David Young | Branding Blog - Marketing Advice and Advertising Strategy for Local Business Owners

Tom Wanek's Ad-Speak Calculator

Remember this routine from George Carlin? He mentions nearly every hucksterism known to mankind. My colleague, Tom Wanek, has taken all of Carlin's phrases plus hundreds more and created a cool and free tool that allows you to paste in your ad copy to see how you rate. (Hint: the more your ads sound like ads, the more they blend into the background of the thousands of other ads your audience is subjected to each day.)

The key is to stand out by NOT sounding like every other ad. It's not easy. Here the link to the Ad-Speak Calculator.

What's Your Market Share? Do you really know?

How much of the market for your particular product or service do you own?

Car dealers, real estate companies and other businesses whose transactions are tracked by the government have it made. They know exactly where they stand. Some businesses have an industry clearing-house that collects such information and shares it with members.

For other local retailers or service businesses, this can be a rather difficult number to calculate with any degree of accuracy.

So, how to keep score?

If you've been in the market for long, you actually know more than you think. I hope these steps help you.

1. Write down every one of your competitors by name
2. Order them from biggest to smallest
3. Estimate their annual billing by your BEST GUESS (you're probably close enough to at least make this a useful exercise)
4. Write this number next to their name
5. Show the list to your sales staff, spouse or managers and ask them to add the competitors that you forgot
6. Place your business and your sales number in its proper place in the list
7. ADD up all the numbers…this is your estimate of Market Potential
8. Divide YOUR number by the TOTAL…this is your MARKET SHARE

If the Market Potential seems like a much smaller number than you thought it would be, you've probably missed a few competitors.

What's the lesson from this exercise?

Now, you have a scoreboard!

All of the businesses listed ABOVE your name are targets! Your goal is to be stealing market share. Study them and learn how you can be better than they are.

All of the businesses BELOW you are either potential acquisitions or potential threats to YOU. They see a target on your back. Don't ignore them.

How to Profit from a Higher Bounce Rate?

It's simple. Put your phone number in your banner. The phone rings more and the bounce rate goes up.

I get tired of web gurus telling people that they should make sure their bounce rate isn't too high. Some will cite studies that quote an average bounce rate. Some will say things like, "Obviously a high bounce rate means your site has low relevance to visitors, and so to capture more of those visitors you can work on making your site more relevant."

Here's the rub…comparing YOUR bounce rate to somebody else's is simply bad math. The only important comparison to make with your bounce rate is to compare it to the past. If it changes, dig deeper into your web analytics to find out what is going on.

So, how will putting your phone number in your banner increase your bounce rate?

And, why is this good?

If you are a local retail or service business and you are doing other advertising in your market, you will no doubt be enjoying traffic (you do have a web site...please say yes) from visitors who have searched for you by name. (The good news about this is that when they search for you by name, they most likely won't find your competitors.)

Many of those visitors are coming to your site for one reason; to find your phone number. If you bury it on a "contact" page instead of making it prominent, you create friction for your customers who are already convinced they should call you. If they are forced to click through to find it, your bounce rate drops because these visitors don't count as a bounce.

If you put it on your banner, a visitor can find your site by searching for your name, see it on your banner and stay on your site just long enough to dial the phone. Your analytics program will count this as a bounce.

I would count it as making the phone ring.

Wouldn't you like the phone to ring more?