Call tracking is the process of connecting offline interactions, like phone calls, with online visits. The most basic form of call tracking would be when a business asks a person who called them “How did you hear about us?”. The problem with simply asking all potential customers isn’t really effective, especially if a business receives a lot of inquiries – and most businesses that rely on phone calls to close deals do. Also, simply asking potential customers can’t properly be measured which could lead to problems with the marketing agency.
Call tracking is a software platform that allows you to see phone calls like you see your website, ie. you see from which page the call was made, you can even record the phone call and go back and listen to it later – this could tell you if your marketing message is working the way you wanted it to. If you run a business that relies on phone calls for closing business – you need call tracking. If your marketing agency works with businesses that rely on phone calls for closing business – you NEED call tracking.
In this article, we’ll cover five reasons why marketing agencies like yours need call tracking.
1) Measuring advertising effectivity
The first and possibly the most important reason why a marketing agency needs call tracking is actually pretty simple – if you don’t track calls, there’s no way you can know how much of an impact your campaign is having on lead generation. This will prove to your client that your campaigns are effective and that you are not wasting the budget. Also, you’ll be able to tell which of your campaigns are performing better, which ones are not and optimize them accordingly.
2) Getting feedback on your campaigns
Most marketing agencies work hard to get qualified leads for their clients. Leads that pick up the phone and call the business can definitely be categorized as qualified leads. Why? Well, calling business implies a sense of urgency. That’s why your qualified leads should be a priority. Qualified leads also provide a great base for measuring the effectiveness of other channels and departments, like sales and customer care, that are intertwined with marketing. Recording and listening back to calls with qualified leads can teach both the client and you how a good (and bad) call sounds like, what do the qualified leads really need, etc. The qualitative data you get from these recordings is very valuable.
3) Making a greater impact
Let’s be honest, even though most marketing agencies work hard, there are a lot of them out there that do paid ads with little effort or care, just hoping that something good will happen. Most of the time, it doesn’t. Unfortunately, your clients probably had a similar bad experience with an agency sometime in the past.
However, if your client sees that your ads are making the phones ring, they are likely to increase the budget, which should result in an increase in your profits.
4) Better marketing campaigns
Do you know how sometimes clients complain that marketing campaigns won’t work in the real world? And that the agency is too disconnected with the customers? A great benefit of call tracking is that you get a lot of quantitative and qualitative data from real leads and customers. That data can be used to create new and adjust the current marketing message to be more in line with the customers. Call tracking also allows you to create different campaigns for all the key personas your client has and then test them out and get real feedback very soon.
5) Deeper integrations
If you use call tracking in your marketing, then you’ll want to make sure your call tracking software is fully integrated with your CRM. Capturing your phone call leads and nurture them right along with your other inbound marketing contacts will allow you to see every prospect, every action and how they relate to all your campaigns, projects, and overall goals all throughout the sales funnel and beyond.
Conclusion
Hopefully, with this article, we’ve shown you why marketing agencies need call tracking. There are a lot of benefits in introducing call tracking to your clients, especially if they rely on closing business via the phone. Even though we didn’t mention it before, call tracking will definitely be useful for all businesses, no matter their sales funnel. The data you get from call tracking can be used in all sorts of ways – everything from measuring how effective an ad campaign is, to getting real feedback from qualified leads, to creating marketing content, copy, and campaigns based on real key persons to deep integrations with your CRM systems which allows you to map out the sales journey much deeper and better than ever before. To possibilities with call tracking are almost endless.
Photo credits: Business photo created by yanalya