Call Tracking UK

How do we measure the Return on Investment from Social Media?

2012-02-24T06:32:00.003-08:00

Following on from my blog on Wednesday “The Rise in Social Media… But what does it mean to Marketers?” We will now investigate how we measure the ROI on Social Media Marketing.

One of the biggest challenges social media faces is the question of return on investment. If marketing budgets are going to fund a social media campaign or presence, what will be the return?

Many marketers struggle to quantify fans and followers. To determine how social media can help achieve your business goals, you must set your own objectives and what you expect to see back on your ROI. The success will then be measured with how well you achieve them.

Here are a few key ways you can track your ROI using Social media:

Building your brand recognition

Social networking can help build your brand recognition simply by the number of followers or fans who see your regular updates on a regular basis. If you have a consistent growth in the number of followers and fans which resulted in reading regular updates with good content, then the visibility of your brand is being recognised by more people.

Increased number of calls (call tracking)

Marketers are given a unique telephone number for each social media channel in their marketing campaign (or even each tweet) which enables the marketer to capture and measure telephone leads in a report in a similar format to Google Analytics.

If the number of telephone calls has increased during particular social media campaign to a particular call tracking number you can tell which campaigns or tweets are working best. It is also a key tool in helping to target the right market with the right message which in the long run saves time and money.

Loyalty

How often do your fans comment on your posts and blogs? Instead of focusing on the numbers of fans and followers, how responsive are they? The more fans and followers that comment and re-tweet the more your brand will be recognised by other businesses which will in turn create more opportunities.

Promotions

Sales promotions can be extremely successful on twitter and other social networking sites and can increase sales revenue and brand recognition. These can be measured by all that is mentioned above; increase in number of followers or fans, number of re-tweets or comments and number of calls or call tracking calls.

For any more information about call tracking please give me call or send me an email or even better tweet me or leave a comment! I will do my best to respond straight away.

Laura Baxter

www.mediahawk.co.uk

@laurabaxter

0845 122 2213

The Rise in Social Media...But What Does It Mean To Marketers?

2012-02-22T01:29:00.005-08:00

Over the last few weeks I have been engaging our social media campaign here at Mediahawk and it’s got me asking to myself, "how many people are actually using social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and linkedin?"

Whether its from a marketing perspective or its purely for personal use one in nine of us in the world are regularly logging into Facebook. Facebook has over 600 million users with people like you and me spending 700 billion minutes per month using the site. 250 million people alone are accessing the site through their mobile devices.

Twitter is also dramatically on the rise with an average 500,000 more users joining the site every day and tweeting on average 190 million times a day!

With figures like these its easy to see that social media is increasingly becoming an important part of the marketing mix. With so many users it really isnt something that marketers should be missing out on.

The 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, is an annual report surveying marketers about the role and application of social media in marketing. 2011's report surveyed more than 3,300 marketers and came out with some very interesting results including:

1. 90% of Marketers indicated that social media is important for their business.

2. Only one-third of social media marketers want to know how to monitor and measure the return of investment of social media.

3. 58% of marketers use social media for 6 hours or more each week.

4. 77% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing in 2011.

5. 70% of marketers want to learn more about Facebook.

Please click on this link to view the entire report: 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report

Later this week I shall be exploring in more detail the facts and figures that relate to all things social media, how social media is linked to the way we market our products/services and in particularly how Mediahawk can form an important part of this marketing mix.

Keep looking on here for updates and feel free to leave your comments!

If you are not already doing so please follow Mediahawk on twitter @mediahawk and like our facebook page!

Laura Baxter
@laurabaxter

Valentine’s Day… Is it just an excuse for bare faced commercialism?

2012-02-14T08:12:00.000-08:00

Yes its Valentine’s day! That special day that you get to show your loved ones exactly what they mean to you. You usually buy presents for each other, or you go out for dinner. Either way you will probably spend something on Valentines Day. People spend thousands every year on February 14th to make sure that their special someone feels loved and wanted.

But is it really just a day that is commercialised by the marketer as an excuse for promotional activities within our businesses? If there is an opportunity to talk to people, whether they are potential customers or current ones, we should not miss out on this opportunity in communicating with them.

