Why do legal marketers need call tracking?

Web searches and enquiries for ‘divorce’ and ‘family legal advice’ see a dramatic surge in January. So, whilst many might be feeling miserable during the festive period, family lawyers are at their busiest when they return to work in the New Year.

Yet, competition is fiercer than ever now – and this presents a challenge for legal marketers. Whether you specialise in property, mediation or family law, for your firm to be successful you need to know how prospective clients find you.

The most valuable business often ‘arrives’ by phone. As a marketer, you’ll want to know which of your campaigns trigger these important inbound enquiries.

Call tracking technology enables you to discover the source of every single prospect.

So, why do legal marketers need call tracking?

Personal matters, such as divorce and personal injury, but also commercial work, dispute resolution, intellectual property and so on are complex purchases – and in most instances require a conversation.

If you don’t track these telephone enquiries how will you know how these clients found you?

With an ever-increasing range of marketing channels – websites, email, social, directories, paid and organic search and webinars, to name a few – you need to accurately track the performance of each channel.

Whilst legal firms are now embracing new channels, they’re also still reliant on traditional methods, making marketing broad and expensive. Tracking inbound calls by marketing channel means that you’ll spend your budget more efficiently, you’ll have data-driven evidence to see which campaigns generate most leads and, as a result, you’ll become more profitable.

What is call tracking and how does it work?

Call tracking technology provides you with a complete picture of your lead generation, demonstrating which marketing channels are pulling their weight.

Dynamic call tracking for websites

Dynamic numbers work by simply adding a small snippet of code to your website. When a prospect lands on your site, you’ll see:

• how they found you (organic search, PPC ad, referral, email, social media link, etc.),
• which pages they viewed while on your site,
• where in the journey they picked up the phone,
• pages viewed after the call ended,
• any subsequent visits to your website and post-visit calls.

This data allows you to gain an insight into the behaviour of your prospects: helping you to understand where your content, or the steps in the conversion path, might be causing confusion. Or even putting them off entirely. You can also assess how well your website pages perform in terms of generating leads.

Call data also enables you to optimise your organic and paid activity by tracking leads at keyword level.

The reports capture the keyword used by a prospect when they click on your Google ad – or call using the call tracking number. Using these keywords to enhance your website content allows you to improve your organic rankings and tweak your paid adverts to improve response.

Call tracking to monitor offline marketing response

Similarly, if you’re running an offline marketing campaign (TV adverts, newspaper, direct mail drop) or creating printed materials (such as a brochure), you can add a unique phone number for each channel. Static phone numbers enable you to see precisely the response each campaign generates. View inbound calls by campaign, channel, media, department and more, quickly and easily.

How does call tracking fit in with my existing analytics tools?

You’re probably already using analytics to track your web traffic and incoming enquiries, for example Google Analytics, and a CRM system such as Salesforce.
But if your tracking stops when someone picks up the phone, it leaves you with a gaping hole in your lead attribution.

Call tracking is the missing link between your online to offline inbound enquiries, leading to more accurate marketing attribution. Our custom integrations with tools such as Google Analytics, Marin, HubSpot, Optimizely, and our API and FTP functionality makes it easy for you to see call data against any data gathered by your 3rd party systems in the way that is most convenient to you.

Benefits to practitioners and management staff

Call tracking insight benefits all departments in law firms. The marketing analytics and lead tracking arms marketing teams with the understanding needed to make sure budget is being spent efficiently.

In addition, team members who handle inbound and outbound calls can listen back to conversations to gain a better appreciation of the quality of calls – and how their interactions ease prospects through to the crucial take-up stage.

Call reporting data also enables your firm to prepare for busy periods – such as the traditional ‘January divorce spike’. Knowing what your call volumes were during any given period – or in response to a previous campaign – allows you to make sure you have adequate staffing in place to handle your forecasted number of calls in future.

Our clients have found that simple changes in how calls are handled helps to close more leads.

Whether you specialise in property, mediation or family law, the New Year brings new business and new opportunities. If you haven’t discovered call tracking yet, your competitors already have – and they’re using it to track the success of their marketing campaigns. Don’t miss out: Read on to discover how call tracking can help you.