As cus­tomers’ paths to pur­chase become increas­ing­ly com­plex, mar­keters are under mount­ing pres­sure to evi­dence their con­tri­bu­tion to ROI with­in the mul­ti­chan­nel mix.

But with more tech plat­forms to inte­grate than ever before, is there room for call intel­li­gence with­in the grow­ing martech stack?

Despite the sig­nif­i­cant evo­lu­tion of the call track­ing and intel­li­gence mar­ket, the tech­nol­o­gy, to date, is utilised by less than 5% of busi­ness­es that could ben­e­fit from it. In part this is due to a lack of under­stand­ing about the role it can play in a world where dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is con­tin­u­al­ly mak­ing waves.

It can also be said that many mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als are feel­ing some­what swamped in an already com­plex MarTech land­scape. The fear is often that call intel­li­gence would be just anoth­er plat­form to manage.

As a result, many mar­keters have, under­stand­ably, con­cen­trat­ed on the arse­nal of tools at their fin­ger­tips in an attempt to pen­e­trate the mar­ket, dri­ve acqui­si­tions and increase conversions.

They’re being savvy with retar­get­ing to speed up the sales cycle, con­tin­u­al­ly mea­sur­ing and opti­mis­ing spend, and hook­ing up mul­ti­ple ana­lyt­ics plat­forms to fuel smarter deci­sion mak­ing. There is an unswerv­ing focus on dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing ROI, and right­ly so.

But the goal behind every mar­ket­ing activ­i­ty is sure­ly to lever­age and make sense of big data, in the ongo­ing plight to achieve the holy grail of the ‘sin­gle cus­tomer view’.

So why are calls still being over­looked by the major­i­ty of brands?

Online and offline behaviours

Online and offline behav­iours are not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, so nor should they be viewed in isolation.

But still there remains a seem­ing­ly ‘untrack­able’ gap for most organ­i­sa­tions, when a prospect or cus­tomer reach­es the point in their jour­ney where they pick up the phone. Greater col­lab­o­ra­tion is there­fore needed.

Dig­i­tal mar­keters have a vest­ed inter­est in under­stand­ing what makes the phone ring.

For some, this means the pro­cure­ment of cam­paign-spe­cif­ic tele­phone num­bers. But they pro­vide insight only at an activ­i­ty lev­el. And, with so much effort going into per­son­al­is­ing jour­neys at an indi­vid­ual lev­el, this will not suffice.

Mar­keters need to under­stand every sin­gle prospect or customer’s inter­ac­tion with the brand, up until the point of them mak­ing a call.

This is why call intel­li­gence is grow­ing, not decreas­ing, in its impor­tance to mar­keters – even those that don’t have any direct own­er­ship of the phone channel.

It can deliv­er an unpar­al­leled insight into a customer’s jour­ney, inte­grat­ing data from mul­ti­ple exter­nal sources rang­ing from Dou­bleClick Cam­paign Man­ag­er to Google AdWords and Sales­Force to Optimizely.

It can unrav­el the ori­gin source of an individual’s jour­ney, the impact of PPC cam­paigns at key­word lev­el, which pages were sub­se­quent­ly vis­it­ed, for how long, and at what point they left to call. It can even iden­ti­fy when they leave the online expe­ri­ence and come back.

The result is the abil­i­ty to tru­ly under­stand what made the phone ring, which helps to attribute sales rev­enue and oth­er objec­tive com­ple­tions to spe­cif­ic cam­paigns, enabling activ­i­ties and bud­gets to be opti­mised thereafter.

It is pos­si­ble to under­stand which key­words are worth the invest­ment for exam­ple, because, whilst some may be more expen­sive, they may lead to bet­ter qual­i­ty calls and conversions.

Greater insight

Armed with this back­ground data – in real time – con­tact cen­tre oper­a­tors can also ensure more tai­lored, con­tex­tu­al calls help to improve the qual­i­ty of service.

Admit­ted­ly this is of greater inter­est to those respon­si­ble for the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence but it can aid dig­i­tal mar­keters’ efforts too because, the more clicks and calls that lead to con­ver­sions, the greater the ROI for the ini­tial online efforts.

With the world of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing evolv­ing at such a pace, there may be an aver­sion to focus­ing on what might be seen as a more tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing chan­nel. But the glob­al pop­u­la­tion is seem­ing­ly hooked on the ‘super-com­put­ers’ we car­ry in our pock­ets, and click-to-call spend­ing is pre­dict­ed to grow to £13.7bn in 2020.

Research has also found that, whilst 64% of mil­len­ni­als do all their research online, they val­ue speak­ing to some­one over the phone to ver­i­fy infor­ma­tion before mak­ing a purchase.

With­out greater insight into what makes the phone ring, search mar­keters might nev­er over­come their con­ver­sion blind spot.

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