Today we have sent out this rather fun game to our client base http://www.mediahawk.co.uk/valentine/ have a go and see how many you can score!

Whether or not Valentines Day is just a day to show your loved ones what they mean to you, or if it is a chance for marketers to promote to their customers, I for one will not be missing out on either opportunity.

Laura Baxter

Everything you need to know about call tracking

2012-01-18T06:32:00.000-08:00

Call tracking does the following:

1. Fills the gap in your analytics

Call tracking will give you the full picture when it comes to assessing how successful your online campaigns have been. Rather than judging the success of a campaign on the online conversions, look at the offline activity and close the loop in your analytics reporting.

2. Integrates with Google Analytics

View your offline and online conversions in the same analytics package. Website call tracking works in tandem with Google Analytics and to this end you can view your web activity and calls as a result of web activity in one place. Set up calls as goals and track back to the referring URL and keyword search to identify the original source of the call.

3. Displays a unique telephone number according to the keyword or URL source

Assign a call tracking telephone number to each keyword you advertise against and this number will display on your website every time a visitor clicks through to your site after searching using that keyword.

Keyword search: "hotels bristol"

Google result: Your PPC advert for a hotel in bristol

Visitor clicks through to your website

Website call tracking number is displayed on your site

By looking at the reporting you can see that the keyword "hotels bristol" resulted in a telephone call

4. Provides you with in-depth reporting to ensure you are spending money on the right marketing activity

Call tracking gives you a clear view into how many calls you received for a particular campaign, where those calls came from and how long they lasted. You can drill down to get concise information on which keywords are resulting in telephone calls and what URLs are sending traffic to your site that results in offline enquiries.

5. Provides you with an easy to use inexpensive way to save money on marketing

From less that £10 per month call tracking will help you to see which advertising is working and give you the information you need to cut out what doesn't. You can really focuss your marketing activity on what brings in quality leads and sales.

Are you capturing every conversion from PPC?

2012-01-18T03:33:00.000-08:00

Pay per click advertising is a vital element in any marketing campaign. The conversion rate is an important way to assess the success of the campaign and its particular keywords. As this form of advertising is online and will predominantly focus on driving new clients to the website, the tendancy is to concentrate on online conversions. When assessing the activity levels and conversion rates the web traffic and click throughs will be the main indicator of how successful the campaign has been.

However, depending on the nature of the business and what it advertises, there is a large element missing when it comes to capturing responses. Measuring the offline activity in the form of telephone calls using website call tracking, will enable the marketer to get the whole response picture and provide more accurate figures when it comes to return on investment.

Website call tracking is the activity of allocating telephone numbers to specific keywords and referring urls. The visitor searches using the keyword "hotels bristol" and clicks on your PPC advert. The click takes them through to the website and there they will see all the information they need as well as a specific telephone number allocated to that particuler keyword. When the marketer comes to analyse the results, they can see which keyword generated a telephone call.

In a nutshell, website call tracking is a vital element when it comes to providing the full picture of response analysis.

Track Calls as Goals in Google Analytics

2011-09-13T08:38:00.000-07:00

Now you can track calls as goals when you integrate call tracking with Google Analytics. With a Mediahawk call tracking account, you can track every call and view it as a goal in your GA account.

Monitor every time a call comes in from a ppc advert or natural search using call tracking. The integrating with Google Analytics is simple and works seamlessly alongside your website analytics to give you the full picture of the impact your marketing is having.

Try call tracking free for six weeks and you will wonder how you managed without it.

Using call recording to monitor telemarketing campaigns

2011-09-05T05:59:00.000-07:00

Call recording can be used to monitor the effectiveness of your latest telemarketing campaign. Measuring how many outbound calls are being made as well as listening to the quality of those calls is essential if your business uses this medium to gain vital touch points with new markets.

Listening to the calls made will give you an insight into how your team are engaging with potential new clients. It is often better to improve the quality of the calls rather than the quantity, depending on your business. Call recording is very simple to use and can be accessed online through any pc or laptop at any time of the day or night. The outbound call recording function is on demand and as such all you need to do is type in a code prior to making a call and that call will be recorded. This makes it especially functional for field based workers as they can use the system in a home office as well as your head office.

