The age old problem for marketers is proving their efforts are yielding results. This has never changed and will always be a primary issue for marketers. Luckily, in the realm of digital marketing, we have many analytical tools that have made this process much easier. Yet we still have trouble with one form of lead that can always go untracked, phone calls. Many visitors do not want to fill out a contact form and will prefer calling a company to further discuss business. This is because by calling you can get a bit better feel for the company, which in return will provide the comfort you need to disclose personal information with them. Something you probably didn’t have when asked to just submit a form.
Let us look at a quick scenario:
You are interested in hiring a CPA firm to come in and do your company’s taxes. You start by googling something such as “houston tax accountants”. You then go ahead and click on the first or second result that comes up in your search. The reason I say this is because 90% of Google users click on one of the first three links that show up in their search results. After this you go through their website and get a feel for the company. Once you have done that and like what you see, you decide to go ahead and give them a call.
Well, now you are in contact with the company and it all started because of them ranking high within search engines. Yet, the marketing team does not know of this unless someone on the sales side digs in and finds out from you as to how you came across their business.
This seems to be a pretty common problem amongst companies and their marketing teams. I know I have personally experienced this in past marketing jobs and it is quite frustrating. So, how can we fix this? What can we do to show that the reason someone called your company was because of them coming across your business online? One solution our company decided to implement was a separate DID (Direct Inward Dial) that is distinctive to our website.
How this works is, we created a distinct sales team DID number that can only be found on our website. When this number is dialed it automatically rings each sales/marketing team members’ phone with the notification on the caller ID of website. This is so everyone knows that the reason for this phone call is because of someone visiting our website and allows the marketing team to monitor incoming sales calls as well. Due to our phone systems software, every phone call is recorded into a database. This makes it so no website call goes unrecorded by the marketing team.
Since implementing this form of analytics into our marketing, our websites’ lead generation has increased by 30% and has given our marketing team further proof of their efforts. It also allowed us to further understand how users are coming across our website through other analytical tools. By understanding this we have been able to implement the tactics that are working and increase our web-based marketing ROI.
For more information on how your phone system can be used to increase other functions of your business feel free to give us a call at 713-865-7699.