Try it Local Cape Cod

To answer the rising popularity and the growing need for a local Cape Cod group deals or social coupon site like Groupon and Living Social, the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce launched a group coupon site with Try It Local Cape Cod. Are local group deals a good idea and will it pan out for local Cape Cod businesses? Read on to find out.

With the growing popularity of social coupons or group deal sites like Groupon and Living Social, the Cape Cod chamber is hoping to get on the group coupon train with their Try It Local Cape Cod offering. The chamber chose TryItLocal for their local deals program. Try It Local is a company based out of Louisville, KY that runs group coupon websites for local and regional chambers of commerce.

Try It Local Cape Cod

Below are a few notable comments and some details from the Cape Cod chamber on the announcement:

As group coupon websites like Living Social and Groupon have soared in popularity over the past year, Kristen Mitchell noticed a worrying trend.

“It always bothered me personally to see people going off-Cape to redeem the vouchers,” said Mitchell, the vice president of tourism marketing for the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce. — Cape Cod Times

I have to agree with the strategy here. While you can get group coupon deals for big brand stuff like Red Box movie rentals or national chain restaurants around here, most of the local deals offered by the large group deal sites like Groupon and Living Social are only redeemable up around the Boston area. So there is a void on the hyperlocal, Cape Cod, MA area level.

“Try It Local is an innovative way to explore new businesses and experiences on Cape Cod, while at the same time supporting the local economy and Cape Cod companies,” said Wendy Northcross, Chief Executive Officer of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce. “The Try It Local program not only supports local retailers themselves, but the work of the chamber as well.”

The first deal will arrive on Wednesday, March 23, and a new deal will be released every Wednesday thereafter, featuring businesses like 586 Bistro & Bar, emBargo Restaurant and Alberto’s Ristorante, all located in Hyannis; The Riverway Lobster House in South Yarmouth; and Wimpy’s Seafood Café in Osterville. There is no cost to businesses to participate as a featured deal. The company keeps 70 percent of the day’s total sales and is responsible only for determining the deal and meeting the increased demand for its product or service. — Cape & Plymouth Business

The timing of the Try It Local Cape Cod offering by the Cape Cod chamber is spot on since as I noted above there is a group coupon void to fill in our local area.

The key here is going to be marketing. Right now as I search for “Try It Local Cape Cod” I don’t see the tryitlocal.com/CapeCod/ website or the chamber website anywhere, not even in a paid advertisement. Somebody needs to up their seo and online marketing game if this is going to work.

Try it Local

I spent some time clicking around on the tryitlocal.com website and I’m a bit disappointed. Once you get off the tryitlocal.com/CapeCod page it it loses the local chamber branding. The tryitlocal.com website should probably be set up on subdomains like capecod.tryitlocal.com so the local branding could be consistent throughout each local “site”.

The website’s search engine optimization is lacking to say the least, so it’s really going to be up to the chamber to get traffic to the tryitlocal.com/CapeCod site and make sure it gets found in the search engines. I would encourage them to click here for help.

Local Group Coupon and Social Deals Competition

It would be very easy for Groupon or Living Social to ramp up they’re hyperlocal deals game. With the Groupon IPO estimated at over $25 billion, which is more than Google’s IPO, going hyperlocal is very likely to happen for Groupon, and soon.

Facebook just made a move into the group coupon, or in this case the social deals space with Facebook Deals which just launched recently. With over 1.7 million people (age of 30+) in the Cape Cod and Southeastern MA area, Facebook has a big advantage on the hyperlocal social coupon game out of the gate. Facebook also has a huge small business base already, with most local businesses already using Facebook pages to market their offerings on Facebook pages.

Are Group Coupon Deals Good For Local Businesses?