Outbound call recording on demand

2011-07-20T07:16:00.000-07:00

Outbound call recording on demand is an exciting new addition to the Mediahawk portfolio of call tracking and recording products. This touch of a button technology is set to revolutionise the way sales and customer service teams are monitored.

The technology works in the cloud and can therefore be used and accessed anywhere on any telephone or PC. Call recording on demand can be used as and when required and the recording of the calls can be paused mid recording if sensitive information such as credit card details are being given.

To register for outbound call recording please visit the website.

Call Queuing is now live!

2011-07-04T03:47:00.000-07:00

Call queuing has just been launched. If you have peak calling periods when your customers are reaching the engaged tone, you need to try call queuing to keep your callers from hanging up and calling someone else.

Call queuing will allow your business to increase the number of telephone calls that come through by placing callers in a queue. Whilst in the queue, the caller will be exposed to your brand messages and given a clear idea of how long they will be in the queue.

Call queuing is currently available to existing clients using a call tracking account. To find out more about this exciting development please call us on 0844 253 5880 or visit the website.

Telephone Call Tracking for Adwords

2011-05-24T04:17:00.000-07:00

How do you currently monitor the response you get from Adwords? Do you measure the number of telephone calls your PPC adverts have received? If you don’t measure the number of calls you get from online advertising, you may have been missing out on a whole stream of leads that were assigned to another form of marketing. This will have an adverse affect on planning and may result in you decrease the budget on a successful form of advertising.

How does it work?

Measuring the telephone response to online advertising is as straightforward as using Google Analytics. Every advert you wish to track gets a unique telephone number assigned to it, you can also track at keyword level. When a potential client clicks on your advert and gets through to your website, that telephone number will appear on your site.

• Set up campaigns for PPC
• Identify web visitors that make a telephone call
• Capture the clients that research online

Once the visitor calls this number it is tracked and you will be able to see which keyword they typed in and what advert they clicked on to get to your website and eventually make a call. If you are measuring this type of activity you will get a much clearer picture of how your leads found you and why they made contact. When you are analysing your marketing campaigns you will know where every lead has been generated from and which adverts are worth booking and spending vital ad budget on.

The marketer’s checklist

As a busy marketer it is vital to have a clear understanding of where your responses are coming from. With numerous routes to make contact with you as a business, it is more difficult to get a definitive picture of exactly which adverts made the telephone ring.

• Assign call tracking telephone numbers to every form of marketing
• Set up reporting to enable clear analysis of every campaign
• Identify the criteria you wish to capture (location, keyword, source etc.)

You can work out cost per lead from each advert type and from this information understand how important it is to have a good sales process in place. Ensure that your sales team are handling the inbound telephone leads in the right way. Set up call recording to play back calls and assess the standard of your in-house enquiry handling.

Overall, it is vital to have a clear idea which advertising is generating the leads that turn into sales. By setting up a call tracking solution to capture these leads you will be able to identify which adverts are generating the most leads.

Mediahawk

Google Call Metrics - Awaiting Launch

2011-05-03T02:32:00.000-07:00

It will be interesting to see how the launch of Google Call Metrics will affect the call tracking providers in the US. The product is currently only available in the US and not launching there until May 16. Call tracking is such a useful product to have, especially when marketing online as clients demand a choice of options when it comes to making contact. Depending on what business you are in, the telephone always remains top or near to the top when it comes to response.

If you are not tracking the callers you get from PPC and other online channels, prefering to focus on web contacts, you maybe misjudging your audience. If you track your callers from this activity, you can accurately market, improving your ROI and increasing sales as a result.

Call tracking made simple

2011-03-29T03:08:00.000-07:00

Monitoring the traffic from email marketing and referrals to your website is relatively simple. The major hurdle for the majority of marketers is measuring the offline responses to online activity. Most consumer organisations still receive the majority of their enquiries via the telephone so therefore it is vital to include this response mechanism.

