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Economists are predicting a recession in 2023 and marketers know all too well what this means: their budgets will be under pressure. A recent study found that about a third of the world’s largest advertisers plan to slash ad dollars next year. Additionally, three-quarters of those surveyed said that their 2023 budgets will face increased scrutiny.
Don’t worry, the year ahead isn’t all doom and gloom! In fact, a challenging economy can provide opportunities for you to pull ahead of the competition if you execute correctly. While everyone else is pulling the emergency brake, it’s time for you to shift gears and find opportunities to pull away from the crowd.
Conversation intelligence can provide one of the greatest opportunities to surpass the competition during these turbulent times. It can also help you justify your advertising spend and even make the case for more budget. In this post, I’ll share how this tool gives marketers the ability to drive more phone call conversions — and prove their results to leadership.
Like all marketers (or nearly all of them!), you’re already measuring how many of your customers are converting online. But this is only a small piece of the puzzle — think of how many consumers engage with you offline, especially over the phone. For many industries, phone calls are critical moments in the buying journey — they’re where customers reach out to complete large purchases, schedule appointments, get quotes, and forge authentic human connections.
Still not convinced that phone calls are important? I raise you these stats:
See more in our Ultimate List of Call Tracking and Conversation Intelligence Statistics
If you want to take your marketing to the next level, you need to track phone calls with the same rigor you track online conversions. Otherwise, you’ll have an incomplete view of your marketing performance and you won’t be able to make the right campaign optimizations — or prove the results.
With Invoca conversation intelligence, you can escape the data dead zone in your marketing metrics and get complete attribution for the phone leads you drive. Below, we’ll share how Invoca can help you prove — and improve — the value of your phone call conversions. This, in turn, can help you defend your marketing spend and prevent cuts to your budget and team.
Invoca allows marketers to tie each phone call to the campaign, ad, channel, keyword, or webpage that generated it — and track how much revenue it resulted in. This allows you to see your true cost per acquisition. It also allows you to more accurately prove your results to your leadership team and get the green light for more budget.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Great, another portal to gather dust in my tech stack.” But that couldn’t be further from the truth — Invoca has deep integrations with the marketing tools you use every day. You can get all of the powerful conversation intelligence data you need without changing your existing workflows. For example, Invoca integrates with Google Ads to give marketers that sweet, sweet closed-loop attribution to show their ad spend is effective.
To see our full list of integrations, check out our integrations page.
Once you’re tracking phone call conversions with conversation intelligence, you can make smarter optimizations decisions. How? With this new visibility, you can see your true return on investment (ROI), for both online AND phone call conversions. This allows you to allocate more budget to the campaigns driving the most total value — both online and over the phone.
For example, in the chart below, the marketer is able to increase their ROI by factoring in the number of phone call conversions their Google Ads campaigns are driving.
As mentioned above, Invoca integrates with your existing martech tools like Google Ads. A common workflow is to use phone call conversions as an input for Google’s Smart Bidding algorithm. This allows automation to do the work for you, as Google will use phone conversion data to automatically make the most efficient bids to scale your PPC results.
When Rogers Communications used Invoca’s Google Ads integration, they achieved these incredible results:
Read the full Rogers Communications case study here
We’ve all had an experience where, after we purchased a product from a brand, we still got bombarded with ads for it across the internet and on our social feeds. These kinds of advertising experiences are not only annoying — they’re a waste of marketing dollars.
With conversation intelligence, you can avoid these kinds of missteps. The solution gives you deep first-party insights from phone conversations so you can retarget callers with the right ads at the right time.
With Invoca, you can track the product or service each caller expressed interest in over the phone and if they made a purchase. You can then use that data to inform retargeting at scale. If you’re a telecommunications provider, for example, you could reengage every caller who expressed interest in your deluxe sports package — but didn’t ultimately purchase it — with a special offer to upgrade. Or, if you’re an insurance provider, you could retarget callers who expressed interest in multiple insurance policies with a bundling discount.
That’s only scratching the surface of what you can do — you can also use call center data to market differently to price-sensitive customers. If someone expressed a hesitation about pricing over the phone and didn’t buy from you, you could retarget them with an ad that provides a coupon for 10% off and free shipping on their next order. Advanced targeting methods like these can help you recapture lost opportunities and stretch your marketing budget even further.
You may be wondering, “How can I scale this?” Don’t worry, Invoca turns conversation signals into structured data and pushes them into the martech platforms you use every day, including Salesforce, Google Ads, Adobe Experience Cloud, Search Ads 360, and many more.
In addition to retargeting, you can use Invoca to inform suppression. If a caller purchased a product or service over the phone, you can make sure they don’t see any more ads for it. This reduces wasted budget and creates a better experience for the customer.
Read more about Invoca’s retargeting capabilities in this post
As you know all too well, driving phone calls is only half the battle — your marketing ROI also depends on your team’s ability to answer those calls and convert them to revenue. But did you know that a significant percentage of the phone calls your marketing campaigns drive likely never get answered? For most industries, the average call answer rate hovers around 25%. That’s a lot of marketing dollars down the drain!
To reduce missed calls, leading companies use Invoca’s Lost Sales Recovery feature. This tool gives teams complete transparency into how many calls their locations are missing. You can then use this data to diagnose issues and determine the best next steps to increase call answer rates.
With Invoca’s real-time reports, you can collaborate with your sales and operations teams to make the right changes to decrease missed calls. Some common pivots include:
Invoca’s Lost Sales Recovery feature also prioritizes your missed sales calls using intent data. For example, if you work in the automotive industry, Invoca can flag high-intent callers who called from an ad for a limited-time 0% APR financing promotion. It can also sort callers based on the IVR keypresses they entered (for instance, press “1” to speak to sales or “2” for service.) This helps you determine who your team needs to follow up with first, and if the follow-up should be done by a sales or service agent.
Want to learn more about how leading brands defend their marketing spend with Invoca? Check out these resources:
Download our Ultimate Guide to Reducing Wasted Marketing Spend to learn how you can lower your CPA while improving marketing campaign performance.