Of course the group coupon sites themselves are full of local business success stories, but are sites like Groupon good for local small businesses? There are mixed signals and not all are good. There are stories of small local businesses getting hammered and studies of local business that used group coupon sites show less than stellar results. In a hyperlocal market such as Cape Cod, group buying deals may work better for local businesses because of the smaller scale. Some of the small business Groupon horror stories I have seen resulted from the small business being overrun with the volume of group coupon customers.

What Kind of Customers Do Group Coupon Deals Bring In?

Another thing for local businesses to be aware of is what kind of customers will you get from social deals? While you might get some new loyal customers out of the deal, the following passage is a sentiment that I have seen in a few different places.

The truth is that people who use Groupon-type deals are the last kind of customer your business wants. They are coupon chasers, running around their respective cities with no loyalties and no long-term business value. They rarely return to YOUR business. They just go after the next best deal. And why shouldn’t they? Groupon offers them a staggering discount on almost anything. — source

Conclusion

With all the different players vying for position and the jury still out on whether group coupons will be good for local small businesses on Cape Cod, it will be interesting to see how the hyperlocal group buying and social couponing space unfolds here locally.

I think the Cape Cod chamber is making a bold move here with Try It Local Cape Cod and by executing the right marketing plan it should work for them and for the local businesses that get on board with local group buying coupon deals.

Try It Local Cape Cod & Group Coupon Deals is from CapeLinks Internet Marketing Blog located on Cape Cod.

Local Lead Generation

Local lead generation is a local affiliate marketing service that supplies new customer leads to business clients. Using online and offline sources, the local lead generation company will acquire leads targeted to the client’s business niche and sell them to the business client.

Most often these are flat fee per lead agreements (like you will find with CPL lead affiliate programs), but there are other models as well. The other one that I use is the commission based model (where you get paid a percentage of the profit on a closed lead like CPS affiliate programs). There is also a hybrid model (the client pays for the ad spend and the leads) and the setup and maintenance model (get paid to set up and maintain lead gen campaigns only).

Leads are delivered to the client via email and/or phone via local or toll free tracking numbers.

Your local lead generation education starts here

Here are all the local lead generation resources that I have bookmarked over the last few years, more or less in the order that I found them. The links below cover the entire local lead generation business model, both the good and the bad.

• How To Make Money Setting Up Your Own Local Affiliate Program -  Shoemoney
• Shoemoney Local Affiliate Marketing Guide (PDF)
• Cashing in on Cash For Clunkers With Myspace – Shoemoney
• Private lead generation with example – CDF Networks
• Create your own lead generation business – CDF networks
• 83 Proven Local Lead Gen Niches – CDF Networks
• Local lead generation to the next level – CDF Networks
• Tracking phone leads with Google Voice – CDF Networks
• Finding local lead generation customers – CDF Networks
• The Ugly Side of Local Online Advertising – Ad Hustler
• Local Online Advertising Case Study: Facebook Vs. Google Adwords – Ad Hustler
• Hell Has a New Name: The Local Online Advertising Media Buy – Ad Hustler
• Case Study: The Offline To Online Local Media Buy – Ad Hustler
• More Fun With Local Online Advertising Clients – Ad Hustler
• How I Generated $1,700,000 in Auto Sales Despite a Weak Economy – Ad Hustler
• Offline Billboard To Online Affiliate Offer Case Study – Ad Hustler
• The Twitter Local Lead Gen Machine – JonathanVolk.com Guest Post – Ad Hustler
• Pricing on Local Lead Gen Landing Pages – Ad Hustler – Ad Hustler
• LOLZERZ About Local Lead Gen – Ad Hustler
• $200 into $4,000? Local Lead Generation Can Be Very Profitable – Andrew Wee
• Local lead generation can give almost infinite ROI – Andrew Wee
• Scalable Local Leadgen Marketing For Cash – Smaxor
• Local Leadgen Niche Ideas – Smaxor
• Scaling Local Lead Generation – Amanda Orson
• Facebook Lead Generation for Local Businesses – PPC Blog

Below are the slides from Ad Hustler and Amanda Orson’s presentation Local Lead Generation – Heaven & Hell at Affiliate Summit West 2011. I didn’t go to ASW11, so I’ll have to wait until it comes out on VHS to hear what was said. Eric Nagel posted a recap of the session at ASW11 Session Recap: Local Lead Generation.

