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Today’s CMOs are under increased pressure to prove how each of their programs translates to revenue. However, this is easier said than done, as the modern buying journey is more complex than ever. Prior to placing a purchase, consumers engage with businesses through a mix of channels and devices — both online and offline.
While most marketing teams have granular tracking for the online buying journey, they have a measurement gap when it comes to the offline journey — especially phone leads. In this post, we’ll break down why phone calls are important for proving your marketing ROI and how you can ensure your team can track them effectively.
In our recent survey of 600 marketing, sales, and contact center leaders, we found that just 28% of companies are confident they understand the full buying journey. This is major issue — if you don’t understand which marketing efforts are moving customers through the funnel and driving conversions, you may be prioritizing the wrong programs and campaigns.
When we asked marketing leaders why they struggled to understand the buying journey, they overwhelmingly cited a lack of visibility into phone calls. In many organizations, marketers can only track click-to-call button presses. While this is a helpful starting point, this doesn’t tell the full story — marketers have no way of knowing which of those button presses were from qualified phone leads and which actually resulted in revenue.
A lack of phone lead attribution can cause CMOs to significantly underreport their ROI, as phone calls are often more valuable than web leads, and they convert faster on average. If you aren’t tracking the phone leads your campaigns drive, you’re underreporting your results to leadership, which can make it difficult to defend your marketing budget. A lack of phone lead attribution can also lead to inefficient ad bidding and poor optimization decisions.
So, how can you fix this all-too-common problem and connect the entire online-to-offline buying journey? The solution is easier than you think. Leading brands use Invoca’s revenue execution platform to gain a complete picture of the omnichannel customer experience.
Invoca can track which channels, campaigns, webpages, and ad keywords drive phone calls to your business. The solution allows you to see the entire journey — for example, you can track which search keyword they clicked, which webpages they subsequently visited, and which click-to-call button they pressed to place the call.
Not only does Invoca track that calls occurred, but it also uses artificial intelligence to capture deep insights from the conversations at scale. For example, you can identify if callers were leads, which products or services they were interested in, if they converted to customers, and what their revenue value was. You can pass this conversation analytics data directly to martech platforms you use every day like Google Ads, Adobe Experience Cloud, and Salesforce.
When you track the phone leads your marketing efforts generate, you reap a host of benefits that contribute to your bottom line. Keep reading to learn more!
When you have attribution for the phone leads your marketing programs drive, you can make more efficient ad bids. Since you know your true ROI, you can bid to increase the high-value phone leads that are resulting in conversions and revenue. You can also use Invoca's Google Ads integration to inform your Smart Bidding strategy — the algorithm will automatically weigh your phone call conversions into its calculations and bid to help you reach your goals.
Callers are your most valuable leads — these consumers want to engage with your brand directly, and they’re often looking for additional information to complete a purchase. If you aren’t getting attribution for phone leads, you’re significantly underreporting your marketing ROI.
When you track phone leads with a solution like Invoca, you can prove higher returns on your marketing campaigns to your finance team. This can help you defend your marketing budget and even build a compelling case for an increase.
Call attribution can also enhance your retargeting strategy. Invoca's AI analyzes phone conversations at scale to detect which products or services each caller was interested in and if they made a purchase. You can use these insights to retarget them according to their interests.
For example, if someone called your dealership inquiring about the Toyota Camry, you could retarget them with future ads featuring this vehicle. You could even tout the specific value props they mentioned over the phone, like reliability and gas mileage. This will ensure you're not annoying customers with irrelevant ads. It will also help you get more value out of your digital advertising budget, as it's far easier to convert a customer who is already "warm" than to start from scratch with a new customer.
Phone calls are a critical part of the customer journey — marketers should optimize the phone call experience the same way they optimize the online experience. However, because many teams lack call attribution, they’re unable to do so.
With Invoca, you can track how customers progress through your online buying flow and when they drop off to place phone calls. You can use its AI to mine the conversation for issues that prompted the call, such as an error with the online shopping cart or a lack of information on a product page. You can then resolve issues driving unnecessary phone calls and tighten the buying flow so customers can easily convert without any roadblocks.
An effective way to improve marketing and sales collaboration is to align around a shared objective: revenue growth. This is the metric that matters most to your business and what you are ultimately striving for. When you use a solution like Invoca, you can get a full view of how all of your marketing efforts contribute to revenue — both online and over the phone.
You can use this attribution to work more collaboratively with your sales leaders. For example, if you determine your marketing campaigns are driving a high volume of non-sales-related phone leads to your sales team, you can make the right adjustments to improve lead quality. You can also use Invoca’s AI to analyze how well your sales team is handling the phone leads you send them, and you can make the right adjustments to training and scripts to increase close rates.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you prove and improve your marketing ROI? Check out these resources:
