For the modern marketer, attributing calls to marketing campaigns is an essential part of their work. Curious to know why?
People have become reliant on the Internet to make transactions and navigate their day-to-day lives. It might, therefore, seem like the human interaction of a phone call is outdated. In fact, the opposite has proven to be true. After all, a phone may be able to search the web but it is still fundamentally a phone.
When a prospective customer finds a business using the mobile web, more often than not, they will call. Calling enables the prospect to answer questions and make a purchase without having to navigate through the website.
What is a marketing stack?
Before we address why call tracking is such an essential tool for marketers, it is worthwhile explaining what we mean by the marketing stack. A stack is a collection of technologies that marketers can use to drive their marketing. There are many technologies that can be added to that stack but there are few which are truly essential. One of them is call tracking.
What is call tracking and how does it work?
As the name suggests call tracking is the process of tracking phone leads by inserting a unique number into your webpage, ads, and emails. This is done through dynamic number insertion. Each visitor sees a unique phone number, but when that number is called it is sent to your original phone number. This allows you to track visitors on an individual basis but for the visitor, the process is completely seamless.
Data-driven marketing
In just two years more than 90% of the total data ever created was produced. All of that data can empower companies to make more accurate business decisions. It gives far greater insight into a company’s ideal prospect and the channels that can be used to most accurately reach them. As a result, businesses are looking for marketers that understand how to collect and interpret data.
Calls are for many businesses that biggest revenue-generating point of contact. It is therefore very important that the marketers leading those businesses’ campaigns are accurately able to determine how that revenue is being generated. Call tracking gives the marketer visibility over what is one of the businesses’ most strategic assets.
Improve the complete sales funnel
Call tracking is useful for pinpointing which marketing campaigns are resulting in calls to the business. But the usefulness of call tracking doesn’t end when a call is made. Call tracking also provides the marketer with useful data for improving the entire sales funnel.
Data points like the length and number of calls required before a sale is made can be used to tighten up the sales process. Transcripts from the call and surveys can be used to make even more specific improvements to the way that objections are addressed and the product is presented.
Gain total visibility over your marketing
Having an incomplete picture of your marketing is no longer acceptable for marketers. Businesses expect that marketers will have total visibility over where leads are coming from and how they interact with the business when they arrive. Fortunately, call tracking can reveal all these valuable aspects. So, marketers who want to retain their value need to master this aspect of data analysis. That’s the truth!
Improve your PPC & SEO campaigns
If you are running PPC campaigns, then call tracking needs to be part of the process. One well-established trend is the shift towards the mobile web. Tied in with this are prospects increasingly preferring to call after clicking on a PPC ad. As detailed above, the mobile web means that people are making more calls, not less, with a preference towards businesses that make this process easier. It is perhaps not surprising that 6 – 8 % of mobile users were more likely to click on a PPC ad that contains a phone number.
As a marketer, an easy win for your PPC campaigns is to include a phone number in your ads. But it’s not only this! The value of call tracking goes beyond including them in your PPC ads. With call tracking in place, you will be able to identify which specific keywords in that PPC campaign lead to calls and sales. This lets you optimize for those particular numbers. In an increasingly competitive PPC space, you need to be making the most out of your budget.
The knowledge can then be leveraged for any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) initiatives you are undertaking. Through your call tracked PPC campaigns, you can establish which keywords lead to calls. Armed with this data you can start to optimize your website around these money-generating keywords.
Optimize your website and landing pages
Fundamentally, the purpose of a website is to generate revenue for the business. Therefore, you want to be constantly optimizing the website with this goal in mind.
According to a study by Forrester, customers who initiate a phone call convert faster and spend more money. As calls are likely to be the business’s largest source of revenue, it makes sense to optimize to increase the number of calls. This sounds like common sense but if you haven’t set up call tracking it is almost impossible to do.
Without call tracking, you could make improvements, which increase the number of visitors that complete the web form but decrease the number of phone calls that are received. This could occur by giving greater prominence to calls to action (CTA) for the web form. While this may very well increase the number of people who click through to these forms, it potentially reduces the visibility of your calling option. The danger is that what might seem like a win – increased web form completions – could negatively impact overall revenue. This is due to the loss of higher revenue-producing phone calls.
By establishing call tracking you can ensure that any changes and testing take into account the impact on the number of phone calls. For example, you can A / B landing pages to see the exact impact it has on both the number and quality of phone calls that are made. And because call tracking is able to identify clients on an individual basis, it is easy to determine exactly how much revenue those calls are responsible for.
Remarket to your highest-converting audience
Clients that choose to call will often be your highest-value customers. Wouldn’t it be great to identify other clients just like these? This is exactly what you can achieve when you combine call tracking with ad platforms that offer remarketing like Facebook.
With remarketing, you can create lookalike audiences. First, you take a seed data set such as the email addresses of a particular group of clients. You then upload the seed data set to the advertising platform. The platform uses this data to create a lookalike audience whose characteristics match that of your set. By using as your data set customers that both called and converted, you can expand your reach to other similar customers who have a high propensity to buy.
Provide the sales team with valuable insights
There is often a disconnect between the marketing and sales team. Call tracking is an excellent way to help bridge that gap. Firstly, by utilizing call tracking you can demonstrate how specific marketing campaigns lead to more sales calls. This is not only a great way to show the value of marketing to sales. But it also can be invaluable when you are getting your marketing budget approved. Secondly, call tracking allows you to provide your sales team with valuable data that they can use to improve their processes. And there is plenty of room for improvement.
According to Salesforce, 85% of potential customers are not satisfied with the experience they receive when calling a business. Telling sales that they need to improve their phone process will invariably lead to resistance – unless it is backed with data. Using call tracking you can explain which calls result in sales.
Using sales transcripts and customer reviews you can detail what goes into a phone call that ends in a closed sale. You can also help sales managers identify which of their team members may require further training to improve their performance. Ensuring that the sales team is maximizing the phone leads that you are providing them with is the best way to ensure your advertising campaigns are delivering a great return on investment.
Takeaway
Having the right technologies in your marketing stack is the difference between delivering mediocre and outstanding results. Calls do the heavy lifting when it comes to generating revenue. Therefore, your marketing initiatives need to keep calls front and center at all times. If you want to crush it with your marketing, then call tracking needs a place in your stack.
