10 reasons lead tracking is essential for marketing agencies

If there’s one thing that should be at the forefront of every marketing agency’s strategies today, it’s lead tracking.

But why is this so crucial?

In this blog we’ll explore how your marketing agency can drive successful growth and optimise marketing efforts with effective lead tracking.

What is lead tracking?

Lead tracking is the important process of identifying, monitoring, and analysing the entire journey of potential customers.

A single enquiry or purchase from a customer is often the result of a journey through multiple different touchpoints in a business. From the initial interaction to the point of sale or phone call, every step is vital to the outcome of the customer journey.

Your agency needs to have the right methods in place for gathering data on lead sources, behaviours, interactions, and conversions. This way, you’ll gain insights into what marketing efforts are successfully engaging and converting customers for your clients – or even yourselves – and where improvements can be made.

Lead tracking vs sales tracking

While lead tracking and sales tracking are related, they serve different purposes. Your agency will most likely lean towards lead tracking as a priority.

Sales tracking focuses primarily on monitoring sales activities, such as the sales pipeline and closed deals, or the different ways customers are making a purchase.

However, leads have a large impact on sales, and this is where lead tracking comes in.

Lead tracking is a process that encompasses the entire customer lifecycle, from initial lead generation through to conversion or loss. This includes the potential sale at the end of a journey, as well as every interaction that led to this, including website visits and phone calls.

Why is lead tracking so important for marketing agencies?

Lead tracking provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns so that your agency can further refine strategies to attract and nurture high-quality leads.

Using software like Mediahawk’s call tracking for your agency, provides the unique edge you need to track leads more effectively.

Receptional, a multi-award-winning digital marketing agency, explains how they used Mediahawk’s call tracking software to track leads. Justin Deaville, the Managing Director, says: “Mediahawk helped us identify which marketing channels were generating calls, so we could better prioritise our spending. For one particular client, Mediahawk allowed us to generate five times the amount of calls – without increasing ad spend. You can imagine how happy the client was.”

“Mediahawk helped us identify which marketing channels were generating calls, so we could better prioritise our spending. For one particular client, Mediahawk allowed us to generate five times the amount of calls – without increasing ad spend. You can imagine how happy the client was.”
– Justin Deaville, Managing Director, Receptional

There are a vast number of reasons why lead tracking for your agency is so important. That being said, here are the top 10 we think are most significant:

1. Practice what you preach!

Your agency needs to demonstrate its capabilities for understanding and optimising marketing processes. This includes effectively tracking, analysing, and increasing lead generation for clients.

Implement robust lead tracking strategies using call tracking for your agency, and you can showcase your competence and credibility to clients. This reinforces your expertise and shows that you deliver measurable results.

2. Prove success to clients

Use clear and measurable data to demonstrate your success to clients and prospects.

For instance, a client may want to focus on driving more phone calls. You can use call tracking and marketing attribution software to provide clear data and actionable insights on which channels and campaigns are most effective at driving calls. Use this information to direct resources towards these activities to increase conversions rates and deliver a better return on investment (ROI).

3. Better understanding of prospects

Lead tracking provides valuable insights into prospect behaviour, interests, and preferences. This way, you can better structure your campaigns to accurately target customer demographics for your client.
For instance, you can analyse data such as:

• Website interactions and visitor journeys
• Phone calls from specific channels
• Pay-per-click (PPC) visits
• Keywords driving calls

This gives your agency a better understanding of the target audience to refine your messaging and strategies accordingly.

Not all customers are the same, and different audiences will respond better to certain messaging. Once you understand the messages that resonate, you can refine it in order to maximise your conversions.

You can even use AI-powered features such as Speech Analytics. This reveals important keywords and insights from phone conversations, giving you more detail and context around the customer’s needs and challenges.

4. Personalised pitching

Lead tracking is also beneficial when it comes to delivering personalised pitches to prospective clients. It gives you a deeper understanding of the customer journey, so you can create highly personalised pitches.

For example, there are several call tracking metrics that indicate user intent. By analysing the user journey, including the pages users visit and interact with, to see what they’re interested in.

