Marketers’ Call: Connecting Digital Media Performance to Phone Conversions

We’ve seen the digital world transform quickly in recent years. As consumers, we’re fortunate that most everything we need is one click away. As marketers, however, the seemingly disparate ways that consumers can interact with our brand can feel overwhelming. 

The growth of digital marketing opportunities represents more competition, and more pressure to justify media spend with business-driven results. Understanding performance across channels is table stakes.     

To see the complete picture of our digital media programs, including New Customer Acquisition, Cost per Qualified Lead, and ROAS, all of today’s innovation needs to result in on- and offline data integration views. Without tying all the front end digital marketing metrics and data to a complete set of conversion metrics, it is impossible to understand at an empirical level which channels and tactics are driving revenue.

This is a Mobile-First World 

Customers Love To Call When They… 

Calls to your business are an essential touchpoint, both as an intent signal and conversion metric. Users tend to start a search on their browser or through voice search to gather information and, potentially, pick up the phone afterwards to complete a number of actions, such as setting up an appointment or purchasing a product. With call analytics, marketers can aggregate these actions and connect them back to paid and organic efforts. 

Rise’s proprietary technology Connex® partners with Invoca to close the loop on every call from your target audience. Not only can Connex show you how leads are performing further down the sales funnel, it can also highlight which campaigns, ads, keywords, segments, tactics, audiences, and more are driving incoming leads to you.  Focusing on calls can be a great way to grow your business, and Connex can make it easy to show you where digital campaigns are driving calls.  

In the below example, Home & Office Cleaning, Inc. can access call performance at the keyword level to reallocate budget for more efficient media deployment. This level of sophistication should be table stakes for any brand leveraging telecommunications as part of their user journey. With closed-loop reporting that integrates both call and realized appointment data, marketers can make real-time media optimizations based on the keywords, creative, and campaigns driving actual business results. 

How Closed-Loop Reporting Affects Lead Generation Decision Making

Here’s the tough part: for many marketers, integrating call data with a CRM is a substantial project to accomplish alone, and it’s not enough. Once you’ve connected call conversions to realized appointments, the real work of optimizing toward keywords driving revenue begins. If you’re boasting a sizable media program with keywords tailored to multiple geos, audiences, etc., the integration will result in thousands of data points in your lap waiting for analyses.

Enter: Automation. 

With proactive intelligence tactics, marketers can run a robust program with granular optimizations without the headache. Connex Alerts enables our teams to detect and resolve media anomalies quickly to minimize wasted spend and allocate budget where business results are happening.

For example, a healthcare marketer using Connex Alerts could request a twice-daily report of the keywords generating phone calls above a set threshold that do not result in actual appointments (i.e., revenue). In real time, that marketer can shift spend to keywords on an inverse report - keywords generating phone calls that result in above-average level of actual appointments - to minimize wasted spend and drive incremental appointments.

By expanding our understanding of call tracking to include automation, we see a future-oriented business plan that savvy marketers can (and should) activate now.

The Future of Call Intelligence

While AI and other advertising technologies were not affordable in the past, we look at a present where phone intelligence is a viable option that's shaping the future of marketing. This makes it easier to fuel cross-channel marketing campaigns with even more information. 

There are more evolutions to come, including data mining audio recordings from consumer calls and utilizing that information to improve digital campaigns. This would result in the creation of keywords or ads based on the phrases being used by the customers and thus, improving efficiency. For example, a major healthcare system may notice that a significant portion of calls for appointments are seeking information specifically about this year’s flu shots. With real-time data mining from these calls, marketers at the healthcare system could build out campaigns that speak more directly to flu shot appointments, improving the user experience, shortening the sales cycle, and creating an opportunity to seize more market share. 

Personalization remains as important as ever. As technology evolves and provides more granular views of user behavior, having personalized call journeys will be a major advantage for forward-thinking brands.

Preparing for the Future of Call Intelligence

Your call analytics strategy needs to be ever-changing given the speed of our industry’s innovation. We recommend you always prioritize: