It's easy for marketers to assume that anything having to do with inbound phone calls is the realm of the contact center. Your awesome marketing gets prospects on the phone, the reps make the sales, you wipe your hands on your pants and call it a day, right?

Not so fast...

If you're spending marketing money to drive inbound calls to your business with digital marketing, you need to be confident that you're getting the right people to call—and that you'll be able to do it repeatably.

To ensure that's the case, you're going to need some data.

Marketers need their own call analytics

Of course, getting inbound call data from the contact center can be challenging. It's not usually well aligned with Marketing, and the data can be solidly siloed.

The contact center has its analytics and reporting set up for its own needs, not Marketing's; so even if you can get your mitts on the data, it may not do you any good. And if you're getting the call data in anything less than real-time, it may as well have been from 20 years ago if you want to use it to optimize your marketing campaigns.

This is where call tracking and analytics platforms designed for marketers come in.

Of course, you have access to end-to-end customer journey data and attribution for your purely digital campaigns. But the data trail goes cold when your customer picks up the phone. There are some kludgy approaches to correlate phone calls to digital marketing. Some use data that is manually entered by the call center and is transferred to CRMs, others rely on spreadsheets and campaigns tied to hundreds or thousands of unique phone numbers. But all that gets you is correlation, which does not equal causation—or, in your case, attribution.

Call tracking software for marketers allows you to connect phone calls to advertising so you know what marketing drove what call and what the results of the calls were. For example, if you call a business that is using a call tracking platform, they can tell what ads, webpages, or keywords helped drive you to call.

Pretty handy, right?

Here are five ways you can use call tracking to do that and to up your marketing game.

1. Get access to a new source of first-party customer data

Having access to first-party data is more valuable than ever. You get the most accurate information possible about people who have intentionally contacted you to make a purchase.

With the decline and imminent death of third-party cookies because of regulations and browser-based cookie blocking, you will need access to first-party data to implement people-based marketing programs and to create a customer-centric, cohesive marketing system that revolves around customers and their real-time behavioral data—not third-party cookies.

2. Make your landing pages convert more customers

Is the landing page you spent all week working on driving tons of customer service calls and no sales? Is the conversion rate from the page really low? Is nobody calling at all? There's probably something wrong with the landing page; but without a call tracking solution in place, you'd probably never find out.

Call tracking platforms allow you to assign dynamic phone numbers to your landing pages, so you can easily A/B-test pages and see which design and copy drive the most sales. These are some elements that are good to test when you are optimizing landing pages:

• Position, size, and color of phone numbers on the page
• Click-to-call buttons for mobile users
• FAQs that reduce service call volume
• Test CTAs that drive calls (like "Call now to speak with a representative")
• Adding or removing lead forms
• Local vs. toll-free numbers

Remember, test only one change at a time so you know what works!

3. Create a more personalized customer journey

Many times an e-commerce webpage is not a one-size-fits-all deal. Depending on who the customer is and what they are looking for, you might want to show them different content.

For example, DISH Network found that many online shoppers were abandoning their carts when it came time to provide private information, such as social security and credit card numbers. To make sure it could convert those customers, it needed to quickly and seamlessly direct cart abandoners to a call center experience specially tailored to their needs. Using a call tracking platform, it was able to provide customized Web and phone experiences for those customers to significantly boost conversion rates.

4. Improve the call center experience

OK, so this is REALLY the call center's problem, right? Nope. If the call experience stinks, your conversion rates will tank no matter how good your marketing is. Since your customers are jumping across channels from online to phone, it's critical that the call center know where they have been, who they are, and why they are calling. Without that information, friction is increased because the call center has to deal with…

• An incomplete view of caller information
• Lack of context
• Calls being routed to the wrong place
• Frustrated callers

Using a call analytics platform, the call center can get real-time insights about callers, including their previous engagement history as well as the keyword and ad campaign that drove the call. That information can be used to automatically route and filter calls so callers get to the person or department that can best help them without sending being sent through a confusing and frustrating phone tree.

5. Get to know your customers better

When people call your business, they are literally telling you—in their own words—what they need. With a call tracking and analytics platform in place, you can easily analyze the language used in the call to make your ads, webpages, social ads, and other advertising mediums better reflect the way your customers actually talk about your products. Considering the rising prevalence of voice search, that approach can help you optimize your SERPs for the more natural language that people are using today.

Call analytics can also help you gather demographic data that can help you precisely target your customers and even create lookalike audiences on Facebook and YouTube that will help you discover more your most high-value, high-intent customers.

Are you ready to make call tracking and analytics part of your marketing strategy? Download the Invoca Call Tracking Study Guide for Marketers to learn what you need to know about today's AI-powered call tracking and analytics solutions.