Why You Should Pay for Call Tracking
As a marketer, you have no room in your budget for tactics that aren’t performing well. Because of this, you need to be constantly aware of which marketing efforts are working. This certainly sounds like Marketing 101, but as media channels proliferate, tracking marketing efforts seems like an impossible feat. This rings even truer for you as a distributed marketer. With your local partners scattered across the country — maybe even the world! — conducting a wide variety of marketing activities, having a full understanding of your marketing seems more like a dream than reality.
I’m here to assure you that monitoring your marketing the right way is indeed possible. How? Two words: call tracking.
Call tracking goes beyond simply having your local partners count how many phone calls a particular number gets. It means capturing and analyzing data to gain insight on your marketing campaigns. This data is crucial, and it definitely comes at a price. Is it a price worth paying? Absolutely. Here’s why:
- You can see — without a doubt — what is generating a response from your customers.
You want customers to respond to your marketing. Otherwise, your efforts are in vain. You can include a tracking number just about anywhere you’d like: TV commercials, direct mail pieces, and even social media posts. No matter where you place your number, the data it yields will show you how many calls are generated by a marketing tactic. Call tracking systems with robust analytics and structures will allow you to see campaign performance across your entire network. You will be able to see how each offer or tactic converted based on region or partner type. You can even see how individual partners (i.e. locations) are performing.
- You can easily perform multivariate testing on your marketing assets.
Call tracking makes it easy for you to compare different offers, messages, and creative executions. Put a different number on each tactic in question, send out your communications, and watch the calls come in. It’s that simple!
- You need detailed information on your callers.
The best call tracking data will give you two levels of information. The first level is a comprehensive view of the days, times, and lengths of all calls generated by a campaign, channel, or offer. The second level is the information about each call. You should be able to see if a person is a repeat caller, whether the person’s call was answered, and any notes about a particular conversation. This second level will also give you information about the local partner answering the call. Maybe your local store employees aren’t answering their phones, need more training, or have other issues that you would know nothing about if it weren’t for a call tracking system.
- Funding will increase network participation.
While there are compelling reasons to pay for call tracking, convincing your network users is easier said than done. Depending on local partners to opt in and pay for it will cause haphazard adoption, which will make the data collected difficult to interpret or even invalid. This is where your co-op, MDF, and other marketing funds come in. By using these to offset costs, your channel partners are more likely to get involved, engaged, and excited about call tracking.
Remember that call tracking is not merely another line item in your budget. Instead, it is an investment in the long-term success of your brand. Your brand can’t grow if you don’t know what your consumers want. Because call tracking lets you know what is working, what is failing, and what opportunities you have to better connect with customers, investing in the tool at the national brand level is a no-brainer.
