Predicting What Consumers Want to Buy

I recently hired a local graphic designer to create a predictabuy logo.  At the end of our meeting, she asked how we found her.

She wanted to know because she had just been talked in to putting a display ad in the print yellow pages for the first time.  She was concerned about whether or not this had been a wise decision.  Short of asking people she has no way of knowing whether or not the ad is working for her.

I told her about tracking numbers.  Just place a unique phone number in the print ad.  Whenever that number gets called, you know it’s because of the ad.

You can get very sophisticated solutions for doing this from a company like Telmetrics.  I think yellow page publishers should be offering this as service.

But after the meeting, my wife suggested an even better solution for most small businesses:  just take out a second phone number with a distinctive ring on your existing phone line.  Cheap, easy – and you know right away when you’ve got an incoming call from your yellow page ad!

And every month the phone company sends you a performance report on your yellow page advertising – the call details for your second phone number.

Nice.

(BTW: It turns out my wife did use the yellow pages to find the graphic designer.  Sort of.  She used it to find a list of graphic designers in Edmonton.   She only considered the ones with websites.  We then examined the portfolios of the different designers.  Seems like there should be a better way eh?)