Yesterday I was speaking with one of my favorite clients. He was telling me about a meeting he’d just finished with one of the five or six Yellow Page directories in his market.

They were there to do their dog and pony show and tell him all about how his great his cost per thousand (CPM) was and how he MUST keep his first page position in their directory because – heaven forbid – a competitor would get that position if he were to reduce the size of his ad.

Most YP salespeople are trained to use ego and fear as sales tools. Blatant manipulation.

But, you see dear friend, his Managers have told him all year long that they weren’t seeing any results from the book.

So, on one hand he’s fooled into thinking that he must maintain his position or a pesky competitor will get the front spot. On the other hand, he knows (or thinks he does) that the book is a waste of his money.

The YP salesman tells him there’s no way their precious book would perform so poorly and that his managers are simply messing up the tracking efforts.

Certainly a possibility, right?

Of course.

But, what these two clowns didn’t know is that we’ve been tracking the ad through a very scientific tool we have.

So, we knew all along how well the ad really did.

We knew how much it cost him to get the phone to ring from that ad.

We knew the cost per acquisition of a new tenant on that ad.

And guess what, the ad WAS a complete waste of money. His cost per acquisition was well over $500 for that one book alone.

Now, that’s painful. But not nearly as painful as not knowing or finding out five years later when you’ve wasted far more money on a lousy marketing effort.

I’ve put together a special video for you that shows you the tool we use to track your self storage marketing efforts. It’s free to you and you can find it here:

I hope you learn from the video. It’s not entertaining but you’ll see a tool in action that can help you become much more profitable next month, next year and in your bright future.

Enjoy,

Derek M. Naylor
President
Storage Marketing Solutions
800.941.4805

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Self Storage Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.