To help you measure your offline responses here are some easy to set up tracking options to suit your next campaign:

1. Call Tracking Telephone Numbers

Call tracking telephone numbers are specific telephone numbers inserted into an advertisement, direct mail flyer, email, website, Google advert or any other form of promotion or advertising that requires a response. These telephone numbers are routed over your existing phone line and will be answered in the same way. The telephone number is monitored to measure how many calls have come in, how long they lasted, how many rings it took to be answered and where in the country the call came from. Any unanswered calls are also picked up.

2. Dynamic Numbers(Pay Per Click Call Tracking)

Dynamic numbers are a great way to measure telephone responses from marketing such as pay per click advertising, search engine marketing or banner advertising. A specific telephone number is allocated to each advert in this medium to enable it to be tracked when the user clicks through to your website. This works by changing the number on your website when the customer clicks through from an advert. If the customer telephones you the call is captured and can therefore be measured as an offline lead from online marketing.

For those of you engaging an SEO expert to raise your position on the search engines, this tool is vital. It measures the offline responses as this form of response to this type of marketing is rarely monitored correctly and can end up costing you thousands of pounds in wasted money. It is vital to measure offline response using call tracking as online marketing doesn’t just result in filled out web forms.

3. Call Tracking Reporting

If you need to justify your marketing spend and demonstrate ROI, call tracking reporting is essential. Allocating specific telephone numbers is the start of this process, using reporting that you can drill down to get the information you want is the next step. Analyse your data by date, time, and duration of call, duration of ring, channel, media group, and campaign. See clearly the cost per lead, how many calls were unanswered and where in the country your customers are calling from. Depending of the type of business you run, you will have different uses for the reporting. If you want to clearly identify the ROI of your marketing budget, right down to cost per lead, having reporting in black and white to justify your marketing decisions is essential.

4. ROI on Sales

Its one thing measuring the ROI on your marketing efforts to justify your spending patterns; but how successful have your ads been in terms of actual sales? Linking up your database with a call tracking reporting system is the Holy Grail in terms of sales management. Simple to achieve and extremely worthwhile when planning future marketing campaigns; call tracking ROI measurement is the next step on from call tracking and will give you the control you need during an ever changing climate.

5. Call Recording

If your marketing is going well and you have a steady stream of traffic resulting in enquiries from your website why are you not converting? How are your sales team performing? Are you listening to how they speak to customers? Isn’t it time you did? You can record your calls that are coming in as a result of your marketing activity using a simple network level call recording system. The best system is one that works with your existing call tracking reporting tool.

6. Referral Scheme

If you are a direct marketing, digital or SEO agency why not suggest to your clients that they use call tracking to measure the effectiveness of their marketing both on and offline. This benefits you in two ways; firstly you will be able to show clients that the hard work you have been putting into their marketing campaigns is paying off. Secondly we will pay you commission for every client you refer to us for call tracking.

To find out more about call tracking, call recording or dynamic numbers, please call us or visit the website.

Improve sales conversions

2011-03-28T05:34:00.000-07:00

If your latest marketing campaign has been successful, pat yourself on the back. What is your conversion rate like? Not as good? How do you maximise on the success of your marketing activty and really get the most from every lead that comes into the business. If they are not being converted, why not? Are they getting quotes from you and then using the competition, is there a reason why? Don't waste the hard work spent on getting them to contact you in the first place, understand why these enquiries are not converting. In this post I will give you some tips on how to train your staff to improve conversions as well as gaining a better understanding of why enquires are different now and your sales team need to adapt to the change.

1. Call tracking

Are you aware of where your enquiries are coming from? Do you track your results from the internet, direct mail, advertising and email marketing? This is the first place to start when looking at increasing conversions; understanding the lead and capturing it. Measure your results from marketing using a call tracking program. Allocate an 08, 03 or local presence phone number to all your marketing material. This way you can measure the success of your marketing activity and have an understanding of where your leads are coming from. Use an analytics program to measure your internet enquiries and traffic. Google offer a free analytics program to do this and it will help you to monitor your leads.

2.CRM

Make sure all leads that come into the business are entered onto a CRM system. Identify the source (this is where call tracking and analytics comes in). Enter all the actions that have taken place against this lead and note a date for follow-up. These simple measures will ensure that all leads stay front of mind and are not lost during busier periods.

