Ask the Experts | Tracking Radio & TV Promotions

Question: How do you measure the effectiveness of TV and radio marketing?

Gary Elekes; Founder, EPC Training:

Great question. TV, radio would both be considered broadcast media, and it’s very difficult to measure that. The advanced approach would be to create a unique promotion, and then you can create some sort of a tracking mechanism that attaches itself to that promotion, so that it’s unique to that particular medium.

So whether that’s radio or TV as a combination or individually, we would almost always have something that we would try to create that was specific to that. So that if we get calls from those particular media, or if someone even lands on the website, and somehow comes through a digital platform and we collect that call and record that call, we know what the question is relative to the promotions – we can track that back to the actual media choice.

This extends past radio and TV as well, by the way. So I spent 14 years with Lennox, and we sold TV to a lot of our Lennox dealers as part of our dealer-group advertising program. Lennox would throw money at that, and I think suppliers today still do something similar, a co-operative type platform. And the difficulty back in those days, where we didn’t really have the web technology that we have today to be able to tie everything in, record the calls, do all those kinds of things we do today.

But even in those days what we know for sure, was the most successful contractors always had a balanced approach to media. So they did some form of advertising that was beyond just one or two things, whether that be direct mail or newspaper. Typically they looked at all forms of media and said, “How do I create a promotion and how do I track it?”

So, in today’s world, it’s much more fragmented than it was even 10 years ago, let alone 25 or 30 years ago. So I think what you have to do is be mindful that your promotional pages, your pay per click pages, all of those things have to line up to your promotions, so that anytime you do some sort of a media platform, you create some kind of call to action that can be tracked.

And then the biggest challenge I see is that a lot of companies don’t train their internal organizations to support the idea that that’s out there. So customer service and dispatch folks, sometimes, are unaware of that. So make sure you align the training with that as well.

Wally, I’m sure you probably have some comments on that. …

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