Temporary Fencing | News Views Tips & Ideas

What’s their number?

Chances are, if you have been listening to the radio lately, you will have heard ads featuring Phone Words. They are the phone numbers you dial by spelling out a word on your phone’s alphanumeric keypad. Some of Australia’s largest companies are taking advantage of the enormous increase in brand recognition and phone number recall they generate. Many small ones too.

Mark Eaves and brothers Martin and Bruce Fouracre, of Melbourne temporary fencing business 1300TempFence, are small business owners following the lead of the big boys, in trying to raise awareness of their brand through a phone word.

“We’ve seen the campaigns of 13CABS, Rams home loans and Westpac, and although we don’t have that sort of money to spend, you can see the opportunity it presents. We have sixty kilometres of temporary fencing on commercial building sites and residential construction sites across Melbourne. Every fence panel on every site is a potential billboard. We wanted a name and phone number people could recognise and remember in the few seconds it took to drive by a site with our temporary fence. We’ve gone with large signs with our name clearly emblazoned across them for this very reason”, Martin says.

In the U.S, where phone words have been in vogue for over 10 years now, research shows an increased response rate of 300 percent to marketing/advertising for those companies using phone names compared with a standard phone number.

Mark agrees, “It will work for virtually every industry, everywhere. Our plan is to expand 1300TempFence Australia wide and this is the perfect vehicle to do it. If people see our name on our temporary fencing panels they will immediately remember our number. That will apply whether they are in Karatha, Kiribilli or Kooyong. 1300TempFence says who we are and what we do. Next time they need temporary fencing they won’t have to think too hard. The phone number is already in their memory.

We currently use the internet, www.1300tempfence.com.au and Yellow Pages to advertise our business. They work really well and generate heaps of business. We’re supplying temporary fencing for more and more construction all the time and the event industry are keeping us busy with both temporary fencing and crowd control barriers, but to keep people coming back it’s important that they remember our name ahead of our competitors. Along with the great service we provide, that’s what we believe the Phone Word achieves for us”.

Telstra, through their phone word arm 1300Australia have just begun a campaign of radio advertising to promote the awareness of phone words or smart numbers to the community. Log on to www.smartnumbers.com.au to see if there is a phone word to suit your business.