10 Insights Marketers Can Get Only from Phone Calls

Marketers are trained masters in the art of digital analytics. We can follow the digital customer journey in our sleep. Email open rates, content downloads, social shares - easy! What could we possibly be missing?

It turns out phone calls hold a ton of valuable (even essential) marketing insights. I know this flies in the face of your digital sensibilities, but the truth is that a simple phone call has customer and marketing insights you just can't find anywhere else. Here are 10 marketing insights you can gain only from phone calls.

1. True campaign performance

It's no secret digital marketing drives phone calls. In fact, according to Invoca's 2015 Call Intelligence Index, 54% of customer-initiated phone calls come from mobile marketing campaigns and 30% come from traditional online channels and campaigns. This means phone calls are a key metric when measuring marketing campaign performance. It's not enough to measure form submissions and email open rates. If you really want to know how people are responding to your campaigns, look at what's driving people to call. You may be surprised at how often your campaigns generate offline leads.

2. Multi-touch attribution

In this age of multiple channels, multiple devices, multiple everything, it's important that we give credit to every touchpoint that influenced a sale. If phone calls aren't part of your attribution, you're overlooking a valuable touchpoint and you'll lose the trail when a prospect picks up the phone.

3. Keyword performance

Every marketer is doing paid search. If your business receives calls you should be tracking those calls back to the paid search keyword that drove it. If you don't know how your keywords are generating leads (online and offline), you don't really know how you should be bidding on them. Even companies that don't receive many calls can benefit from this level of visibility. After all, people who choose to pick up the phone are generally your best leads. Invoca's data shows that calls have conversion rates around 30% compared with clicks, which convert only 1% to 2% of the time.

4. Competitive threat

Don't you want to know what your prospects are saying about your competitors? Who do they most often mention or compare your brand to? Your inbound phone calls have the answers. Understanding the competition can help you beat the competition and highlight your unique differentiators.

5. Prospect objections

Nothing can give you insight into your customer and buyer personas quite like a phone call. No matter how much you examine the emails they've opened, the ads they've clicked, and the content they've read, you're never going to hear their objections and biggest concerns until you mine your phone calls for this data. Without this data you could be making inaccurate assumptions and explaining your key value propositions in a way that doesn't resonate with your audience at all.

6. Common questions

Knowing your prospects' most common questions is a huge advantage that can help inform everything from your sales scripting to your website copy and overall messaging strategy. It gives you the chance to answer frequently asked questions before it's too late. This type of insight also makes for great blog fodder and will help move your prospects along the path to purchase. If your leads are well informed, your sales rep will have more effective conversations when the time comes.

7. Characteristics of a qualified lead

Analyzing your phone calls gives you great insight into the anatomy of a qualified lead. Do your best leads come from specific locations, campaigns, or share similar interests? Do calls that result in a sale have an average call duration?

8. Sales script and sales rep effectiveness

Listening to call recordings and capturing the outcome of each call can provide a wealth of information on the effectiveness of your sales script and sales rep. Perform an A/B test with two scripts and see which is more successful. Listening to phone calls also can provide the visibility to more effectively train individual sales reps. You'd be surprised how different your scripts and sales reps perform when they're dealing with a real caller.

9. Geographic location

Is your product or service available only in certain locations, or does your business have multiple sales territories? Knowing the geographic location of your callers can help your sales teams focus on the right customers that will benefit from your product or service, and make it possible to provide a top-notch customer experience by automatically routing customers to the proper location, department, or person.

10. Level of interest/buying stage

Not all calls are created equal. Knowing what stage customers are in and their level of interest when they make their first call can help you better optimize your nurturing programs. You can retarget early buying stage callers with the most relevant and personalized campaigns that will bring them back to make a purchase. Sales reps also can use this information to tailor their conversation to the prospect and their unique journey.

There is no other interaction in the customer's journey more influential than the phone call. With today's call intelligence technology, it's easy to get all these insights and more in a completely automated and scalable way.

Note: This article originally appeared on the Marketo website's Modern Marketing blog.

Amber Tiffany brings her passion for writing and technology along with her two first names to the marketing team at Invoca. As Invoca's content marketing manager, she has extensive experience in content strategy and prides herself in staying up to date on all things marketing, from SEM to lead generation to conversion rate optimization. Contact Invoca at 855-891-9537 or by email.