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You’ve probably had an experience where an unwanted ad stalked you across the internet like a horror movie villain, popping up on every website you visited and haunting your social feeds. Maybe instead of screaming, “Here’s Johnny!” it screamed, “Here’s Brawny™!” Maybe you tried to slip the ad, going into incognito mode or using an ad blocker — or maybe you realized it was futile. Maybe you relented to your fate and let the ad gouge you into submission.
Poor advertising experiences like this are all too common, and consumers are fed up. They say it can feel “creepy” and “invasive” when they’re followed around by ads that are irrelevant to their wants, needs, and interests. But when marketing is relevant and helps make the buying experience easier, their tune changes. According to a recent study, 80% of consumers are likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience.
If you’re a marketer, you need to know your audience on a deep level. The better you understand them, the better you can target them with ads that actually align with their needs. And what’s the best way to gain this deep knowledge of your audience? With data.
Keep reading to learn how leading marketers use first-party data from phone calls to improve their ad targeting — and drive more conversions at a lower cost.
First-party data is data that your organization has collected from your audience. It differs from second- and third-party data in that it doesn’t come from trusted partners or data brokers — it comes directly from users, making it more trustworthy. In addition, you can rest assured that it complies with the data security standards your company establishes and maintains.
Learn more about first-, second-, and third-party data in this blog post.
Common examples of first-party data include data from CRMs, website visitors, social media followers, email subscribers, and transaction records.
There is one source of first-party data that companies often fail to capture: phone conversations. These interactions contain incredibly valuable customer insights, such as the caller’s product or service interests, how you can make them happy, and any barriers to purchase they’re facing. This data can help you improve ad targeting and ensure callers receive the right messaging at the right time.
Of course, capturing first-party data from the thousands of phone calls your organization receives every day can seem like a daunting task. Your team doesn’t have the capacity to listen to all those calls, let alone identify the common trends that are occurring in conversation.
That’s where conversation intelligence comes in — with Invoca, you can let AI do the listening for you. Our solution automatically identifies trends at scale, so you can understand your callers’ needs. From there, you can drill down into each topic to get more detail and see specific instances where it was mentioned.
The next logical question is, “How can I use these insights in my existing workflows?” 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.
Now that you know the basics of how to capture first-party data from phone calls, we’re going to show you how to use those insights to get more bang for your marketing buck. Read on to learn our top tips to improve your ad targeting with conversation intelligence.
Not all conversions are created equal — you’re selling different tiers of products and services, and, as you know, it’s far more beneficial to move your high-ticket items. But when customers purchase over the phone, you don’t necessarily know which products they bought — or how much they spent. In fact, depending on your tracking, you may not know that a transaction was completed at all — you may only see that a phone call was placed.
This data dead zone makes it difficult to understand which campaigns are giving you the greatest return on your investment. For example, you may be underinvesting in keywords that drive phone sales for your most expensive product line — and not even know it. Or, you may be allocating the bulk of your budget to campaigns that drive low-value phone calls.
To solve this problem, marketers use conversation intelligence to track the outcome of every phone lead their marketing drives — including if the call converted, and what the caller purchased. You can then integrate Invoca with Salesforce for full revenue matchback. This allows you to understand the true ROI of all of your campaigns and keywords — for both online and phone call conversions. You can then allocate more of your budget to the campaigns that are truly driving the most revenue for your organization. You can also feed this data to Google to inform its Smart Bidding algorithm and get more returns from automated bidding.
Rogers Communications uses Invoca’s AI to understand not just which customers convert over the phone, but the average value of the conversion for each customer type. With this data, they can understand the revenue that each paid search campaign, ad, and keyword drives — both online and over the phone. They can then feed this revenue data into Google Ads to inform Smart Bidding. Smart Bidding weighs their bids in proportion to their returns, decreasing cost per acquisition by 82% in a two-year period. They also achieved an 18% lift in net revenue from paid search.
A strong retargeting strategy is critical to the success of your digital marketing program. It’s much easier to sell to a consumer who is already “warm” than trying to start from scratch with someone who has never heard of your brand. In fact, studies have shown that it often takes a minimum of 20 ad impressions to drive a conversion.
But your retargeting strategy is only as good as the data you use to inform it. If you’re blasting consumers over and over again with the same irrelevant ads, you won’t earn their business, you’ll just annoy them — and waste your ad dollars. With Invoca, you can use conversation insights to retarget callers who didn’t make a purchase over the phone. Since you know which products and services they mentioned, you can serve them relevant ads tailored to their interests.
For example, if you’re a dealership and a caller mentioned they were interested in the Toyota Tacoma, you could serve them ads promoting that vehicle. Your ads could even tout the specific value propositions the caller mentioned over the phone, such as safety features or towing capacity. This would be far more likely to pique their interest than a generic ad for your dealership and it would keep you top-of-mind as they continued their research.
It’s far more cost-efficient to sell to your existing customer base than to sell to new customers. Research finds that existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more, on average, compared to new customers.
When you capture first-party data from phone conversations, you gain a wealth of insights about your existing customers, such as what they’ve already purchased and what their needs are. You can use this data to target your existing customers with ads for relevant companion purchases.
For example, if someone purchased car insurance from you over the phone and mentioned that they owned a boat, you could retarget them with ads for a bundling discount on boat insurance. The customer would be far more likely to sign up for boat insurance with you than another provider since you’ve already earned their trust.
In today’s inflationary economic climate, price-sensitivity is becoming more common among consumers. According to our recent Buyer Experience Report, 67% of consumers will do more research than they did last year to find the best price. If you don’t address your customers’ pricing concerns, you’ll lose out on a huge chunk of your customer base.
With Invoca, you can easily identify callers who expressed hesitation about pricing over the phone and didn’t buy from you. You can then market differently to these customers — for example, 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.
Sometimes, even after you purchase a product, you still get bombarded with ads for it across your social feeds. These kinds of advertising experiences are not only annoying — they’re a waste of marketing dollars. This problem is especially prevalent when customers buy over the phone since it can be difficult to tie the full omnichannel journey together.
With conversation intelligence, you can avoid these kinds of missteps. The solution automatically detects when someone makes a purchase from you over the phone, so you can improve your suppression. If a caller purchases a product or service over the phone, you can ensure they don’t see any more ads for it. This reduces wasted budget and creates a better experience for the customer.
Want to learn more about how Invoca’s first-party data can help you stretch your marketing budget? 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.
