It’s just another day at the office. The phone rings, the sales department answers. Perhaps a great conversation is had with the customer on the other end of the line, maybe even a sale was made. As a marketer creating online and offline campaigns and advertisements, how nice would it be to know why that particular customer called and what was discussed on the call — the good, the bad and the ugly?
Enter Call Tracking
For years, agencies, businesses and marketers had a glaring blind spot when analyzing the ROI of their campaigns. Without call tracking, once a lead dials the phone number in an advertisement, any insight into the performance of that ad disappears.
With call tracking, however, you are able to track phone leads by attaching unique phone numbers to each and every marketing campaign you run. All of the sudden, you have evidence-based insights detailing where the call came from, where and how leads found your ads, and, most importantly, which campaigns are delivering the most profitable results and which campaigns need improvement. In essence, call tracking helps integrate the insights from a sales team to the marketers charged with creating compelling content. In this way, marketers know what questions leads are asking and can better tailor their marketing and SEO efforts based on call tracking data.
Long Live the Phone Call
According to a 2015 Deloitte study and subsequent report by The Guardian, “more than 75 percent of adults own a smartphone, but a quarter never use it for calls.” Yet, the phone may actually be one of the most useful sales tools in your marketing arsenal. Invoca’s 2015 Call Intelligence Index describes how phone calls are changing the digital marketing landscape.
Case in point: There has been a 40 percent increase in phone calls across all industries since 2014, and marketers have started to take note. After all, phone calls are the quickest way to get a response, so it makes perfect sense that consumers would choose to call a company rather than fill out an online form. This understanding is important for a couple of reasons. While your typical online conversion rate is somewhere near one to two percent (on a good day), phone calls produce conversion rates of 30 to 50 percent, according to Invoca’s data. Search Engine Journal corroborates Invoca’s findings, noting that calls convert 10 to 15 times more often than web leads.
If you implement call tracking, you’ll have a complete digital paper trail of what led to a lead giving you a call. All of this supports your sales and marketing efforts, helping you adjust campaign messaging based on responses and reallocate resources based on what you’re learning from call tracking, thereby providing you with a better understanding of how your paid, organic and referral traffic are supporting inbound leads.
So What?
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Marketing is arguably the most crucial aspect of an organization’s business plan, and here at Pivot we rely on every puzzle piece that makes up a marketing strategy to fulfill our clients’ goals. If your own marketing efforts aren’t yielding results, there’s a good chance your tactics aren’t matching up with your strategy. By appropriately incorporating call tracking into your tactical and strategic marketing plan, you’re likely to start seeing the results you’ve been waiting for.
Still unsure of how to best use call tracking to your advantage? If you’re looking for a strong team to help propel your marketing efforts forward through call tracking, drop us a line and we’ll give you the support and resources you need to achieve your goals.
