Hi , I’m looking into setting up a Pay Per Call service. I have the infrastructure in place, done the testing and waiting to finish off the website. I don’t know though whether people would be interested so that’s why I ‘m testing the waters here.
It works by publishers offering free advertising space across all their media either web based, magazine, flyers etc to advertisers. The advertiser only pays when a customer rings the publisher provided telephone, either local or toll free, in their advertising campaign which will be provided by me. I can then offer telemetrics to the publishers and advertisers on how well the marketing campaign is going; how many people have rang , hung up , what geo locacle the customer is from, etc. The publisher and advertiser agree a price for the calls and I get a percentage of that. Conditions are put in place so advertisers aren’t charged for short calls or duplicate calls from the same number within a set time period. It will give transparency to the advertiser on how well their advertising money is doing and where it might need to be redirected or stopped . Not good for the publisher if he’s selling bad advertising space however! But the advertisers could ask for a telephone number from me if he suspects the advert is not performing and it would give them the info he might be interested in.
I know technically it all works , what I don’t have is a way to get to publishers to see if they would be interested in selling this marketing model.
Any ideas, suggestions would be very welcome

So you are researching the demand after you have put all this other stuff in place?

You would be betetr off finding out if there is a demand for this service before spending any more money on anything. You need to do your donkey work and start phoning round and researching, actually asking your target market if they would buy your service. That's the only way to find out.

You need to think about the cash flow implications for the publisher. They rely on the advertising revenue to pay for the printing and distribution of their copy.

Your offer means they will only collect revenue after they have incurred all the cost and, if the advertisers product is of no interest (for example I could advertise blow up dart boards!), they will not generate an income from it i.e. you cannot expect a publisher to be able to judge whether an advertisers service will be popular or not; otherwise they would be selling what the advertiser is trying to promote!

I'm all for Innovation but I really do think this business model is floored!

It sounds like a good plan to me. Pay Per Click advertising is very popular on the internet, and a lot of newspapers & magazines are in dire straights since their advertisers moved online.

I'm sure at least some publishers would be willing to take the gamble for possibly higher advertising revenues. Their revenues are dismal at the moment, the status quo isn't an option, more newspapers & magazines are closing every month.

There's no benefit for the advertiser or the publisher if the ads are irrelevant to that publication's audience, the publishers would still be able to chose what they print & don't print. The publishers would be able to see how successful each ad was after the first issue & then they'd be able to decide whether to continue with that ad or not, or whether to charge a higher pay per call rate for it.

You'll have to do a good job so that publishers don't feel the need to set up their own similar system to cut the middleman out.

Hi

I like the idea and I like the technology that you have done.

Pay per click google style works because the adverts that get poor response rates just dont get shown (simply put if you ad gets a 0.01% click though and your competitors get a 0.1% click through google will charge you 10x the price your competitor pays or else no one sees your ad.

You need to develop a market place a bit like clickbank where there are multitudes or referrals for content owners to market on their site, they click through and purchase rates are all visible as is the price paid.

So to de still the idea to its core, advertisers should first place a paid for ad with any of the publications whilst using your tech (for which you should still get your fee) then you should publish the stats and let content owners see if they want to take the gamble. As more take the gamble so you will get better and better stats!

Good luck to you :) alex

Thanks for the responses and advice. My main issue is getting to talk to publishers and advertisers to show them the concept. Any marketing people out there or folk with contacts in the publishing industry? The infrastructure is already in place so the ppc idea is just an add-on to an existing product. I know there’s interest out there as confirmed by marketing metrics – it’s getting the customers, issue involved in trying to sell any service. AT&T is promoting a similar product in the US. The issue with publisher versus advertisers and the pros and cons concern trust. Do you trust your publisher to be working in your best interests when they are selling advertising space? They will sell advertising space to fill column inches and if you don’t make a sale well that’s the advertisers’ problem. A publisher should be able to demonstrate that their service works and is not afraid to take a risk- the advertiser is. The publisher should know and tell if any advert submitted by an advertiser is any good and advice accordingly or will they keep quiet and take the money? I feel soon that many advertisers will be asking their publishers to change their number to a trackable one and let the advertiser decide what is the best for them. I know from a publishers point it sounds like an own goal - years of no questions or unanswerable questions to an advert's success and regular money streams at risk but let them prove their existing model and let the advertisers see that it works.

Ok

Having rethought your idea again, I think we need to concentrate a little more "inside the box". The simple solution is the current model stays the same, you find advertising agencies and advertisers who are willing to try your phone lines so they can see what return they get from differnet sources such as website, newspaper national a, newspaper national b, trade magazine, local paper a, etc etc. The service would be a no brainer as advertisers would acually find out which medium or publish provides the best return on money!

You would not need to change the market place or reinvent the wheel. You would be helping so as long as its not too pricey i dont see why many organisations would not try this.

It sounds like you need a good salesman to help you build a small sales team that can contact advertisers & publishers to sell the idea to them. I'd be surprised if you couldnt get any interest from any magazine/newspaper publishers, especially some of the smaller ones.

If you're really struggling to get any interest from publishers (have you contacted any?), then maybe you could start by selling it as a stats monitoring service for advertisers. Charge them a monthly fee to get stats on how many calls they've had from each ad, give them a unique number to put in their ads for each publication & it'd give them more info. I think most companies that offer '08' numbers already have some kind of stats monitoring system anyway though, so you'd have to offer a better service, or undercut them. Once you've got a client base of advertisers, then you'd be in a better position to approach publishers.

Apart from offering publishers and advertisers different metrics and marketing model I thought of another way to make it work but using a method I'd already tried albeit difficult to do . I tried to contact web based directory sites owners who have lots of advertisers,there are 1000s of these directory based web sites.
What I was thinking was to contact the owners of the directory based web sites and propose they give each advertiser a free phone number for customers to ring. A fee would be arranged between the site owner and the advertiser and I would charge a fixed fee , I charged 50p per call plus 2p per minute last time. The website owner charges what they like , depends on their agreement; I'd put conditions in place to prevent the advertiser and the site owner being charge for short calls, duplicate calls within a certain time frame. The advertiser gets free advertising unless someone actually contacts them and the publishers' only task is to change the advertisers number to a 0845 or 0800 freephone one.I know this model works as I've done it before but canned it after a while as contacting the site owners took too long and I had to have so many as to make buying the wholesale phone lines viable.My problem is not how to do it but how to contact the web site owners to sell the idea . Is there a way to link to sites or get them to visit a site to see if they would be interested or do I emply a sales person to contact them by trawling through their contact details. I'd do it but sales is not my forte to say the least
Thanks for all the input so far.