Learn the many reasons for why you need to track your calls for measuring marketing ROI.
Look around. Everyone has a smartphone glued to their hand. Smart phones have advanced so much that 65% of people prefer to contact a business directly by phone rather than filling out a submission form. Contacting people with a phone call is the most convenient way to start a conversation and ask for information. Are you tracking your calls?
If you’re skeptical about your call tracking process, then you probably don’t track calls. You’d know if you had a call tracking platform in place, because you would get monthly or weekly reporting, ways to improve nurturing your leads, and much more. Continue reading to learn why you should implement a call tracking strategy for measuring your marketing ROI.
The Call Tracking Process:
The whole premise behind call tracking is being able to determine how callers found your business. Call tracking works for both online advertising and traditional advertising. Whether that be with a print ad, social, banner ad or billboard, measuring the effectiveness of a particular campaign is huge for marketing.
The process works by determining how you will use your call tracking software. After you determine which ads or marketing channels you want to track, then you create a tracking call number for each channel. This number looks similar to your business or sales team’s phone number in that it can use your area code. This tracking number is a façade which forwards all calls to the actual phone number of your business or sales team.
Many call tracking platforms give you the option to customize this tracking number based on zip code and number order preferences. For example, call tracking companies will give you three to five options depending on the availability of the specific call tracking number.
This number is placed on your marketing materials and helps you better track your ROI from a particular ad or other marketing platform.
6 Reasons Call Tracking Benefits Marketing:
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Determines outcome
Wondering how well a printed ad is doing? It’s hard to measure considering a single impression does not guarantee a member of your target audience even saw the ad or recognized your brand. But with call tracking, it can determine the outcome of your marketing materials by pinpointing exactly how many calls were generated by the ad.
Call tracking gives you a much deeper scope of audience analysis, which we will discuss later in this article. You can also learn what works and what doesn’t by comparing two ads. If Ad #1 generates 15 calls and Ad #2 generates 40 calls with differing calls to action, then you know Ad #1’s CTA is more successful.
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Practice tool for sales
A huge benefit of implementing call tracking tactics is the recording feature. Have you ever called a business and been prompted with a pre-recorded message of: “This phone call will be recorded for quality assurance / training purposes”? That is the call recording feature letting you know about the privacy limitations of your call.
By listening in to previous calls, you can use it as a practice tool for your sales team. Invite your team to listen to the recorded calls, explain to them what makes for good and bad calls, and coach them on using the right messaging to improve your sales. I always recommend my clients to turn on the recording feature to gain more insights.
There is a legal aspect behind recording calls. Many states in America have differing laws when it comes to phone recordings. If you choose to record all calls from your call tracking software, be sure to include the initial message to let your audience know they are being recorded. This can save you from legal concerns down the road.
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Wealth of insights
Since you can record all calls coming to your business, there is no telling how many insights you can gain from a single conversation. You can determine consumer trends, how well the conversation is going, and gain firsthand insights into the many questions people ask your business on a daily basis.
Another benefit to learning about these insights is to determine the hot and cold areas of the buyer’s journey. For example, if a certain question or comment triggers the consumer into turning away from your products or services then you know what to avoid. You can also determine keywords and phrases your audience uses for SEO strategies…
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SEO benefits
Call tracking helps with your SEO strategies because it can help pinpoint keywords and key phrases your target audience is using with your sales team. You can use these keywords and commonly asked questions to improve your marketing campaigns and website content.
For example, if they’re more than a few commonly asked questions people ask your sales team, then you can use this content to create an FAQ blog post or even an entire FAQ page on your website. In fact, some advanced call tracking companies even allow for tracking on the keyword level. Better and more on-target keywords will always improve your SEO.
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Time for call hours
The fifth important reason to consider call tracking for your marketing is that it allows you to learn your peak calling hours for your business. If you know when the highest volume call times are, then you can better prioritize your time.
If there is a certain window of time where most of calls come in, then you might want to consider hiring extra staff members to accommodate the volume of calls. It can also help you with scheduling meeting appointments.
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Reporting benefit
Each call tracking platform comes with detailed analytics. This report contains all information from a phone call including the name of the individual, their location, duration of the call, percentages of agent talking time vs. consumer talking time, if they were a first-time caller, the source of the call, and more.
Since implementing call tracking technology to my own marketing campaigns, I have been able to improve aspects of marketing that I would have never found out before. Now, I put a tracking number on all of my own ads as well as those of my clients. I suggest exploring different call tracking companies to see for yourself how valuable it is for your marketing efforts. Let us know if you want to start tracking calls!
What’s stopping you from tracking your calls?