Local Lead Plan

I was waiting to see who was going to be the first to release an info product on local lead generation. So, when Chad from CDF Networks released his “Local Lead Plan” ebook last year, I got it right away.

This ebook covers every aspect of the local lead generation business. Everything is inside: top niches, landing pages, traffic sources, pay per call, tracking, billing, scaling etc…

I highly recommend this product for anyone that is serious about starting a local lead generation business outside of my area. I am also sure that all of the people that wrote the posts linked to above would tell you the same thing.

• 18 chapters, 115 pages, 23,000 words long. It’s a complete local lead gen education.
• Extremely low one time price.
• Covers everything from top niches, landing pages, traffic sources, pay per call, tracking, billing, scaling etc…
• The first of its kind course
• Local is the future of affiliate marketing
• Totally positive feedback and press

Local Lead Plan (DOWNLOAD)

Additional local affiliate marketing thoughts

Below are some tips that I have learned and applied from the links above and a few things that I discovered through my own trial and error.

I have been doing local lead generation in one form or another since 2000. After being a Servicemagic affiliate for a few years and driving national leads to them for like $5 each, I built my own local lead gen system in 2005. The only problem with that was, during that time, where I live, everyone was so busy in the trades that nobody was interested in more leads or phone calls. Subsequently the local lead gen system got shelved and just sat idle. I have built alot of web projects on “spec” over the years and like irons in the fire, some get hot some do not.

Fast forward to the economic problems that started a few years ago. All of the sudden the people that I had talked with years earlier were coming out of the woodwork contacting me saying: “Hey Darren, We’re kinda slow, you still getting those leads you were talking about a while back?”.  Around this time local lead generation or local affiliate marketing also started to become a “next big thing” buzzword with affiliate marketers. So I revisited my lead gen system and because of the renewed interest from the locals, I have been building it out quite a bit.

Since the economic fail, quality trade leads are worth good money locally. Having known many of the clients I deal with personally for years, I often negotiate commission based deals for exclusive leads on major stuff like home remodels, additions, garages, etc… Working on commission requires a high level of trust. Keep that in mind when setting up commission based deals and try to plug any holes in the commission chain beforehand.

Since I live in kind of a unique area, the trades people around here are used to paying commission based referral fees to each other and have been doing so for years. I get into how the trades and services work around here in some comments I made on Amanda Orson’s blog where I over-commented a bit…

Someone called me last week and said some carpenter on Craigslist was advertising that he would pay 10% on any jobs he was referred, so there are definitely people out there looking for work. Be advised, Craigslist is not the best place to look for clients however.

Getting clients

The hardest thing I have found with local lead generation is finding local business clients that “get it”. They know they need to be online and they might have a website, but do they really “get it”? Old school businesses that stand by the yellow pages and newspaper ads might be a tough sell at first, but this can be overcome, sometimes. Teaching them about their advertising ROI and customer acquisition cost can be a good ice breaker.

Do a some research on the client’s business niche before you go meet with them to negotiate a local lead deal.

• Try to figure out who their ideal customer is. There are a few online tools that may give you a hint at the business’ demographic, but if you don’t know for sure, you can find out from the business owner later on. They will know best.
• Research competing businesses, see where they are advertising and see what else they are doing to generate leads.
• If you are planning on using paid advertising sources, figure out what your cost per click and ad spend is going to be for the demographic and keywords you will need to target.
• Try to find out what the national lead generation services are charging for similar leads.
• Locate all the possible channels available to you for generating leads (Adwords, Facebook, SEO, local listings, classifieds, newsletter and website sponsorships, radio, bulletin board tear-offs, church fliers, bandit signs, other offline sources, etc…)
• If you are planning on getting into a niche you are unfamiliar with, but you think has potential, run a few hyperlocal targeted test ads on Adwords with a quick landing page and see if you can get a few email and phone leads before you try to get a client for that niche. Even if you have to blow off the test leads, at least you know you can get them. (Sorry, I think you have the wrong number…) Landing a local lead generation client is no good unless you can generate leads, so test first.

