What Is Call Tracking and How Does It Help My Marketing?
Nowadays, there is a buzz about how practices effectively utilize call tracking to gauge the intrinsic value of their digital marketing efforts. What is call tracking anyway? Well that is a great question, and here is what you need to know.
Call Tracking — What is it?
Call tracking approximates the effect of rigorous digital marketing campaigns focusing on sales conversions and lead generation.
The methodology was given birth by the necessity of the evidence-based need to convert increased visibility into sales leads.
If you generate the bulk of your leads from user-friendly website forms, identifying what types of advertisements that lead to a favorable return on investments (ROI) can be easy.
However, this isn’t the case for many industries and businesses that lay at the external spectrum of fundamental e-commerce. These include travel and healthcare, for example, along with financial and automotive services and B2B tech.
Businesses in these industries generate a majority of potential leads that come from telephone, not just online forms.
But companies aren’t able to harness all the precious data because without streamlined call tracking software, as soon as potential customers see the number on the ad of any website and decide to punch in the number on his phone, there is no insight to the performance of that activity — the metric just disappears.
Reasons Why Organizations Neglect Call Metrics — They Aren’t Aware of What They Are Missing Out On
As a digital marketing or online entrepreneur, there is simply no more room for guesswork. What you need is precision-based information that you can use to convert leads into sales. There is plenty of incredible technology for it. But why do businesses still miss the bigger picture?
Unfortunately, there are plenty of organizations where there is a lot of rigidity when you talk about effective sales and marketing. These rigid silos make it hard to close the gap between inbound calls and digital marketing efforts.
Apart from that, some businesses are under the false impression that call tracking is somewhat cost intensive and difficult to implement.
Jennifer Stretch, director of marketing at DemandResults, stated that when the organization integrated call tracking systems to analyze all the potential data, more than 50% of their sales leads actually originate over the phone.
When you have access to that amount of visible and tangible data, there is no reason you can further streamline your digital marketing and inbound campaigns. This way, you can stay ahead of your competitors by a significant margin.
In general, the ever increasing use of smartphones, and the positive effects it has had on shaping the consumer behavior in the 21st century, has exponentially accelerated the desire for harvesting more insight into the powerful link between phone calls and inbound marketing.
But…
How Does Call Tracking Function?
Call tracking is a form of connecting marketing sources with potential leads, avenues, and opportunities. This way, you can enhance your ROI over the phone.
You can bring together particular digital marketing campaigns and essential keywords with unique phone numbers. Using this method, digital marketing specialists have the power to analyze and record the number of calls each one of their campaigns are establishing.
The call tracking number is easily placed on your website so that every phone call that comes in to your practice from the website is easily recorded and tracked.
This opens the door for two great opportunities: the first being a great chance to listen through how staff are handling patient calls, the second being a tool to measure ROI.
How Effective Call Tracking Systems Can Enhance Your Business Online
Staying Up to Date with Smartphone Usage
There is no doubt that smartphones have completely and permanently altered buyer behavior. In a way, increased smartphone usage complicates the general notion that online advertisements will lead to clicks and conversion.
Integrate call tracking software and couple it with your digital marketing strategy. This way, you can analyze and monitor all phone calls you generate as a result of the organic searches and/or online ads that you are paying Google to spread all over the web. More importantly, you can track calls from smartphones.
This offers you extremely credible and precision-based information on how interlinked and connected your marketing sources actually are. There are still thousands, perhaps millions, of people that would rather call your organization before making a decision.
Keeping a Bird’s Eye View on Offline Engagements
Tracking calls also helps keep an eye on your offline advertising mediums. Rather than asking your potential customers how they managed to find your website, you will already have all the information if you are using a call tracking number on these mediums.
This will open more doors when it comes to the quantification of your website’s success. Hence, you can determine whether your offline marketing campaign plays an instrumental role.
