One Call Number is a Black Hole
Ring, ring ….. It’s a potential customer calling, ready to purchase from you. They got your number from ….. Wait, you realize that you have no idea where they found your number! If your marketing campaigns (or your clients’ campaigns) use the same phone number regardless of the marketing medium, there is no way to tell which campaigns are the most successful. At the most basic level, you can track campaigns by having a different phone number for each one; by why would you do just that? Bottom line, without precise call tracking and attribution, there is no way to tell which campaigns are driving the most or the highest quality leads (and ultimately sales).
Call Tracking: A Key Component in Marketing Analytics
As a modern marketing manager, you know that analytics play a crucial role in structuring successful digital marketing campaigns. However, by concentrating on tracking all of your online activity, you may be neglecting to track the phone calls they drive. You’ve invested a considerable amount of money in a beautiful new website, sent a bunch of segmented emails, and set up multiple pay-per-click campaigns. Wouldn’t it be useful to know which digital marketing tactics are so enticing that potential customers will pick up the phone and give you or your client a call? The fact is, you can’t have a full understanding of lead and conversion data if you’re not also tracking phone calls.
Really Get to Know Your Customers
If you are an effective marketing manager, you already have some knowledge about your customer base. But, without call tracking, there’s a lot of information that you are missing. For example, what are your customers’ income levels, purchase trends, call patterns, and levels of satisfaction, and where do they tend to reside? By tracking calls, you can gain additional powerful insights concerning who is likely to buy your product, and you will come to understand your target audience like never before. You will be able to answer the following questions commonly brought up at company meetings:
- Are there sales calls that we should be getting that we are not?
- Are we spending our advertising dollars in the most effective places?
- How many new leads are we producing every month? and are they converting?
- Which keywords drive the best calls?
Track Your Campaigns
By combining call-tracking with your existing marketing analytics, you will gain a more focused picture of the overall success of any marketing campaign. Effective call-tracking software will include keyword level tracking (to the click-level) and multi-channel attribution tracking. You will be able to see correlations between your marketing efforts and results and determine which ones are the most successful. Phone call data from digital and non-digital marketing campaigns can be viewed on your call analytics dashboard. You will have the tools to track every visitor to every site and know which channel, location and keyword are producing the best results. You will have data on each visitor – their location, date and time when they came to your site, how many pages they viewed, how long they stayed. This will give you a better grasp of the success of your marketing initiatives, including PPC campaigns, Facebook ads, TV spots, print ads, and billboards. Your call-tracking platform will need to integrate with the tools you use to push data into your CRM and train your ad platforms whick clicks drive the most valuable calls.
Keywords Are Key
Keyword tracking enables you to see which keywords produce the most phone calls and conversions, and which ones need to be fine-tuned. However, if you’ve ever tried keeping track of more than a handful of keywords manually, you’ll know just how difficult this process can be. Fortunately, there is keyword tracking software out there that can automate the process. This can be exceptionally useful in determining the success of PPC campaigns. This is basically how call tracking software works:
- You are assigned a unique pool of phone numbers.
- A potential customer lands on your paid ad and clicks on your website, While they’re browsing your website, they’ll see a specific phone number from your pool.
- When you receive a call, you’ll know which ad and keyword were used.
- The phone number is freed up when the call is completed.
Without Call Tracking, Your Campaign Attribution is Inaccurate
Marketers rely on data. Want to run a new display ad? – check the data from the last one. Want to exhibit at that trade show again? – look at the data from last year. Want to increase your mobile advertising budget? – what does the data tell you?. But, what if you are making these crucial decisions based on incomplete data or your data is simply wrong? If you are not capturing data from phone calls, your data is going to be wide of the mark. Call tracking is the missing piece in marketing analytics. By utilizing this powerful tool, marketers can achieve a better understanding of their target audience, alleviate attribution blind spots, and gain a better idea of where to expend their efforts. Call tracking can help your and your client’s business exceed expectations.