Your phone channel is your key to lead generation: Here’s how to capture the data you need

At times when consumer spending is at its lowest, it can be difficult to maintain a consistent pipeline of leads in your business. Our previous blog highlighted just how valuable lead data can be to building this pipeline in a flat economy and what you should understand about your customers to increase lead generation.

But one key question remains: how do you capture that crucial data?

You’ll find a lot of the answers in your phone calls. The telephone remains one of the most important channels to marketers today – in fact, Salesforce’s recent report found it to be the second most popular channel consumers use to contact brands, surpassing mobile apps, online chats, and social media.

That’s good news for marketers, as it’s also a gold mine of information about your leads that can help you generate more engagement and boost conversions.

Below, we’ll reveal exactly what data you can capture, how to capture it in the phone channel, and how to use it to inform your lead generation strategy.

The phone channel: A gold mine for marketers

While digital marketing channels continue to grow and evolve, the phone channel still plays a major role in many industries. It gives customers an opportunity for direct contact with your brand and offers the chance to receive immediate resolutions to their queries.

“In many commodity-based sectors – such as retail – transactions are often simpler and don’t require a lot of back-and-forth between a business and the lead. For instance, you don’t need to ask many questions when purchasing a book,” explains Faye Thomassen, Head of Marketing at Mediahawk. “But in sectors selling more complex services – such as the automotive and care home markets – leads will inevitably require more engagement.”

Whether it’s calling to ask about a service, booking an appointment, or even making a purchase, there are dozens of touchpoints throughout the buying journey.

All these touchpoints can provide valuable information about what tactics are working in your overall campaign to engage your leads, what’s helping them convert to sales, and what you might be able to do in the future to optimise your lead generation strategy.

There’s also a lot of granular data you can capture, such as the lead’s journey through your website, the ads they interacted with, and the page that encouraged them to call. And with the right tools, capturing this data from your calls can be easy.

How to get the most from your phone calls with call tracking

Insights like these will become especially important over the next year. As user awareness around data privacy and personal data collection increases, the harder it becomes to capture insights to improve your campaign targeting. While you’ll still be able to gather general insights on platforms like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the more granular – and most valuable – data won’t be as easy to capture.

Using the right call tracking and marketing attribution platform, you can fill these data gaps and understand what campaigns and channels drive your phone calls.

Our own platform, Mediahawk, assigns and tracks a different number for each campaign to tell you the PPC ads your leads clicked on, the keywords that encouraged them, and much more.

This includes information such as call durations, your caller’s approximate location, and your conversions. And unlike on platforms like GA4, where you’d often need to wait 24 hours for data to process, this information is available in real time.

That’s especially useful when you need to make changes to a campaign that’s not working. You’ll often be able to identify issues before they’re flagged to you by someone else, whether it’s a 404 error on your website or a link in your PPC ad going to the wrong location.

Unlocking new insights with call tracking

George Davies Turf offers a prime example of where call tracking is invaluable. The UK’s leading lawn turn supplier receives 95% of its business through calls and needed to understand where its sales were coming from.

Using Mediahawk’s call tracking solution, the company can easily see which marketing channels and campaigns drive its lead generation, and accurately link revenue to the exact source it originated from.

Get to know your leads even further with Speech Analytics

Once you’ve identified what’s making people call your business, you can see what they’re actually calling about.

Mediahawk’s Speech Analytics feature can help you pick out specific information from your phone conversations in real time.

You can identify common words and phrases that come up in conversations – or that indicate a caller is a lead – and use this information to adapt your PPC strategy.

For example, say you’re a service-based company that’s creating a new marketing strategy for the next quarter and trying to improve the performance of your PPC ads. With speech analytics, you’d be able to identify that people who call your brand frequently ask: “Do you offer trials?”. With this information, you’d be able to update your PPC ads to say, “Free trials available,” to potentially attract more enquiries.

Similarly, if you notice that most callers who convert ask about annual subscription prices in their conversations, you’d be able to tag future callers who mention this topic as high-intent leads.

“Beyond simply identifying keywords, we uncovered valuable trends and patterns in customer enquiries and objections.” says Victoria Markianos, Google PPC Specialist at Springup PR. “This has enabled us to tailor our campaigns and offerings more effectively, ultimately improving our conversion rates.”

“Beyond simply identifying keywords, we uncovered valuable trends and patterns in customer enquiries and objections. This has enabled us to tailor our campaigns and offerings more effectively, ultimately improving our conversion rates.”
– Victoria Markianos, Google PPC Specialist, Springup PR

Turn your data into actionable insights

Getting the information from your phone calls is just half the challenge – you also need to know how to apply it.

Mediahawk’s reporting features make it easy to view, understand, and manage your data. They can help you map the entire customer journey and generate the insights you need to inform future campaigns.

Some of the most helpful reports in Mediahawk include:

• The ‘source flow’ report – This report shows all the marketing sources that contributed to a conversion, and the channel the lead converted on. In the same report, you can also see sources that contributed to the revenue – and if Sales Matching is enabled, the optimum visitor journey for sales.
• The ‘visitors’ report – Here you’ll see the entire visitor journey for everyone who visits your website. It offers granular insights you can’t get from GA4, including how the lead found you, what content they interacted with on your website, and when paired with Sales Matching, which marketing sources contributed to sales.
• The ‘paid campaigns’ report – This report allows you to compare PPC campaigns across Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising (Bing), and Facebook Ads on one screen. From here, you can easily compare data like calls, visits, ad spend, and sales across all three platforms to see which campaigns and platforms are performing best.

With multiple ways to dig into your data, it becomes much easier to spot patterns across your campaigns that tell you how well your efforts are working.

“Another feature that’s particularly useful in Mediahawk is Parameter Connect – it allows you to pivot data in any way you want,” adds Faye.
“It’s a great way to compare PPC performance on big ad platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising , and Facebook Ads with other paid channels, such as LinkedIn, X, Instagram and TikTok.”

Conclusion

Having the right foundation of data on your marketing efforts can help you build an accurate understanding of what tactics help lead generation – and what’s wasting your budget.

Book your free demo of Mediahawk, where we’ll show you how to unlock new insights around your leads and make your first step to boosting your conversions.