Call tracking empowers local marketers to drive leads and gather consumer data
Even in an age of QR codes and artificial intelligence, direct human communication remains a powerful tool to drive leads and close sales. Although technology has made it easy to acquire data at nearly every point of contact across the customer’s digital journey, what happens when your target jumps from engaging with a digital ad to the offline world of phone numbers and in-store visits? Call tracking lets you understand your marketing efforts’ direct impact by measuring how many calls you get and where they came from.
What Is Call Tracking?
Call tracking is a tactic that allows marketers to measure the value of inbound calls driven by their marketing efforts. It’s simple. A unique phone number is created for each piece of creative in your marketing that you want to track, be it a billboard or web banner. By assigning this new number to a business phone line, any inbound calls made to the new number get forwarded to your office or sales teams, where software captures:
- Each caller’s name, location, and number
- The time, date, and length of the call
- Whether the call came from a digital ad, a traditional ad, social media, a landing page, PPC ad, SEO, or keyword search
Rather than assigning one tracking number to one marketing campaign, like a landing page, call tracking now integrates with Google Analytics through social media, web search keyword data, organic traffic, direct, and referral, in order to examine the role each plays in generating leads and making conversions.
Equipped with these valuable insights, marketers can assess their efforts’ effectiveness, optimize them to get more high-value customers on the phone, and improve their media spend ROI. With specific data about phone conversations, marketers can show exactly what campaign or tactic drove the sales call and the call’s result. When it’s time to discuss budgets, marketers can also use call tracking data to prove the value of their effective marketing efforts.
For business owners, the take away is clear: If you still use a phone for your business, you should use call tracking.
Why Should Local Businesses Use Call Tracking?
Any industry that acquires a significant percentage of their customers through inbound calls should use call tracking. This includes insurance, healthcare, automotive, real estate, financial services, and franchises.
Money may talk, but customers do, too, and for many people, a phone call is still the best way to connect with their local business. After years of texting and scrolling and filling out complicated, impersonal, online forms while hunched over tiny smart phone screens, many customers just want to skip forms and talk to another human being immediately. No matter how informative the most well-designed websites can be, many types of business simply cannot be conducted entirely online. In a world where a global pandemic makes a visit to your office impossible — and may have even eliminated your office — a phone call becomes an even more vital mode of business communication. To close sales, companies need people.
Call tracking collects the call data which businesses can then use to further enhance marketing.
How to Use Call Tracking
With over 20 years of experience helping brands successfully reach the local level, we at BrandMuscle have learned the most successful brands and their partners focus on ROI. Call tracking is the missing piece of that puzzle. Think about the implications of this tool, extending across traditional and digital media.
- Pick the right number for the right approach
- Determine what creative messages or keywords are driving calls and conversions
- Compare the ROI for your online and offline tactics in the markets
- Identify effectiveness of event marketing by tracking flyers, tabletops, and banners.
Ready to Enhance Your Marketing With Call Tracking?
Contact BrandMuscle and learn more about how our solutions and strategy can help you convert leads to customers.
