Business VoIP Featured Article

Analytics Help Track Call Data for Marketing Campaigns

September 28, 2016

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Business VoIP Contributor

Marketing has always been one of those business areas that falls in between an art and a science. It’s an art because there are a variety of creative ways – some tried and true, others innovative – to attract potential customers’ attention and keep existing customers. But it’s also a science, since companies expect it to be a formula: put money into marketing, execute a campaign, and rack up hard sales figures.


The problem with marketing traditionally is that it was difficult to gauge exactly how your campaign was going while you were in the middle of it. Once upon a time, companies would launch a campaign, keep their fingers crossed and hope for the best. Was it successful? A wash? A failure? The only way to tell was months later when sales figures showed up. Even then, you weren’t sure how much of the boost (or slump) was caused by the marketing campaign.

Nowadays, of course, there are all manner of analytics to track marketing campaigns while they’re ongoing, so those campaigns can be adjusted or redirected before they’re even finished. The average company today tracks a variety of metrics using analytics, according to a recent blog post by Nextiva’s Yaniv Masjedi. The number of channels available through which to market today sometimes makes it hard to understand what you should be tracking.

“Data can reveal an incredible amount of information to drive marketing campaigns in one direction or another,” wrote Masjedi. “But you can’t just look at one data set; it’s important to look at data from all areas, including inbound calls, talk time, Web site traffic, social media engagement, CPCs, etc. in order to get a holistic understanding of the activity marketing is generating for the company.”

In the rush to track analytics in all the newest channels, however, sometimes the old channels get forgotten. The telephone is still a critical business and marketing tool, and companies shouldn’t forget that customers still pick up the phone when they’re interested or have a question.

“There is one type of data that doesn’t get enough attention in marketing these days, and that is call data,” wrote Masjedi. “Like many companies, we use different phone numbers for campaigns and media. While you can make do with basic reports, there’s so much more insight about your company’s marketing efforts you could be getting from your call data.”

A good cloud communications solution can make it easy to track and analyze call data from a marketing perspective, and provide the results in an easy-to-read custom dashboard. In addition to phone number performance, companies can also use the data to keep an eye on sales performance. The telephone is still a number one sales tool. Analytics can provide managers with sales performance insight such as overall talk time, number of inbound and outbound calls, and average call duration over a given amount of time. This, in turn, can provide guidance for current and future marketing endeavors.

Many of today’s cloud-based communications solutions will even provide location-based data, which Masjedi notes is critical in a marketing campaign.

“This shows where calls are coming from throughout the U.S. for our various marketing campaigns so that I can identify hot spots,” he wrote. “From here, advertising and lead generation efforts can be amped up to target different geographic areas to accomplish our goals of the moment, whether that’s to increase leads, boost awareness, or share information about an upcoming event.”

In the rush to throw marketing dollars at new media and ground-breaking experimental campaigns, it’s important not to forget about the telephone. It’s still one your organization’s most critical marketing tools. 




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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