Once you have done your homework, you’ll have an idea of what kind of money you will need to get for the leads to make it profitable.

When you meet with the client to negotiate a deal, ask them a few questions first. Ask them what a new customer is worth to their business. Ask them what they think their customer acquisition cost is through their other forms of advertising. The answers to these questions will give you a good idea of how in touch the client is with their business and whether they will be a good client for you money wise.

Then, instead of telling the client what you need to get for the leads ask them what they would be willing to pay for the leads first. They might offer more than the figure you have in your head. If not you can always negotiate up to a profit margin you are comfortable with.

If they are a tough sell, but they “get it” and you think they will turn into a good client, you can offer them a few leads up front to see how it goes.

Phone leads are generally worth more because the close rate is (and should be) higher. Sometimes this depends on the niche, but more often it depends on the person that answers the phone at the business (can they close). Pay-per-call or flat fee phone calls are usually qualified as a lead by call duration. In other words, only calls lasting over a certain time period, 30 seconds, a minute, etc… are billable as qualified leads.

If your lead quality is high and the clients are “closers”, they will stay with you for fear of losing your source of leads to the competition. This is one thing that is good about a quality local lead generation service. If that client doesn’t work out for whatever reason, you can just move on to their competition. This can also give you some future renegotiating leverage if need be.

Where to host the landing pages or lead gen websites

This really depends on your resources. As has been said elsewhere, using the client’s website to host landing pages can have its advantages with Adwords quality score, domain age for seo, it can be quicker, lower costs, etc… But in my opinion, to build a sustainable long term lead gen business, you should be building out your own network of lead generating landing pages and websites.

When you are in charge of your own network, you can split test and switch what client you send leads to with a few mouse clicks and a few lines of code. This is a major advantage over using the clients website. Plus, the horrifying thought of having to do everything through their “web guy” if they wont give you access to the server is a major red flag for me. So host your own stuff.

Keeping track of leads

Email leads are easy to keep track of. My setup has a database that stores all the email form leads and also bcc’s me with any email leads that come through the system. Then I just label them in my email with the client’s name. A bit of redundancy never hurts.

Tracking phone calls will require a third party application. At the very least you could use Google Voice as Chad lays out here and in Local Lead Plan. There are many other phone tracking services as well. Most of these services can supply either local or toll free 800 numbers for phone tracking use. Some of these services can be quite expensive and I was fortunate enough to get on board early with a particular phone tracking service and can get basic tracking numbers and reporting for around $6 a month each (along with a pennies per minute usage fee).

Phone tracking for local lead generation is essential with the growth of mobile. One of the niches that I chase leads in has an extremely high amount of mobile users that drive a huge percentage of the phone leads to the client’s business. In that niche, phone leads outdo email leads by about ten times every month.

Scrubbing leads for quality

With commission based lead generation deals this is not an issue, but with flat fee per lead arrangements you’ll need to scrub irrelevant leads to keep your lead quality up. With some of the niches I deal with, I get jobseekers filling out the lead forms looking for work. You will also get spammers that will fill out the forms offering website ranking services and other crap. Bogus leads and employment inquiries are simply not counted at billing time.

Scrubbing phone leads in pay-per-call lead deals is done by call duration as mentioned above. Any calls over x amount of time are billed as leads. Based on the client’s business the call duration required to qualify leads will vary. This is something you will have to work out with the business owner.

The bottom line is, if you can acquire good quality leads, they are worth money.

