Are you considering a fresh revamp of your marketing campaigns? Perhaps you’re thinking about different ways of gathering data to make more informed marketing decisions? You’re certainly not alone. Many business owners are constantly looking for the next disruptive solution that will solve all their market research woes. Luckily, there is one hot option for business owners in your position-- call tracking.
Call tracking as a strategy has been around since the age of the internet although it was then far less technical than it is today. In fact, marketing pros like Neil Patel have spoken on the value of call tracking in today’s age. One might believe that due to the invent and proliferation email, text messaging from mobile devices and chat tools, that inbound calls to businesses for sales inquiries are a medium that should not be invested in. Landline phones might be “…a thing of the past…” says one popular Neil Patel blog post, “… that doesn’t mean that people aren’t calling your business, especially since cell phones are everywhere these days. And it doesn’t look like that’s going to change any time soon. Calls to businesses from smartphones will reach 162 billion by 2019…”
So what is call tracking, and why should business owners and marketing specialists adopt a call tracking solution? What makes it so effective? Let’s take a look.
What is Call Tracking?
Call tracking is the process of identifying how different callers found your business, which add, post, page, video etc prompted them to call in to inquire. We all know that analytics is so important when it comes to building powerful and successful marketing campaigns. Understanding how callers found your business’ phone number and became interested in your services can be pretty useful for your marketing endeavors, it will help you to focus your marketing dollars on the most successful marketing strategies opposed to guessing or not knowing which precise ad, page, post of marketing medium is working for your business.
This form of data collection has been around since phones first came to exist, more or less. Businesses have been reaching out to customers to ask, “How did you hear about our business?” for decades. How else could businesses understand what marketing campaigns were working? It’s simply the basics of analytics. Obviously, call tracking has evolved quite a bit and no longer requires customer outreach to determine who they found you, these days your call tracking software will handle most of that for you automatically
Call tracking marketing will often involve call tracking software. Through this type of software, one can attribute the sources of leads using sophisticated technology that is very easy for any user to setup. There are a number of places where a customer may have heard of your business before calling. Maybe the first exposure was an online advertisement. Perhaps the second was a mailer that you sent them that finally convinced them to call. How can call tracking software find the real source?
It all comes down to multi-channel lead attribution that is offered in applications like Contact Cloud.
Using Call Tracking for your Marketing Strategy
Multi-channel attribution is a marketing strategy that determines which touch points in the customer journey are delivering the highest ROI, thus determining how valuable those touch points are for conversions. Call tracking is a very important part of multi-channel attribution, as are other forms of data-driven marketing and reporting methods.
Today’s top-tier call tracking software (such as Contact Cloud) will use a very simple snippet of code that can be simply added to your website to track all online engagements, along with this and configuration of the Contact Cloud application tracking calls is seamless. For the tracking of offline sources, that we will be with a tracking number only and does not require the code snippet. Typically, a tracking number will be assigned to each advertising campaign and campaign level and tracked through the call tracking platform. Brick-and-mortar businesses can set up tracking numbers for their main lines and calling agents as well, including calls and SMS messages. Taking this omnichannel approach to call tracking makes it easier for businesses to get a clear picture of where leads are being driven from. Focusing on just one aspect of your customer’s interaction with your brand (such as the actual sale or first interaction) is just not a wise way to engage in marketing research. Every part of the customer journey could provide insight into what marketing channels are working. A customer won’t just call or text your business to make a purchase. They will call to ask questions, get information, seek technical support, and much more. This is why call tracking is so valuable.
Pretty much any business in any industry could benefit from call tracking. If your business gets calls and you are running multiple simultaneous campaigns in different channels, you could definitely benefit from call tracking software. Small businesses that don’t have a huge online presence and depend on word-of-mouth could benefit in a major way from tracking calls as well.
Just as well, call tracking can help you get to know your customers. That’s the basic premise behind marketing, right? Call tracking simply provides additional insights into your customer base. Recording calls can also help you improve your customer service techniques as well.
Get Started With Call Tracking Today
Whether you are a small brick-and-mortar business or a marketing agency that represents a large enterprise, call tracking can provide some serious features that can help you track your marketing campaigns. By focusing on customer movements and data collection, it will be so much easier to understand where customers are coming from in order to refine and improve your marketing campaigns.