You can customise the approach your agency takes, making sure to address specific pain points and demonstrate a deeper understanding of the prospect’s needs, increasing the chances of winning new business.

5. Successful follow-up

Effective lead tracking for your agency enables you to identify and prioritise hot leads, ensuring timely and targeted follow-up. In many instances, the decisions made after an enquiry, call, or interaction can have the most impact on whether they choose your services or not.

Powerful call handling, for example, can ensure you never miss a lead again. You can use call routing and advanced interactive voice response (IVR) to discover the routes that have the most profitable outcome.

By understanding where prospects are in the sales funnel and their level of engagement, you can tailor follow-up efforts, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

6. Improved lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is crucial for converting prospects into clients, and an advanced lead tracking process can make all the difference.

Insights from call tracking show you what stages each lead is at in the marketing funnel, so you can develop personalised nurturing campaigns..

Let’s say prospects are interacting with your business for the first time from your social media channels. You can serve content and messaging that aligns with their specific interests at this stage in their journey. In this case, it could be awareness campaigns or lead magnets to establish authority and increase engagement.

7. Optimise marketing strategies

A key part of reaching your client’s goals – whether it’s increased leads or better ROI, for example. – is implementing the right strategies for them. This is where lead tracking is vital.

You can analyse lead data to identify which marketing channels, campaigns, and activities are generating the most valuable leads. You can then make more data-driven decisions to optimise these campaigns to increase lead generation and deliver improved ROI.

This could be by:

• Improving the overall messaging of the campaigns
• Adapting the style or tone of content
• Changing which channels target different stages of the customer journey

This enables you to double down on successful strategies and eliminate ineffective campaigns, maximising your marketing ROI.

8. Create your competitive advantage

In a crowded marketplace, lead tracking gives your agency a competitive edge. By leveraging data-driven insights and demonstrating measurable results, you can improve your client offering and make your agency stand out amongst the crowd.

We partner with agencies to help them understand the importance of call tracking software for growth and success. You can offer your prospects a tailored marketing approach that combines industry expertise with powerful insights for maximum results.

9. Allocate resources more effectively

Lead tracking is also important when it comes to allocating resources more effectively.

Accurately identifying high-value leads allows you to prioritise your efforts in the right places. Using the built-in features, such as Speech Analytics, that call tracking software provides, enables you to pinpoint the marketing sources with the most valuable conversions.

By focusing resources on the most promising prospects, and avoiding poor quality leads, you can avoid wasting spend on underperforming channels and non-profitable leads.

10. Improve scalability

As your agency grows, lead tracking becomes even more crucial for maintaining consistency with your service quality and managing clients. You need a fool-proof way of tracking your valuable leads and ensuring successful client interactions.

Is every valuable lead being captured? Are you returning missed calls? Is your messaging and strategy structured in the right way to move prospects along the funnel to a conversion?

Implementing a call tracking system means that your agency can keep on top of lead tracking no matter the scale of your business, and maintain a consistently high standard of service and delivery.

Why call tracking is an essential tool in your marketing agency’s arsenal

If you didn’t already know, it’s clearer than ever that lead tracking is a vital process for your marketing agency. But what’s also evident is that call tracking is key to achieving your full potential.

Call tracking software enables you to accurately track call conversions and revenue, and attribute these to the correct sources. With dynamic phone number insertion, you can see the calls coming from your digital campaigns, channels, and keywords.

The detailed insights and reports you get from the software give your agency invaluable data on lead sources, caller behaviour, and campaign performance.

Lawrence Cavill Grant, Head of Commercial at Mediahawk, highlights the importance of call tracking for agencies: “Call tracking is becoming more important every day for marketing agencies who want to stay competitive. With this software, tracking and increasing leads across different channels couldn’t be easier or more effective”.

Do you want to get started with a more effective lead tracking process in your marketing agency? Arrange a demo of Mediahawk’s call tracking software and learn how this powerful solution can give your agency a competitive edge.

This blog was first published in July 2023 and updated in June 2024.