Local Lead Generation (Local Affiliate Marketing) is from CapeLinks Internet Marketing Blog located on Cape Cod.

The only problem with that is, well it’s CraigsList. By that I mean there is no vetting process or requirement of qualifications to place an ad on sites like CL. The problem with that is, these kinds of sites attract people that may be scammers, or really just aren’t qualified to do the services they are offering.

Now there are two ways to approach hiring a service providers off CraigsList:

Wrong way: You can browse or search ads in the relevant services category and reply to these ads blindly. Which opens you up to any person you reply to. Not smart.

Right way: Place an anonymous services wanted ad and let the providers that reply open themselves up to you instead. Isn’t that the way it should be? Why put yourself out there by replying to unknown people who place ads on CraigsList?

By following the tips below you can begin to protect yourself from scammers and unqualified service providers.

1. Place a services wanted ad in the appropriate section.

2. Use the anonymous email feature and do not put your real email address or your phone number anywhere in the ad.

3. Describe exactly what you are looking for and if applicable include a budget for your service needs.

4. Submit the ad and wait for replies.

By having the service providers reply to you, you are putting the shoe on the other foot which gives you the upper hand. Any professional service provider should reply with their contact information which should include their name or business name and phone numbers.

Now you can research them anonymously before you decide to reply back to them. Start by giving them a good Googleing. Search for the business name and person’s name. Search the phone number and even the email address. If there is something you need to know about that person or business, Google should find it for you. Make sure to search for each piece of information independently, this will give you the most thorough results.

Things you might find through researching

Reviews about the business or service provider, both good and bad. Any complaints or other business or personal associations should show up as well.

You might find other classified ads this person has posted. Things like stuff for sale ads and other things may or may not be an indicator of their character or financial situation.

Use the information you gather from your research to perform your own vetting process and narrow your list of who to respond back to. This will ensure you have the upper hand when hiring a service provider off CraigsList or any other classified website.

The bottom line is, do not tip your hand until you have to…

The inspiration for this post came from Cape Cod Home Improvement’s Consumer Guide to Hiring. If you need to hire someone on Cape Cod for home related services, check it out.

Hire Service Providers Using CraigsList the Smart Way is from CapeLinks Internet Marketing Blog located on Cape Cod.

A very simple hyperlocal Google Adwords example

Let’s say we own a widget rental business in the Mid Cape Cod area and want to run paid advertising on Google Adwords. Here’s one part of a campaign we might use:

We would setup the campaign to run with very long list of “exact match keywords” like:

Mid Cape Cod widget rental ad

• “widget rental”
• “widget rentals”
• “where can i rent a widget”
• “where can we rent widgets”
• “rent widgets”
• “cape cod widget rental”
• “widget rentals cape cod”
• and many, many, many more …

Now since we are only renting widgets to people in the Mid Cape area, we use the geotargeting settings to target people that search for the above keywords within 10 miles of our business location.

Hyperlocal Online Ad Targeting

Notice how we also specified in the ad copy above that we rent widgets in the Mid Cape Cod area only?

This will discourage clicks from people who might be inside the target area, but want the widget delivered outside of our service area.

This ad copy strategy also gives the people who are in our service area a sense of exclusivity and let’s them know that we are the place to call for widgets in the Mid Cape area.

In addition, we would also use negative keywords to eliminate showing up for non relevant searches.

We would also run an additional campaign that had no geotargeting but included only exact match location based searches in our service area  like “widget rental yarmouth ma”, “dennis ma widget rentals”, etc…

Misspellings would be added to all campaign keyword lists along with a few other tactics to round out a complete widget rental Adwords campaign.

Since the targeting is extremely tight (a 10 mile area) and widgets are not super popular rental items, the budget here is going to be relatively low. However, this ad campaign should convert extremely well for us which means more of the right widget rental customers.

