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Is it worth paying for a memorable number?

In an earlier blog article we briefly touched upon memorable phone numbers when we broke down all the different kinds of number. But is a memorable one worth paying for? Read on, and catch our take!

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OK, no, I’m joking, you’re stuck with me. But hey, at least you’re not having to pay for it... yet.

It is worth considering which things that you need ARE worth paying for though. Specifically on this occasion, I’m going to be asking whether it’s worth you paying a bit of extra money for a memorable phone number.

We actually discussed this very briefly in a previous article about the different types of telephone number, and that article is well worth rereading if you’re not familiar with the variations.

However this article wants to look at the matter in a bit more depth to help you understand whether getting one would be the right decision for you at this time.

First of all, this is realistically only a point for business customers – if you’re reading this as a home user, by all means read on, but I can’t think of any reason why a home user could possibly need a memorable phone number for their home. Unless it was as a particularly distinct show of ostentation.

Beyond that, in many cases, you may well not need one – this article is not to try and convince you to buy one at all, but to explain that quite often, it’s not a necessity.

You see historically, before the rise of the Internet, there was far more need to have a number that could be remembered in correlation with the available marketing strategies of the time. You were often reliant on someone seeing your advert on the side of a bus, or a bus stop, or from your shopfront. To search for a telephone number more likely meant that someone was simply searching for the industry required, rather than your company specifically, which meant you were likely to lose out on business to one of many, unless you’d managed to get your message across through one of these kinds of media, or had been given as a referral to someone who didn’t happen to have your number to hand.

The other medium that was far more common in that era was radio advertising. All of us could probably recount several numbers straight off the bat that we heard whilst in the car at that point, and indeed, some of us can still quote telephone numbers we hear from TV and radio adverts even now. If you ARE going to launch an advertising campaign on TV or radio, then it makes absolute sense to use something memorable and catchy to do so. It’ll help your message stick far better if it’s something that can be recalled at will. Additionally, if your business is one that relies heavily on referrals, then you’d want SOMETHING to be memorable, whether it’s your phone number or your website, and so again, perhaps then you’d want to look into getting something more memorable.

However even now, the likelihood is that most businesses will simply need people to use a search engine to either find them directly, or to search for them with more general terms, i.e.: “Builders in Portsmouth” – at this point, your search engine optimisation becomes far more important than whether you have a catchy phone number or not.

The exceptions to this rule are companies whose businesses are likely to be relevant to people who are consistently on the move, whether for business or pleasure. The most obvious one of these would be taxi companies. Whilst you CAN search for a taxi number much easier these days, most of us will, especially in our local area, simply dial the number that sticks in our mind the most. A generic 11 digit number is not likely to do that as well as something with repetition, and so we’d almost certainly advise a customer in such an industry to pay the extra money for a memorable number.

But what do you think? Do you agree with us? Would you consider getting a memorable number to try and win more business? Or did you buy one years ago, and now feel that it doesn’t have an impact. Either way, we like to hear your take, so get in touch with your thoughts or questions about this, and indeed on any other telecoms related matter.

Until next time!

Zarte