Archive for October 2006

Pay Per Call Marketing Survey

Phone Survey ‘Pay-per-Call’ Marketing
We called 474 business of which 252 where willing to take part in the survey. 73% of businesses surveyed classified themselves as ‘providing manual labor’, 19% as retail businesses and 6% as service businesses.

Survey
The survey was comprised of seven main questions with a total of 9 possible follow up questions.

1. How much is your monthly marketing budget?
65% of businesses stated their monthly marketing budget is below $100. 5% of businesses said their monthly marketing budget is between $100 and $500. The rest of the businesses did not want to disclose this information.

2. Does your company location have Internet access? And if not: Are you planning to establish Internet access in the next twelve months?
69% of surveyed businesses stated that they currently have Internet access.

Of the 31% of businesses that did not have access to the Internet 5% expressed they would establish Internet connection within the next 12 months.

3. Does your business currently maintain a web site? If not: why?
27% of business owners said that they currently maintain a web site.

Of the 73% that said they did not own a web site 92% expressed they did not need one for their businesses, 2% expressed cost reasons and 6% did not provide a specific reason.

4. Are you currently paying for search engine traffic?
Of the businesses that maintain web sites 1.1% said they are currently paying for pay-per-click advertising. All these businesses used Google as pay-per-click provider.

5. Are you currently purchasing any online advertising?
Of the businesses that maintained web sites 7% currently purchase online advertising. All of these businesses purchased online advertising from their Yellow Page provider.

6. Are you currently paying commission for referrals?
Less than 1% of surveyed businesses currently pay for lead referrals.

7. Are you familiar with Pay-Per-Call referral systems?
2% of surveyed businesses were familiar with a pay-per-call referral system.

8. Would you be interested in participating in pay-per-call advertising? If so, how much would you be willing to invest per lead?
41% of businesses expressed interest in participating in a pay-per-call advertising concept.

32% of interested businesses said they would be willing to spend $1 per lead, 7% said they would be willing to spend $10 per lead and. 59% where not sure yet how much they wanted to invest.

9. Would you be interested in testing a pay-per-call service if you received a number of leads free of charge? Would you sign up for the service, if at least one of these leads became a client of yours? If so how much would you be willing to pay per lead?
42% of surveyed business expressed interest in testing a pay-per-call service if they received a number of leads for free. 100% of businesses said they would sign up for the service if at least one of the leads would become a paying customer.
41% of these businesses are willing to spend at least $1 per lead. 59% where undecided how much they were willing to spend per lead.

Super Bowl happens on the Internet every day

The Internet is the single most important marketing tool of our time. No other medium even comes close to its selling power. Think about it: what is the most expensive marketing you can purchase? Probably commercial airtime during Superbowl broadcasting: The average price for a 30 second commercial in 2005’s Superbowl was $2.4 million – that equates to $80,000 per second! Ok, the game was watched by 144.4 million viewers but how many do you think got up to buy the new three blade razor? My hunch is no-one. Everybody was still sipping beer and dipping guacamole.
Let’s say you only had one percent of these viewers (1.4 million) on your website with a call to action – a BUY NOW button – how many do you think would by the three blade razor now? Statistics suggest it would be 7,000.
A number of smart marketers have realized that marketing power and shifted all their efforts to online advertising with its multiple benefits: you don’t need a Nielsen family to find out what works and you get demographics about your customers that will make the Secret Service envious.

The Internet’s Reality
But there’s a catch: 80-90% of Internet users will use a search engine to find a service or a product and again 80-90% of these users will never check the second page of the one million or more search results that Google, Yahoo and MSN provide. Basically what that means is that your website has to be in one these 40-50 spots if you want to be seen. There are approximately 40,000 to 50,000 companies in industries, like web hosting, loans and real estate that pay web developers, search engine optimization experts and advertising companies to be in one of these premier spots. It is not unusual to pay $10,000 per month for these efforts without a guarantee to get a single new customer.