Hyperlocal Adwords Targeting Example is from CapeLinks Internet Marketing Blog located on Cape Cod.

These businesses cover a wide range of niches, so I have had a really good look at the Cape Cod area local search listings scene. From what I have seen in my research for clients, there are many local businesses missing out on more customers by not optimizing their local search presence.

What is local search marketing?

Local search marketing involves making sure that a company’s listings on Google Local, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Merchant Circle, Yelp, etc… are up to date and optimized to capture leads on the hyper-local level.

By now you must have seen the local map listings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Here is an example of a Google Local result for “landscaping supplies” targeted to the West Dennis area:

Local Search Optimization

Optimizing your website for local search

The second part to a good local search strategy is making sure your website will also pull visitors from regular web searches, outside of your free local map listings.

Most search queries these days are more than four words long. This means searchers are getting better at searching and they know that the more keywords they use, the more accurate their search results will be.

“One out of five searches on Google are related to location” says Google Maps, Earth, and Local VP John Hanke.

In the local search arena, this means instead of just typing in “house painter” people are typing “interior house painter wellfleet ma” which will yield better results and enable them to find just what they need in less time.

Now you might say, I can add a list of all the towns that my business serves to my website somewhere, like in the footer, or make a page for each city/town that is basically the same except for the city or town name. That may work to some extent, but much of that is considered keyword stuffing or spamming and may work against you or even trigger a penalty.

There are many other techniques that can be applied to your website that will yield fantastic local search rankings and results without it being seen as keyword stuffing or search engine spamming.

Why is local search such a big deal?

Apart from regular internet users looking for goods and services in your area, mobile internet usage is growing at an astounding rate and local search is a perfect companion. You punch “pizza” into Google on your smartphone and you get all the pizza places right around you wherever you are. Or you punch in “gift shop”, or “auto repair”, etc… you get the picture, it’s huge.

Excel at local and you can really increase your bottom line.

Now you might say I already updated my business info at all these places, so I am all set. Well, you might be, but chances are that you missed the boat.

You see there are many tricks that the average business owner will not be aware of when adding or updating a local business listing at any of these places. If you don’t take advantage of these opportunities you may be missing out on tons of local referrals.

In most cases a small business’ best customer is in their immediate area, in their neighborhood. This is the kind of customer you will get through local search optimization if it is done right.

Unfortunately, your competition is also competing for these same customers in your neighborhood. Unlike Google Adwords and Facebook Advertising which costs money, most of these local listings are free of charge, which makes the barrier to compete non existent.

Just because these listings are free doesn’t mean that they should be taken lightly. These listings if done right, can make or break your online presence. This is an excellent opportunity, especially in today’s economy, to drive leads and more business.

Guide to Learning Local SEO and Local Search Optimization gives us the following list of what goes into a proper local search optimization strategy and the order of the tasks at hand.

1. Market Research
2. Keyword Focus and Use of Local Modifiers
3. Optimizing Your Website for Local SEO
4. Creating or Claiming Existing Local Business Listings
5. Optimizing Local Business Profile Listings
6. Building Citations and Links to Enhance Listing Rankings
7. Encouraging Customer Testimonials and Reviews
8. Staying Up to Date with Changes in Local SEO

The only other thing I would add to this list is ongoing online reputation management. Monitoring your online presence for new reviews and other citations which is believed to have a big impact on local search rankings.

If you want to learn more about Google Local ranking factors, Dave Cosper takes a crack at explaining it in Layman’s terms.

Ranking = Location + Information + Corroboration + Input +

There is much to consider when mapping out a local search optimization plan for effectively marketing your business and a lot at stake here.

Choose the wrong keywords, write ineffective or off target business description/website copy, or get a few bad reviews and you may be dead in the water.

If you are serious about your Cape Cod website competing in local search, you should contact CapeLinks for a free consultation.

Local Search Marketing & Optimization is from CapeLinks Internet Marketing Blog located on Cape Cod.

