Who actually watches the adverts on television these days, or ever? Personally, I prefer to record programmes or live pause them, so I don’t have to sit through the adverts. Each time I do this, I wonder how much companies spend on this type of advertising and what return they see on their investment.
We receive an extraordinary number of telephone calls and emails each week, ‘making contact’ and asking us if we would like to spend £XXX or £X,XXX on a half-page advert here, quarter-page there…. or web developers saying they can improve our SEO or similar…. you know the sort. More often than not, the correspondence is uninvited and, since we have changed our contact form on the website, we receive more communication via this method than any other.
About two months ago, a new company (who will remain nameless) called our offices and offered us a 24-hour free trial on a search package which would be very useful in our day-to-day business. Their sales patter included “a lot of other companies in your field use it”…. and we managed to knock down their initial offer to something we were actively considering. What happened next, you ask? Well, we were plagued with telephone calls from said company. Even when we gave them the time frame when WE would get back to THEM, they still continued to call on a daily (sometimes several times a day) basis. The person in the Call Centre of said company even tried to connect with me on LinkedIn – what lengths will these people go to in their endeavours to get our business?
Generally, as MD, I have been too busy to take their calls but last week, a different number appeared on my telephone screen and a voice explained that he had been asked by X [the individual above who tried to connect on LinkedIn] to call me and suggested that I was “expecting his call“. Oh dear…. bit of mistake that! I proceeded to inform him that no, I was not awaiting his call and that, had his colleague not been so aggressively persistent in her calls, I might have taken up their service offer. Unfortunately (I went on….), we are not the kind of company who responds positively to aggressive marketing (we don’t do it ourselves and we don’t appreciate it being done to us). So, dear company who chose to call without invitation…. will you call us again?
It would seem not. The telephones have fallen silent. Practically magic.
