As a digital account manager, it’s your responsibility to educate your client’s on the internet marketing services you provide and the cost attached. Furthermore, you’re going to receive the “Why am I paying this?” or “What is this charge on my invoice?”
One service that clients typically don’t understand when they see a particular charge on their latest invoice is call tracking. Call tracking is exactly what it sounds like. It's a system that enables you to track calls that come from internet marketing campaigns that generate the call request.
This service is crucial for marketers to track, analyze, collect data, and report on calls.
Running marketing campaigns without call tracking will limit your ability to perform. Without call tracking, you will be unable to identify which campaign generated a specific call. You won't be able to determine the quality of leads or re-access your sales strategies.
By enabling call tracking with your current campaigns, you can paint a complete picture to your client of the value of leads you are generating for them.
So how does call tracking work?
Through a call tracking service, you can associate any local or toll-free number to all online and offline campaigns, websites, landing pages, search and social campaigns, etc. This is achieved through assigning unique phone numbers for specific marketing campaigns.
For example, let's say you’re running a paid search campaign on Google to sell sneakers in Toronto. You create a particular phone number for that, which forwards all calls to your office directly. That way, when you see leads from that specific tracking number, you understand those leads came from Google Ads.
Now, this can extend to organic searches as well. When users come to your website through an organic search and call your business number, you can identify those calls as organic leads.
Still not sold on the benefits of call tracking services? Or maybe you are, but can’t explain those monthly tracking charges to your boss. Here are some more reasons why no doubt you should be running call tracking services.
1. Phone Calls Still Remain A Primary Conversion Point
As the internet becomes more digital, and booking engines become available online. You may think why should I track phone calls. Appointments are all scheduled online directly or via email.
However, depending on the nature of the business, phone calls remain a primary source of contact, especially in the healthcare industry, where about 88% of patients still book over the phone.
Call’s generally produce higher quality leads. Many people prefer speaking to someone over the phone, where they can access as much information as possible. Opposed to booking online with limited information.
If you’re a business where phone calls are a significant source of your lead generation, having call tracking enabled is critical. Having the ability to listen to previous phone calls and evaluate your sales process can help your business close leads at a higher rate.
2. Determine the ROI of your marketing campaigns
You pay every month for organic optimization and pay per click advertising. Call tracking is the most efficient method to access the ROI your marketing campaigns are bringing you.
With call tracking, all leads are pulled into your CRM by medium. Therefore, you’re able to identify whether the phone leads came from organic, Google Ads, direct, or even the 1000 flyers you sent out.
Maybe you didn’t think that the money you spent on organic was bringing you the return you expected. However, when you enter your CRM and listen to phone leads from ‘organic’, you quickly find that a few of those leads converted into sales and helped you reach the ROI you expected.
3. Provides accurate data
Sometimes call tracking is essential in accessing your data, and the key to making insightful changes.
Listen to calls coming from your paid search campaigns. You may find that you’re receiving quite a few irrelevant leads. If there is any commonality with these weak quality leads, it can help you build a list of negatives to implement into your campaign structure.
You may listen to some calls and realize the majority of them are from an area you can’t service.
This can help marketers exclude where certain geo-locations ads are served to. That way, they can apply bid adjustments to locations the clients wish to sell to.
4. Identify Opportunities
Enabling call tracking will help quantify more leads generated through your marketing campaigns. Typically, when an organic or paid search phone call is made, you’re able to track what device, location, and time of day the user converted.
When call tracking services pull those leads into your CRM, all the data becomes available to you. This can help with shifting some of your strategies.
Perhaps you noticed that you receive phone calls at a specific time of the day where no one is available to answer the phones. So you either make an agent accessible at that time or decrease bids on that ad schedule.
Or maybe you analyzed the phone leads and identified an untapped market. You start receiving a lot of quality leads from Hamilton when you assumed your primary market was in Toronto. So you decide to increase bid adjustments in that location and shift organic effort to increase rankings for specific keywords in Hamilton.
5. Fine-tune your sales strategy
A lot of the time, a client will assume that call tracking only benefits marketing teams to help identify opportunities and make data-driven changes, which is true.
However, call tracking is just as beneficial to your sales team. Most importantly, if you assign leads to individual sales representatives. As their sales coach, you can listen to their calls and identify opportunities for growth on the next call.
Maybe the sales representative was not knowledgeable enough to convert a potential lead, or run a successful discovery call.
Perhaps, when listening to the calls, you recognize a lot of leads are price shopping, but the sales rep doesn’t retrieve their email to plug them into your marketing funnel.
Call tracking acts as excellent opportunities to identify your sales process, and make necessary improvements to help increase your sales closing ratio.
Conclusion
As a result, equipping your marketing campaigns with call tracking services is only going to help you reach your KPIs and sales targets.
It provides authenticity to the value of the leads that are generated.
Real-time data is created to help make appropriate data-driven revisions. Consequently, for your marketing team to generate more leads, and for the sales team to close them.