3.Call recording

Use a call recording system to record all your inbound telephone enquiries. You can get either an external box system or an online network level program that plays the recording back through your desktop. The big advantage of having this in place is that telephone calls that come in off the back of marketing activity can be recording and listened to at your desk or used in a training room as either a good or bad example of a sales call.

Call recording is a very useful way of gaining insight into how your sales team are performing and it can be used to demonstrate bad habits and make improvements. General observations when listening to sales calls are that the sales person is busy and not concentrating on the caller. Also, the caller tends to have been passed around and left on hold for a while. These issues are very simple to iron out but from a top level perspective, impossible to guauge on a daya to day basis without listening to calls first hand.

4.Follow-up

How long does it take for a lead to be contacted - 24 hours, 48 hours, a week, never? I received an email a few weeks ago from a company with a great product at what seemed to a good price. I responded to company within five minutes of receiving the email. I am still waiting for a response, they are still sending me emails. I bought the same product from a competitor in the end. What a waste of time and money. If that company worked out the cost per lead on that activity and didn't contact other responders they could have lost hundreds in marketing spend and potentially thousands in lost revenue.

Have a stringent process in place, set an auto-responder email if your enquiries come in this way. It just has to say, thank you for your enquiry, we will be in touch with you shortly. Ring or email the customer within four hours or less. If a telephone call comes in and the sales team are busy don't put the person on hold unless they request it. Take their details and arrange for someone to call back within 30 minutes or less. In the age of the internet, timing is everything as whilst your caller is waiting for you to ring them back they'll be online looking for the next company to call. If they call and get to speak to someone straight away, you may have lost a sale.

5.Keep in touch

Ensure that all your leads are regularly mailed and called with offers from your business. They may have decided not to buy from you on this occaision or have postponed their purchase for a few months. Be there when they decided to buy again. Keep your name in thier conciousness and you won't have wasted your marketing spend.

For more information on Mediahawk please visit the website

Free Trial of Call Tracking

2011-03-28T05:30:00.000-07:00

Try call tracking for six weeks and you'll wonder how you lived without it.

We will give you two free 0844 call tracking telephone numbers for six weeks. Once the trial is over and you decide to continue with your account, you can keep those numbers or change them for new ones.

Fill out the form on our main website and get started today!

Identify the biggest players in your ad team with call tracking

2011-03-28T05:26:00.000-07:00

Find out which adverts are generating the most response. Use website call tracking to identify how many telephone calls are coming in from google adwords.

Allocate specific telephone numbers to certain keywords

Apply code to your website to make your telephone number change when a click through happens

Find out how many click through's resulted in calls

Simple yet extremely valuable to anyone wishing to pinpoint exactly which advertising is generating leads.

Find out more on our main site.

Digital Agency? How do you currently measure offline responses?

2011-03-28T05:20:00.000-07:00

When planning a digital campaign for a client, how will you report back on response rates? Which tools will you use to measure the click throughs, calls and emails? If you haven't thought this far ahead then I suggest you start thinking about it now as there is a glaring issue when it comes to reporting on the response rates of digital campaigns. The humble telephone call is being ignored as a response mechanism. The online nature of a digital campaign is such that even the traditionality of the response route has been replaced by web forms and emails.

As an agency you will endeavour to provide your client with a good hit rate at the end of the campaign. Depending upon the nature of the business you service, is a report using analytics and email marketing statistics enough to provide a clear picture of how the campaign performed? If you allow the client to decide which telephone calls they think came as a direct result of your digital campaign you may be dissapointed. Unless you take on board the role of response measurement in all it's guises you may be giving your client only half the picture of how successful your campaign was.

By using call tracking to analyse the offline results to your campaign, you will be plugging in this gap and taking control of the responses. Allocating a simple 08, 03 or local presence telephone to the next email, banner ad, website or pay per click, campaign you can get a clear picture of how many people picked up the telephone in response to your campaign. In an average campaign of this nature you are looking at a telephone response of about 63% depending on the sector. That is a large chunk to lose in terms of results for your client. If your digital marketing analysis is missing 63% of the results, you may find it hard to convince your client of the real success the campaign was. Providing your client with only 37% results will not get you a second campaign.

Visit our main site for more information about becoming a call tracking reseller.