If you work with an agency, chances are they’ve asked you to use software that helps them do their best work. If call tracking isn’t one of those tools yet, it should be.
Why use call tracking?
At a basic level, call tracking software helps you determine which marketing channels drive phone call leads and assess the content and quality of those phone calls. This helps you and your agency better manage marketing resources and can also influence sales, customer service, and even product development.
To understand how this works, you can think about call tracking in two parts: pre-dial and post-dial.
Pre-dial: Marketing attribution
The pre-dial part of call tracking measures the marketing touchpoints that lead up to a customer picking up the phone and dialing your company’s number.
For example, let’s say a potential customer first hears about your company by clicking through to a blog post via organic search. They spend a couple minutes reading the post and perusing your site before leaving the page. A couple days later, they click on a Facebook ad and spend a few more minutes on your site before closing their browser window. Two weeks later, they’re ready to speak to sales and go to your website directly to find your company number and place a call.
Your call tracking tool notes touchpoints like these for every person who visits your website across paid, organic, and offline channels. That way, you and your agency know which marketing channels are the most effective and can manage your budget accordingly.
With paid media campaigns specifically, call tracking can tell you which paid channels, keywords, and campaigns are generating leads and revenue. This enables your agency to make bidding adjustments and focus on the paid campaigns that actually work.
Post-call: Calling intelligence
Just because someone calls your business, doesn’t mean they’re a qualified lead or that they will bring in revenue. But when you enable call recording and transcription with your call tracking provider, you can literally hear or read what your customers ask about. Some call tracking providers also have keyword search features that can show you common words or phrases among your phone calls.
Together, these advanced call tracking tools can help you gauge which services or products are most popular, find common pain points among callers, or even find gaps in sales and customer service teams’ phone skills. This allows your agency partner to go beyond simply managing your marketing budget and drive more value for your business.
Who needs call tracking?
If customers call your company regularly, you should be using call tracking. This is especially true for businesses that mostly generate phone call leads, such as medical offices and mechanics. You need to know that any advertising dollars you spend to drive phone call leads are worth the investment, and call tracking is the only way to do that efficiently and at scale.
Tracking your company’s main phone number is still a good idea, even if you don’t field a lot of phone calls. An ecommerce clothing company with a completely online customer service system, for example, probably doesn’t place much of a premium on generating phone calls when deciding advertising spend. Nonetheless, you may have business inquiries on your company’s main line that can turn into partnerships and other money-making avenues. It’s important to know where those people found you.
Additionally, call tracking can be equally important for businesses who don’t yet realize the revenue potential of their phone calls. It could be that you don’t check your phones often because you assume customers prefer to submit online forms. By adding call tracking, you can quickly tell whether or not that is actually the case. Sometimes, it only takes companies a couple months with call tracking to realize they are missing out on valuable phone call leads and need to overhaul their advertising strategy.
Why use call tracking with your agency?
Although call tracking software is designed to be self-service for businesses of all sizes, there are two major perks to having your agency partner manage call tracking for you: More efficient ROI and transparency.
Generate phone call leads faster
If you work with an agency who has call tracking expertise, having them manage your call tracking account saves your business time and money.
Many agencies handle call tracking implementation and management for dozens of clients on a daily basis. Why do it yourself when you can have call tracking pros do it for you at a faster pace and with years of experience? It’s a worthwhile addition to your agency services agreement that helps them drive more revenue for your business in less time.
Additionally, your agency team likely has direct connections with your call tracking provider’s support team. While you could just submit your own support tickets, having your agency manage any troubleshooting means solving problems faster than you could on your own.
Transparency and accountability
Given the amount of money businesses like yours invest in agency partners, you deserve to know whether or not that money is actually generating revenue and ROI.
With call tracking, you can access your own marketing analytics reports, call recordings, and other data to see for yourself how well your agency is maximizing your advertising spend. By asking your agency to use call tracking, you not only have the opportunity to improve your advertising ROI, but also you can establish more trust and accountability with your agency partner.
If your agency doesn’t use call tracking yet, it’s never too late to ask and start getting more out of your phone calls.
