3 reasons call tracking is critical for local service businesses ready to grow

This post was originally published on this site

This is a guest post by Keith Brown, the CMO of Today’s Local Media, a full-service marketing agency serving customers nationwide with a mission to bring new leads to businesses and accelerate their growth. 

 

Over the past year, there is one thing every business has their sights set on. Growth. Whether you are looking to grow your customer base or add more revenue to the bottom line, you have to be able to measure your success. For most businesses, that success is won or lost on the phone.

Data tells us that 60% of customers still prefer to contact a business by phone. So, with all those important calls, how do you measure success and grow your business? That is where call tracking comes in. Quite simply, if you are spending money to market your business online and aren’t tracking the results of those campaigns or where your leads are coming from, you are leaving money on the table. You need proof that your marketing dollars are driving new leads. Whether it’s more appointments scheduled, pricing inquiries or location inquiries, call tracking lets you discover which ads and marketing campaigns attract valuable leads over the phone and on the web.

 

1. Know what delivers the most value

How can you know what calls drove the most value? That’s where tracking with call tracking comes into play. You can’t have a full grasp of lead and conversion data unless you’re also tracking phone calls to see which digital and offline marketing tactics are causing customers to pick up the phone and actually call you. By integrating call tracking software, you’ll be able to get a total view of customer behavior and gain a better sense of how to effectively reach your core audience.

So what does it mean to track phone calls? When a visitor comes to your website after finding you in an online search, a call tracking system will assign a unique phone number to them during their entire stay on your site. When they finally decide to call your business, you will know exactly who called and what pages they saw and used while scrolling through the entirety of your website. So not only can you pinpoint which avenues are driving leads to your site, but you can now narrow down the individual number, campaign, or page they used to search for you.

This allows you to tweak your website by using only the top campaigns or pages that people are searching for. You can do this based on seeing the campaigns that performed the best by connecting a unique number to each campaign.

 

2. Optimize your online marketing

It almost goes without saying that analytics are crucial to developing successful online marketing campaigns. So much time, effort and spend goes into PPC (pay-per-click) advertising that if you’re just letting your campaigns run in hopes of driving new leads after setting them up, you’re not using your resources to your full advantage. Instead, you should be continually tweaking and testing to see what’s actually driving the best results.

Whether it’s a Facebook ad, Google ad, organic search result or print ad, chances are you don’t know where your customer calls are originating. With call tracking, you can examine and analyze each of your campaigns in order to see actual correlations between your marketing efforts and results. By assigning a unique phone number to each campaign and gathering such in-depth insights, you’ll be able to better track your individual marketing initiatives and determine which ones are the most successful to your business.

The same goes for multi channel call attribution – a feature that allows you to see every touchpoint a lead has with your brand up until a phone sale. Because you’re reaching potential consumers across multiple channels, multi channel call attribution allows you to better understand customer behavior by tracking each of their interactions with your brand via the source they clicked on and how much time has passed since their initial introduction and final sale.

This information is crucial in planning future campaigns and maximizing your marketing budget to yield the best return on investment. Knowing each channel that leads visited before converting gives you an idea of which efforts are working and which need to be tweaked. That sounds better than aimlessly letting your ads run without knowing if they are actually driving your leads to pick up the phone.

 

3. Better understand your customers

In addition to tracking where your calls are coming from, call recording allows you to listen in on your employees and their interactions with customers. By honing in on your sales team’s conversations with callers, you’ll be able to better analyze their tactics and identify areas that require attention to increase conversion rates. This is critical for helping you train your employees to follow your company standards.

It also allows you to better understand your consumers. By using our call recording software, you can analyze areas like:

  • What are your customers asking about?
  • How are or aren’t your products serving them?
  • What issues are customers having with your products or services?
  • How long are your customers staying on the phone with your representatives?
  • Are your customers receptive to the guidelines you have set in place?

By listening to your employee and customer interactions, you are taking the necessary steps to optimize your sales calls at full capacity.

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