Do you know what it costs you to acquire a new customer? If you said no, how do you expect to measure the return on your advertising dollars?

If you are serious about growing your business, you need to start tracking your ad response rates.

This will enable you to judge which advertising dollars are being well spent and which part of your advertising budget you are just pissing away.

It’s all about generating leads for your business and turning them into paying customers. The only way you can figure out your cost per lead is by tracking your ad response rates. Then to get your customer acquisition cost, you figure out how many of those leads closed or turned into a sale.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say we spend $300 on an advertisement and we get 15 responses that we track and know are from this specific ad.

Ad spend ($300) divided by the number of responses (15) = Lead cost, CPL or cost per lead ($20)

$300 / 15 = $20 cost per lead

Your close rate or how well you convert these lead to sales is what matters now. For this example, let’s say we made 8 sales from the 15 leads we tracked at $20 each. 8 sales from 15 leads is a close rate of better than 50%. This could be a pretty good percentage depending on what you are selling.

The ad spend ($300) divided by the number of sales (8) = ($37.50) Customer acquisition cost or cost per sale, CPS

$300 spend / 8 sales = cost $37.50 per sale

Now to figure out if this campaign was profitable, we would need to know how much profit we made on these 8 sales and minus the ad spend of $300. If the total profit on the 8 sales we made from this ad is more than $300, we made money on this ad campaign.

Tracking advertising response rates

Online

These days, tracking your online ad response rate is easy using Google Adwords or Google Analytics or both. In Google Analytics, you can use Goals to track your online response rates. This can also tie in with your Google Adwords campaigns to measure your customer acquisition cost or cost per lead.

Tracking phone calls from your website or online advertising efforts can also be done by using special web only phone numbers.

Offline

Tracking your offline advertising dollars is a bit more involved. For most traditional advertising channels like print, TV or radio you will need to use phone tracking or ad specific online landing pages.

Phone Tracking

Your offline ads will need to each have a different phone number with call tracking to measure the response rate from each ad you run. Now I know this sounds expensive, but today it is actually cheap to do. You can get local exchange or 800 numbers with basic call tracking and reporting for about $7 per month each and pay only pennies per minute for usage.

You also don’t have to use a different number every time you run an ad. For a newspaper ad, you can expect that the response will only last a few days to a week after the ad is run. This means that you can use the same trackable phone number for ads you run a week apart in different newspapers without being concerned with too much overlap.

With phone tracking your customer acquisition or lead cost is simple to figure out. If you spend $200 on an advertisement and get 10 calls, your lead cost is $20 each.

Ad Specific Landing Pages

You can also use online methods to track offline ads as well. Who hasn’t seen a TV or print ad with a website tracking code? A website tracking code is usually something like: website.com/TV20 or website.com/SPECIAL. This is just a landing page specific to that advertisement where response rate can be tracked via unique visits to that page. Ideally you want to use a unique landing page and website URL or tracking code for each ad you run.

Conclusion

Traditional advertising providers do not want you to know your response rate. They will tell you about their demographics, distribution, reach etc…, but only you can measure the actual performance of the advertisement.

Knowing your response rate gives you leverage. When the advertising salesman comes around to get you to renew your ads, you will have response rate data specific to that advertisement and you can use that data to negotiate your next ad buy. If you run an ad and find that the response rate is less than ideal for the money you spent, just tell the salesman you will not pay the same rate because the ad is not performing well enough to justify the spend.

If the response rate on that ad campaign is terrible, tell them you want a discounted rate to continue or just tell them to forget it and you’ll shift your ad dollars elsewhere.

Once you know how your ads are performing, you are in the driver’s seat.

By tracking your advertising performance, you will be able to trim your ad budget and increase your effectiveness.

Measuring ROI: Customer Acquisition Cost is from CapeLinks Internet Marketing Blog located on Cape Cod.