Internet Marketing for the Small Business
So, how can a small company compete? – In the past the dominating marketing tool for the small business was the Yellow Pages and other local printed directories. Surprisingly this industry is still going strong and is still used for marketing reasons by the majority of small businesses despite the fact that most consumers today will only look for the Yellow Pages if they can not find what they are looking for online.
But the printed Yellow Pages had one advantage for the user: he usually could rely on finding a list of the service providers for a certain job in his neighborhood.
Now Google and Yahoo both are trying to add more visibility to local markets by launching “Google Local” and “Yahoo local” intending to bring up smaller local companies. Although the search engines are trying to provide this service they fail to provide a similar completeness as the Yellow Pages did for the last 100 years.
One of the reasons for this is clearly lack of motivation and effort on the part of the major search engines. Let’s face it, would you put much effort into helping a company that does not even have Internet access (like the majority of small businesses in the US) when you offer an online service that makes money from large companies that buy click-through advertising for their websites?
Also, this approach faces the same drawbacks as all the other search engine results: it is benefiting those who have the Internet knowledge to ensure that their information is number one in local rankings even if their service is not necessarily what the search engine user was looking for.
However, there is some light on the horizon. A company in San Diego is offering a solution that does not require the small business owner to have Internet knowledge. In fact, the company’s solution does not even require the small business owner to have Internet Access. More importantly, it provides its customer with a guarantee of being found online.
COLIZER – Computerless Internet Services achieves visibility for small businesses by providing high-ranking portals for industries that are usually left behind. These companies often can not afford to hire a web designer and spend a couple hundred dollars on a web site let alone on optimizing it to be found be search engines.
At the current introductory price of only $7.99 per month, COLIZER certainly offers the most affordable Internet Marketing solution available to date. Even if their clients got only one new customer from this service, it will pay for itself.

Small Business Marketing Success
Two recent examples of COLIZER’s success are a portal for painters in Arizona (www.painterusa.com) and a portal for lawn care professionals in California (www.lawn-portal.com). “Right now these portals reach about 1,000 consumers a month that find the local painter or gardener in their own geographic area.” explains Christian Kameir, CEO of COLIZER INC. “By the end of 2005, these portals will get 1,000 hits per day.”
The company has more than 100 portals like these in the US and is about to expand to France, Germany and Greece.
Surprisingly, the cost of this unique service for the small business is only $96 for an entire year and this even includes a top level domain, web site and a contact form which the small business owner can receive as text message on their cell phone. COLIZER also offers the fastest website creator on the web. Companies that have Internet access can create their own website without any design knowledge in less than one Minute at http://www.colizer.com/buynow.php.
But COLIZER finds most of its customer’s offline through their lucrative affiliate program and is currently seeking more than 1,000 affiliates nationwide. “Some of our affiliates make more money working two hours a day than they were making working 40 hours a week at their old jobs”, says Melissa Kremer, COLIZER’s Vice President of Sales. Applicants for COLIZER’s affiliate program are asked to file a free application on the company’s website: http://www.colizer.com/affiliate.php.

Internet Marketing for the Offline World

Pay-per-clicks generated more than $10 billion revenue in the USA in 2005. Pay-per-click is an advertising pricing model in which advertisers pay search engines such as Google or Yahoo based on how many consumers clicked on a promotion.
But Internet advertisers begin to realize that the online market is starting to saturate. Therefore they are branching out into the off-line world in search for new revenue streams.
65% of small businesses are not online yet, according to Colizer Inc. a small but fast growing Internet marketing company in San Diego. Colizer is offering Internet marketing solutions for small business without access to the Internet.
AOL adding a pay-per-call solution to its revenue model in 2005. Pay-per-call ads appear at the top of sponsored links in AOL Search results, and display a toll-free number in the search result. Clicking on the ad directs the searcher to an information page with a description and additional details about the advertiser, rather than to a landing page on the advertiser’s web site.
Colizer’s CEO Christian Kameir explains: ‘The danger of pay-per-click or pay-per-call is that it can be miss-used by individuals who want to harm their competition. If I wanted to deplete my competitors pre-paid account with one of the search engines I simply spend half an hour repeatedly clicking his link. The same could happen with pay-per-call where someone can just repeatedly call the 800-number and hang up or worse program a dialer to do the same.
Colizer developed a solution for small businesses to close the gap between the consumers who wants to find a small business online and the business that does not have an Internet presence yet. Reportedly more than 65% of all US businesses are not yet represented on the Internet. Colizer created a service called LOXTER – the local exchange carrier, a local directory and virtual 800 service. LOXTER’s database holds the records of more than 28,000,000 businesses in the US. Unlike traditional directories like the Yellow Pages, LOXTER does not charge the business for a listing but provides the basic listing 100% free of charge.
Once the web user finds a company he wants to contact, he can simply click a button on the listing and enter his phone number. LOXTER is connecting the web user to the business, free of charge for the user – just like an 800 number. There is no need for the web user to install any software or have a microphone connected to his computer as LOXTER uses the phone number of the user. LOXTER also generates an email to the web user (if he subscribes to the free service) that allows the web user to leave feedback for the business which can be read by other potential clients.
LOXTER has published the BETA version of its system and is currently accepting pre-signups at www.loxter.com.