaigns and use the data to make tactical changes to increase response and increase the advertising return on investment.

Putting in place response monitoring takes no time to implement and the information returned has the ability to transform an advertisers marketing.

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