The biggest challenge that brands face today is standing out from the crowd. This is owing to the fact that a lot of businesses compete in the same sector or product space. Thus, getting noticed by a customer, especially a potential one, keeps branding agencies and marketing managers on their toes.
The struggle doesn’t end here, though––thanks to increasing digitisation and global retail language, businesses face competition not just from local companies but from MNCs as well. Finally, the fact remains that most of these competing brands and businesses offer just as good and useful a product as any other with similar pricing.
Hence, it all boils down to simply standing out and getting noticed by your target audience, which is as good as half the job done. This is exactly where having a vanity number can help your business a great deal.
“The core benefit of using vanity free phone numbers is that they simply make it a lot easier for a consumer to remember as well as contact your business. They ensure free marketing, strong brand recall, as well as better customer outreach for an organisation at a scale. These are advantages that no business can afford to miss out on. ”
The reasons for getting a vanity number for your business are manifold. Following are five of the most relevant ones to consider.
1. Count beyond aesthetics –
This is a rather underrated aspect of vanity phone numbers. Vanity numbers perform several functions that do more than serving the marketing and branding needs of a business. Considered practically, they actually serve a host of operational requirements.
For example, free phone vanity numbers simply make it very easy for a customer to remember your business or organisation’s contact details, increasing both brand recognition and recall.
Think of it this way––your customer requires very little memory space in their minds to memorise your brand. This is a big win for any brand in a world full of competitors that lack differentiators.
Additionally, an organisation can choose to leverage world-class contact center solutions with advanced CRM tools alongside their free phone vanity numbers.
It will encourage customers to simply pick up the phone and dial up the business, leading to increased engagement. This expands the scope of free phone numbers from being mere marketing utility to being a major strategic and operational asset.
Such contact center solutions hold immense potential in terms of capturing data, performing analytics, scheduling and automating calls, and so on. Businesses, thus, stand to benefit from them and can convert a simple outreach mechanism into a whole new organisational utility altogether.
2. Scalability beyond doubt –
Free phone vanity numbers are scale agnostic––this means, they’re not limited to large-scale organisations; not at all. Even niche brands and relatively smaller-scale businesses can get themselves vanity numbers, depending on their demands and needs.
In fact, they can choose to get free phone vanity numbers for a limited period as well. Moreover, they can scale the service capacity up or down rather easily. Such flexibility allows organisations of all scope and scale to leverage such a service conveniently and flexibly, and give their businesses a push.
What is equally relevant, from a scalability perspective, is the fact these numbers, especially when availed from a capable contact center solution provider, are very responsive to a rapid shift in consumer demands.
For example, during the Black Friday sales weekend, the pressure on a contact center increases significantly, at least for a week, both, before and after the sale period. Vanity numbers, inherently scalable, provide organisations with an unprecedented amount of choice and flexibility to shape their strategies during such peak periods.
3. Incredibly credible –
There remains this one big conundrum that most brands face, especially in the early parts of their journey: gaining credibility in the eyes of consumers.
Consumers tend to, instinctively, not trust brands. There is always this hint of scepticism. And it is somewhat justified, given the number of times businesses have underdelivered on their promises and disappointed customers. This is where free phone vanity numbers prove their mettle.
The fact that you can set up dedicated, easy-to-call phone numbers is in itself a big credibility boost for your brand. And it just gets better! With vanity numbers, you can choose digits that represent the letters of your brand name. For instance, if your brand is called One Stop, you can choose the number 0800-666-7867.
Your customers can literally spell out your brand name before placing a call! Such a feature, unheard of otherwise, totally elevates a business’s credibility multifold in the eyes of a consumer.
4. Add to the marketing firepower –
This is the most obvious and powerful element of free phone vanity numbers by far. They are a very powerful tool in the hands of any marketing department of any business, cutting across sectors and industries.
Imagine having a singular point element that can be marketed and advertised as an exclusive identifier. For some industries, say, for example, hospitals and healthcare, such numbers might come in handy in case of emergencies as patients can easily remember the numbers and call without worrying about incurring any charges.
For other industries as well, these numbers can be moulded to perfectly fit any and all marketing plans and branding efforts.
They draw a strong brand association, are easy to memorise, share, recall, distribute, and so forth. Plus, no matter the format––newspapers, podcasts, banners, webpages, or any other medium––vanity numbers are very easy to print, advertise, and exhibit.
5. Can be measured –
One of the complaints that organisations have is that, often, there exist no clear, concrete tools via which they can measure the return on their marketing and branding investment. It is fairly obvious why such an issue arises.
Primarily, there didn’t exist stable consumer feedback avenues so as to allow organisations to gather quantifiable data to begin with. That changes, atleast to an extent with free phone vanity numbers. How?
Organisations have customers directly call up the business concerned, where they interact with the marketing or advertising material and on the exact number as advertised. That is a very active feedback loop in itself.
Secondly, coupled with advanced contact center solutions and CRM tools, businesses can actually also figure out what proportion of customers are actually being positively impacted by such a branding or marketing effort, what is working, what is not, and so on.
To conclude
It’s fairly evident just how big of a competitive advantage vanity numbers provide to businesses. The market is a crowded space, building brand identity isn’t easy––to say the least, customer loyalty is uncertain, and acquiring customers is arduous.
Organisations that are looking for a differentiation strategy must, at the earliest, make the most of free phone vanity numbers. These are one branding and marketing tool that no one can afford to take loosely.
Get your own free phone vanity number today and make the first step towards carving out a niche for your own brand and business!
Acefone provides a broad range of cloud communication services to businesses of all sizes, which includes Hosted Phone Systems, Free Phone Numbers, and Cloud Contact Center Solutions. Being the UK’s leading provider of VoIP service provider, we always strive to provide excellent customer service and high-quality custom solutions to our customers.
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