Call tracking 101 for legal marketers

Marketing today goes well beyond the confines of your website. Many legal marketers do a good job of online lead attribution, however, they fail to ‘close the loop’ and effectively track their telephone leads.

Tracking telephone leads is especially important to marketers in the legal sector. Due to the complex nature of the service, longer sales cycles and higher value, nurturing leads over the phone is critical.

Here we take a look at what you should know about call tracking – and how it will work for you.

Telephone conversions have a financial value

Inbound calls = sales. 70% of mobile users call a business directly from the search page, so you need to make sure you’re capturing these valuable leads. You can’t accurately measure your ROI unless you know much phone calls are worth to your business.

Many businesses still place greater emphasis and value on web leads because they’re easier to track.

Call tracking software helps you understand which marketing activities spark your telephone leads and provide you with an accurate ROI.

What call tracking can do for you

Call tracking software complements your current reporting and analytics in a number of ways. Here we highlight three key areas:

1. Integrate call data and attribute sales leads

Integrating your telephone call data within your existing reporting systems provides you with robust information on the relationships between your marketing channels, allowing you to track important metrics such as conversion rates and calculate revenue attribution.

It also allows you to determine how each of your individual channels (paid search, social media, blog, email marketing, SEO, etc.) are performing and which marketing campaigns influence revenue and pipeline across all your market segments, enabling you to effectively optimise your marketing mix.

2. Improve customer experience

Understanding what happens with a prospect in that ‘information gap’ – the black hole between your marketing activity and the outcome on the other side – provides you with significant insight into the customer experience.

Call tracking technology allows you to focus on the individual person: how did they find your website? PPC? Facebook? Organic search? How do they interact with your marketing activities and channels over time? Are they an active member of your email subscriber base? Do they read your blog? What specific activity sparked a call that led to a conversion? Comprehensive reporting can tell you all this and more.

3. Closed-loop data is the key to marketing effectiveness

The right insights and data will help you determine what marketing activities are effectively contributing to your bottom line. One of the major advantages of using call tracking is the ability to tie marketing activities to sales. You might be generating lots of leads via a specific channel, such as paid search, but are those leads actually converting and making your business money?

Integrating call tracking with your marketing and reporting tools allows you to establish which channels are most critical for driving sales. You can drill down into your web analytics data, slicing and dicing it any number of ways, but this will never provide you with a comprehensive, accurate understanding of how your marketing is actually performing.