Last week when the news broke that Toyota would be recalling millions of it’s top selling models because of a “sudden acceleration” problem with the vehicle gas pedals or floor mats, I started to monitor the search results for “Toyota recall” to see who would be jumping on the advertising bandwagon first.

I noticed a few things within the first two days of the story breaking:

Toyota was running a damage control ad. To their credit, this campaign is also running on Bing and Yahoo which are both empty of competing “recall related” ads as I am writing this:

Toyota Recall “Toyota Takes Care of its Customers. Read the FAQs at Toyota.com”

GMC and Buick were showing the following ads, but these ads were already running under a previous campaign and likely just triggered for the broad match keyword “Toyota”:

May the Best car Win “On New GMC Models, Assurance Comes Standard. Get Details Here.”

May the Best car Win “See How Buick Stacks Up to the Competition. May the Best Car Win.”

Now a few days later we have Mazda and Ford pitching “reliability” and the lawyers jumping on:

Consider a New Mazda “Check out the reliable vehicles from Mazda and find a great deal.”

Ford Vehicles “Drive Safe and Reliable Ford Cars.

Browse Large Inventories Today.”

The lawyers:

Toyota Recall 2010 Update “Sudden acceleration danger. Free case review for injured.”

Toyota Accident Victims “Toyota Sudden Acceleration Recall. Free Evaluation, 1-866-***-****”

The Local Angle

One thing that I do not see is any local dealers geotargeting their own local market with ads yet.

Even though Toyota.com is running the ad above, this would be a great opportunity for a local Toyota dealer to target their own customers with self branded ads like:

Local Dealer Toyota Customers “We’ll take care of you. Call us now, 1-800-***-****”

Send the visitors from your local market to a simple landing page with a quick video, an “answer line” phone number to call, an email form to build an email list for broadcasting recall updates, etc…

I did hear a local Toyota dealer on the radio today running spots telling their customers to call the dealership and assuring their customers that everything will be fine.

Now the radio ads are great, but you have to figure every affected Toyota owner is going to look for information on the internet.

This is an opportunity for the local Toyota dealers to hold on to their customer’s trust, but also a great opportunity for competing local dealers that sell GM, Ford, Honda, etc… to also target these people in their local market.

Local Other Brand Dealer “Worried about your Toyota? Maybe it’s time for a change…”

With local geotargeting and recall related keyword PPC advertising campaigns on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc… any local car dealer could probably ride this story a long way on short money.

When setting up the campaign don’t forget to also target the makes and model years affected. Include keywords like “camry recall”, “highlander gas pedal”, “toyota floor mat”, etc… It shouldn’t take to long to make a good keyword list for this local campaign.

• 2009, 2010 RAV4
• 2009, 2010 Corolla
• 2009, 2010 Matrix
• 2005-2010 Avalon
• 2007-2010 Camry
• 2010 Highlander
• 2007-2010 Tundra
• 2008-2010 Sequoia

If you are a local dealer that doesn’t sell Toyotas, now would be a great time to bid on your local Toyota dealers business names and run an ad trying to get people to switch to your brand of vehicles.

Here’s a good example from Twitter. A Ford dealer is trolling for distraught Toyota owners by offering a $1000 extra rebate.

Trade in your #Toyota and receive $1000 rebate extra on top of all offers when you buy a new #Ford.

A local Facebook ad campaign might be a good way to capitalize on this opportunity as well.

Note: This was written based upon ads showing in the local market here on Cape Cod, MA. Your local market may look different. Your local car dealer may work with someone like me who told them to start taking advantage of this recall story already.

I posed this question to an old friend of mine, a sales guy:

How would you approach selling new Toyota’s given the recent news?

What a great question. When companies are hit with recalls, and defective products that put peoples lives at risk, selling is the last thing most folks are thinking about. Yet, the selling must go on.

Toyota Recall: Local Advertising Opportunity is from CapeLinks Internet Marketing Blog located on Cape Cod.