The one thing all businesses aspire to achieve is growth.
Business owners are always searching for new affordable and effective opportunities to grow their business strategically. While external growth opportunities will happen from time to time, business growth starts internally.
Internal growth involves understanding:
- How customers are finding your business
- What problems they’re having and how your business can provide a solution
- How potential leads are interacting with your brand online and offline
- Which marketing efforts are driving the most success and revenue for your company
However, to find the answers to these questions, business owners need access to a full scope of data for all customer touchpoints including social media, phone leads, print flyers, and more.
This is where call tracking helps.
Call tracking provides businesses with significant consumer and marketing insight, so they may make better decisions regarding company growth and overall success.
But before we show you how to grow your business using call tracking software, you need to understand just how powerful this technology can be.
What is Call Tracking?
At its core, call tracking refers to the practice of using specific toll-free or vanity phone numbers to determine where a call is coming from. Toll-free and vanity numbers can be used to monitor call volume at specific business locations, analyze marketing campaigns, and so much more.
Using call tracking features, companies can also learn:
- The volume of calls derived from each marketing effort
- Which specific ad generated the phone call
- What time of day receives the most customer phone calls
- How long each phone call lasted
You might be thinking, _“_Why should I invest in call tracking when my online marketing tools provide a wealth of data?”
While analytics software is necessary for marketing and sales success, companies who make decisions solely based on online data are suffering from a significant information void. In doing so, your business growth decisions fail to include data from customer phone calls and phone leads. And, given that 48% of customers prefer to use the phone to speak with brands, that’s a large portion of your audience you’re not taking into consideration.
Plus, when reviewing the results of a marketing campaign, your online data may tell one story while your offline leads say another.
For instance, let’s imagine you ran a PPC ad for 10 days and included a toll-free number within the ad copy. The ad only received five clicks online and no landing page conversions, so you’re inclined to write it off as a failure. But, when you review the toll-free number call tracking data, you see that the ad generated 20 calls with three customer conversions. In reality, the ad campaign wasn’t at all a flop.
Call tracking software helps companies maintain a comprehensive understanding of their business’s level of success, both online and offline.
7 Critical Benefits of Call Tracking for Business Growth
Call tracking offers a multitude of benefits for companies of all sizes, from small businesses to multi-million dollar corporations. Check out how your brand can benefit from a toll-free phone number with call tracking features.
1. Identifying Successful Company Strategies
From an inbound marketing campaign to business cards printed for a networking event, call tracking tools to help companies identify which of their efforts generated the most success.
It does so by solving the information gap commonly associated with tactics such as print marketing, where tracking individual campaign success isn’t a clear process.
For example, companies can assign a toll-free or vanity phone number to a specific print marketing campaign — such as a billboard along a popular highway — and use call tracking features to understand how much business it generated.
Call tracking helps to fill the data gap for online tactics as well. Online marketing strategies from social media to display ads can also generate offline leads if a phone number is included. By assigning a unique toll-free number to each marketing channel or individual online ad, companies can understand how well each effort is performing online and offline.
2. Quantifying ROI for Marketing Efforts
According to HubSpot, only 35% of marketers state that measuring the ROI of their campaigns is “Very Important” or “Extremely Important.”
While we’d argue that all marketers should find the ROI of their efforts to be extremely important, this statistic is likely caused by the information gap! Without a full understanding of their online and offline efforts, business owners cannot truly measure ROI and make substantial growth decisions based on this information.
With call tracking, businesses can accurately quantify ROI for every marketing campaign and strategy by comparing the total number of online and offline leads generated to the amount of revenue received.
3. Proper Allocation of Company Funds & Resources
By identifying successful marketing channels and calculating the ROI of each with call tracking software, companies can make informed decisions regarding the allocation of company funds and resources.
With a business growth goal on the line, it is imperative to ensure that the proper marketing and sales efforts receive the funds and resources they need to thrive. Otherwise, your business might be wasting money on efforts that don’t drive results.
4. Improving Customer Service
American Express found that 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor when deciding to do business with a company. If your company’s customer service team is putting up lackluster results, it’s time to do something about it.
Toll-free and vanity numbers come with call recording and notes features. Companies looking to grow can use this qualitative data to analyze their current customer service processes and pinpoint areas of improvement.
5. In-Depth Consumer Insights
Pairing online analytics with call tracking data provides business owners with a rabbit hole of consumer insights to review.
Using this combination of data, you can determine:
- Exactly how a consumer found out about your business
- What they did on your website
- When they decided to call you
- What forms they filled out on your website
- What the topic of conversation was during the call
If you want to learn more about your customers and leads as your company grows, adding call tracking is the way to go.
6. Strengthen Customer Relationships
Remember, you can record calls and take extensive notes on each conversation with call tracking software.
Your team can then use this information, along with a myriad of other data, to strengthen each customer relationship by referring back to previous encounters during the conversation.
7. Better Sales Processes
Who better to leverage the benefits of call tracking tools than your sales team? Using the insights gathered from each call, your sales team can work more effectively to convert phone leads into paying customers.
All of the call tracking’s benefits work toward helping you grow your business.
How to Use Call Tracking to Grow Your Business
Now that you know why call tracking helps businesses get to the next level, it’s time to put it into action. Follow these steps to grow your business with call tracking.
1. Set a Growth Goal
Growth looks different for every business. For some, it’s as straightforward as driving a certain amount of revenue. For others, it’s opening up a new storefront.
Define what your business’s growth goal is and identify how implementing call tracking can help you achieve it.
2. Pinpoint Areas of Success and Weakness Within Your Business
Using call tracking data and other pertinent information, comb through your company’s strategies, and identify which are working well and which are failing.
Finding and establishing which efforts are not working for your business allows you to make wise decisions toward your growth. Ask yourself:
- Can these strategies be improved?
- Are they helping me achieve my business growth goal or hindering them?
- Could the resources allocated to this strategy be used effectively elsewhere?
For example, if your business is designating thousands of dollars toward a PPC campaign that generates only a few hundred dollars of revenue each quarter, is that helping or hurting your growth goal?
But before you put strategies on the chopping block, make sure you analyze the call tracking data to ensure that you have the full scope of the situation!
3. Review Your Sales Cycle
Next, take a look at your inbound sales cycle and determine if any bottlenecks are affecting potential sales. If so, work with your sales team to identify areas of improvement and use call tracking to better follow leads through the sales cycle.
Also, consider how your leads are being nurtured through the sales process. Are your sales professionals working to help leads reach the next stage of the buying cycle or are they waiting around for the customer to make the move?
Call tracking can also help your sales team better nurture leads as they work their way toward a sale. The more leads that complete the sales process, the closer you are to achieving your growth goal.
4. Invest in Call Tracking Capabilities
After thoroughly reviewing your business’s current situation, it’s time to invest in call tracking and integrate it throughout your business.
The easiest place to get started is within your customer service team. Use call tracking to monitor conversations and gain better insight into the locations and concerns of callers.
From there, add it to your marketing efforts. Toll-free numbers with call tracking capabilities can be used throughout your company’s marketing strategy in campaigns and tactics including:
- Social media ads
- Local SEO efforts
- TV/radio ads
- Email marketing messages
- Display advertisements
- Business cards
- Print ads
The sky’s the limit!
Once implemented, let your sales team use the call tracking data to better drive qualified sales for your business.
By generating more sales and making wise business and marketing decisions using call tracking data, you’re well on your way to accomplishing your company’s growth goal.
