Ryan Deiss is the principal of digitalmarketer.com, a highly regarded educational site for persons who need to know how to make online advertising work. Speaking to a group of advertisers recently, he showed them the 8 sequential things about online marketing.

The first of these 8 was ‘Awareness’. “No one in this room should be spending a penny online for awareness”, he said. “The cost of creating awareness online is incredibly expensive compared to radio. You just need to maximize the online traffic that radio can easily drive to your website.”

One of the business owners in the room that day was Ken Goodrich, the owner of Goettl (rhymes with kettle) Air Conditioning in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Tucson. When Ryan’s session was over, Ken raised his hand to say, “my cost of lead generation for A/C system replacement was about $441 per lead, roughly the national average for my category, until I cut my online budget by half and moved all that money into 52-week radio. Two years later, the sales volume of my 78-year-old company had more than doubled, and my cost per online lead these days jumps between $39 and $47”.

Ken Goodrich went on to make it clear that his customers are going online before they call him. Some of them are reading reviews and some are just looking for his phone number, but most are typing the name of their “city” and “air conditioning” into the Google search string. Goettl Air Conditioning, of course, pops up alongside all its competitors. But unlike the other companies listed in those search results, Goettl leaps off the screen. “Hey! I know those guys!” says the prospective customer. Goettl gets the click, the call and the sale.

But the credit that belongs to radio is often given to SEO consultants and other digital marketing ‘experts’ who pretend that broadcast is dead. Ken Goodrich confirmed that his customers are going online before they call and they’re seeing his company name pop up. But it was only after he became a household word through radio that a much higher percentage of his customers began clicking “Goettl.”

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