The most important thing that we can do as marketers is to invest time in learning who our customers are, and which form of advertising brought them to us. This information is arguably invaluable, as it allows us to tailor our future marketing efforts to be the most effective – and get us the best results.
One of the easiest ways to gather this data is to implement a call tracking software into your marketing strategies. Companies like Mediahawk can aid you in collecting important information about your prospects and identify exactly what led them to pick up the phone and enquire about your services.
But what is call tracking and why is it so important? Read on to find out.
What is call tracking?
As we’ve mentioned above, call tracking is the process of identifying how callers have found your business, and where they got your number. From here, you can also analyse which channels are performing best and transforming into the greatest number of leads.
This can be done in a few different ways, however, they all follow the same basic method of placing different numbers on different marketing channels.
Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) is one of the most common forms of call tracking. It involves placing a snippet of JavaScript coding onto your website, replacing your phone number on each page or section with a unique, trackable number that can then be traced back to that individual visitor.
What’s more, you can also capture how the caller found your site, alongside other details about their visit. This puts together all of that visitor’s actions along their journey to give you an overall profile that can deliver even more data around the effectiveness of your site and marketing efforts. This version of call tracking is best suited to analysing digital marketing, visitor interactions and general SEO performance.
Static Numbers provide just one phone number, with the focus moving to your offline marketing efforts, such as ad content, direct mailers, billboard and commercials. However, the reach isn’t limited to purely offline advertisements, static numbers can also be used on email signatures, facebook pages and your google business profile. These numbers can still be traced back to their source, and show you – as the marketer – where the interest has generated from.
Why is call tracking important?
Arguably, call tracking is always going to be an important part of the marketing process for a lot of businesses, if you want to truly measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and website design. As well as the many reasons we’ve already discussed – such as tracking customer journeys and performance – there are additional benefits to tracking calls, that also prove important.
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Improve efficiency of marketing spend
By collecting data relating directly to the performance of your marketing strategies, you can then make important decisions on where to place your budget moving forward. Uncover where there may be room for improvement and decide whether it’s worth the investment, or if you’d be better off moving budget to your more successful platforms, to push results further.
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Evaluating the quality of leads
By tracking calls you can begin to collate how many callers are genuine prospects and how many fall into less useful categories such as wrong numbers and bottomless enquiries. With a clear picture of how many of your leads are continuing to convert into sales, you can find out which ads are generating the best quality of leads. After all, just because your marketing strategy generates a large number of calls, doesn’t always mean that they are of value or contribute to revenue.
Call tracking is a multi-faceted marketing tool that can be invaluable when gathering data surrounding your marketing efforts. It’s then down to you to interpret this information to improve your digital advertisements and get those leads converting!
