How Call Tracking Can Dramatically Affect Your Trade Show ROI
Call tracking allows you to maximize your trade show spend
Call tracking gives Brokers and Carriers the information they need to optimize their marketing strategies. Many businesses waste money on inefficient marketing because they don’t know where their customers come from. Call tracking gives you the information to change that. It allows you to increase your profit margins and dramatically affect your return on investment (ROI).
The Importance of ROI
Your ROI is the most important figure you have when it comes to marketing. If you spend more on a campaign than it returns in sales, then you’ve thrown money away. That seems pretty obvious, right?
The problem is that ROI is an incredibly difficult figure to accurately measure. As a result, we are often left to our instincts about which campaign was a success, or what is worth repeating.
You could be wasting money on beautifully designed ads, or expensive trade show sponsorships: Without an accurate ROI, it’s impossible to know if it was worth it.
How much did your company invest to sponsor this event? Did you pay pay double for 'opportunity' to speak? Did it pay off?
Effective marketing strategies make use of a range of campaigns across online and offline media. For those of us with a long sales cycle, awareness and content drip campaigns are even more difficult to measure. So, when a customer does get in touch you have need a way of tracking that call back to the event or ad responsible.
How are you to know if your conference sponsorship is generating more sales than your LinkedIn sponsored content? Without this information, it’s impossible to optimize your marketing strategy. You have no way of knowing which campaigns are most profitable.
Even if your overall ROI looks good, you could still be losing money every month on marketing that fails to cover its costs.
That’s where call tracking comes in.
How Call Tracking Can Help
A service that tracks the calls to your business can tell if your trade show dollars have been well spent. They work by creating unique phone numbers for each of your adverts — so the number on your billboard is different to the number on your landing page. For trade shows, you can produce a unique contact number for each event and directly relate the leads generated to specific trade shows. Call tracking services redirect everything to your business.
Call tracking services allow you to stay focused on the customer: By redirecting calls to your business you can deliver excellent service and track your marketing success.
The wealth of data provided — including the option for call recordings — gives businesses a valuable insight into the behaviors and attitudes of their audience, such as:
What benefits matter most to customers
Which adverts made them pick up the phone
Where they look to find new products and services
By analyzing the source of these calls, it’s possible to uncover the ROI for specific events. You will see trends emerge about more than just the volume of calls. You will start to see that the attendees at one trade show were more interested in your billing technology than products, or that attendees at a breakout session were more likely to call with follow up questions. You’ll receive regular reports that detail the number of leads and the conversion rate from each campaign, allowing you to optimize your strategy going forward. Next year, when it is time to register for that trade show, you can decide what you are willing to spend based on the real results, not the hype.
"But We Already Have Online Analytics."
Online advertising offers some data on the performance of your marketing: impressions, clicks, and conversion rates. However, this information tells only half of the story. It ignores customers who see your adverts online and decide to call you directly. It also provides zero data on your marketing efforts offline. During a trade show, you may see a spike in web traffic. Pairing that data wit your call tracking can show you a fuller picture of your trade show impact. This leads to incomplete ROI figures that misinform your financial decisions.
A call tracking service clears the muddied waters. You learn exactly how your customers found you and which adverts are most profitable. This information makes it easy to know how to alter your marketing strategy to dramatically improve your ROI.