The idea of Phonify originally came from our parent company Blackfire Digital which we setup in March 2019. We managed to build up a huge local client list in less than a year. While they say surviving the first year is the hardest part, we not only survived but by month 12 we were depserately trying to find staff to fill positions as we had too much work on.

How did we do it? With Virtual Numbers, which eventually lead to us setting up Phonify as a standalone company.

Advertising, Virtual Numbers?

In a nutshell, we register a new virtual number for every advert we put out. Whether it be a flier, column in a newspaper or magazine, Google Advert, Social media page.. Everything.

• We built a dashboard to view call logs and listen to recordings (now the Phonify dashboard)
• We put 5 adverts on Google Adwords with a budget of £1 / day each and a unique Virtual Number for each.
• We put unique Virtual Numbers on our website, Facebook Page, Twitter Page, Instagram and Linkedin
• At this point we had 10 virtual numbers and we waited a month.
• At the beginning of the next month we put together a spreadsheet with all the numbers, and whether the calls were sales, leads or irrelevant
• We deleted the adverts that gave us no leads as they were a waste of money.
• We tried putting adverts in newspapers, doing flier drops and even coupon sites, all with a unqiue virtual number
• Every month we added 5 new adverts to Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook Advertising and Linkedin, deleted the adverts with no sales/leads and kept building up.
• By month 6 we were receiving around 30 calls a day from new customers.

Small Businesses

If you are a small business i highly recommend you give it a try, a virtual number costs a £1/month and gives you the freedom to experiment, as a web developer the amount of customers i've seen spending thousands on Google Adwords and not getting any result is astonishing. I've had customers paying PR companies for advertising on the London Underground and on the side of buses and i've had to break the news to them that paying £7000 a month for that poster in the Underground has bought you 4 new customers in 3 months.

Get a virtual number, put an advert in a trade magazine or your local paper for £50 and wait a month and see exactly how many calls/sales that made you.

Practical Tips

Here are some useful tips to help you get the most out of using virtual numbers.

• Put the full phone number on adverts including the area code (01908 222111) as just dialling 222111 for example is not supported by most carriers.
• If you are working locally block international calls in the Phonify dashboard, so you are not being charged for spam calls.
• If you are using a mobile phone, on the phonify dashboard setup "Caller Business ID" so when you get calls come through you can see that they are business calls.
• Activate call recording in your Phonify Dashboard and LISTEN to the call recordings, so that you know how many calls lead to sales.
• Make sure you answer the calls, we can see the Phonify call stats for all our customers and you'd be shocked at how many calls go unanswered.