The first place where fundamental marketing attribution happens is in your Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs). Marketing Attribution relies on a holistic view of interactions, and call tracking can provide the missing pieces of data to complete the whole customer journey. Studies show the CRM market is constantly growing, with many CRM variations breaking records of market size.
If you ask a handful of professionals in business today, they’ll give you mixed responses on how they feel about their CRMs. Some still see it as a tool to keep prospects and customer info organized – basically a repository. And probably don’t deal with it as much. Then there are those who realize that having complete lead and prospect information is a lifeline to any business. And now CRMs have become essential software, handled mainly by marketers and sales, giving breed to CRM Marketing.
What is a CRM?
In today’s world CRMs have evolved, becoming smoother to use, offering more capability, and going into marketing automation – even Artificial Intelligence. CRM systems go well beyond contact management and data input. They handle marketing automation capabilities, and just with that, they revolutionized the way business is conducted.
Now, beyond the classic uses, who is engaging with our content? Or nurturing leads via email. The real value of a CRM is its ability to give marketers a single customer view or a single source of truth on what marketing works. With precise data, you can make better decisions. Marketing attribution helps you tie your sales and marketing data together, giving you one power source to track all the stages of your conversion process.
The other capability that drives most of the growth is ‘lead prioritization.’ What starts with attribution of marketing leads ends with lead management – which has twofold implications: it rests on having clear data and getting it to the right person, but it also means businesses can provide more relevant, personal, and timely (if not real-time) interactions.
Marketing Attribution means data – not just more, but … the right kinds of data
This quote from 2003, featured in Computerworld, is more relevant than ever. Only today, the most common challenge faced by marketers and businesses is needing more data from different sources and, thus, being unable to make the best of their CRM.
The touchpoints have exponentially increased with our world being digital-first and convoluted with so many channels. Yet, the data needed to attribute marketing efforts does not come simultaneously. Instead, it is built over time as prospects interact with the business and product, moving through the buyer stages and down the sales funnel.
CRMs are able to provide an answer to ‘where are our customers coming from and why?’ But the answer will depend only on the information available. So if you feed it information from your web engagement and forms, it will tell you how well organic or direct traffic is doing and neglect other channels.
In the marketing and ad agency world, where a holistic view of campaigns is needed, CRMs need to have all the info across the entire customer journey, including social, ads, and call interactions.
Top 3 ways call tracking completes your CRM and boosts your marketing attribution.
1. Never miss a lead
The principal use of a CRM is to store all your contacts. But how sure are you that you’ve got everything? By adopting call tracking and integrating it into your CRM you can: a) create a new contact record for every new caller, or b) update the latest interaction to an existing contact. Using this conversion data marketers can drive custom follow-up activities based on their internal inbound marketing funnels and workflows.
2. Qualify leads & move Deals faster
Day in and day out of a CRM is to manage the pipeline. And many sectors that follow a sales-led approach have their deal data break despite starting out with the best intentions. The need to manually update everything through stages makes it too time-consuming. With call tracking, you can perform lead management during the call, use integration triggers to send business-specific conditions into your CRM, and use that to move deal stages automatically. For example, you can have calls with a duration of over 1-minute trigger into Hubspot and turn a record from lead to MQL.
3. Get accurate lead source
The flagship salesforce study shows that phone calls are preferred by 59% of customers – ranking it as the most popular channel to interact with a business. Yet, so many CRMs have predefined source values for leads to organic, paid search, paid social, and direct. How would an incoming phone call be attributed to marketing? Direct? Or organic? Or Offline?
Well, it depends on whether the phone appears in an ad or on your website, right? Call tracking allows you to have different numbers for your ads – all being directed to the business phone – and, this way, be able to track how they contribute to your marketing. At the CRM level, with call tracking, you can go beyond seeing a chunk of calls attributed as offline and instead attribute inboun
4. Piece together the complete customer journey
Just like a CRM can help you see how many times you’ve interacted with a customer, Call tracking can help you see how many times that person visited your website before deciding to call and book an appointment. You can even see the page that drove that call.
You will unlock so many insights by leveraging call tracking, and your marketing campaigns will begin to perform more. All you need is to get data into salesforce or if you prefer, integrate with Hubspot.
Want to learn more? You can speak to your growth specialists directly. They’ll answer any question you have about call tracking, conversion attribution and how to bring that into your CRM system.
