Call Management

New Year, New You? 3 Easy Steps to Owning this Year

January 10, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

(FREE downloadable team meeting slide deck!)

It’s the same ol’ January tune – here’s how to stay true to your resolutions to truly better your business.

The New Year is always a great time to reflect and refresh. The December holidays are over, where you filled up on goodies and spent time with those closest to you. Now there are no excuses to put your best foot forward towards any and all improvement – personal and business related.

Of course, here we are going to focus on your business-related New Year resolutions—because that’s why CallSource is here! Each of our clients has dedicated representatives to help them with their particular goals (and even help them find out what their goals should be depending on their data) – but you have obviously come here for the same kind of help, and I am going to deliver for you. Ready to make 2018 your standout year? Let’s go!

Step 1: Set Goals

As a business owner or manager, hopefully, you already set specific short and long-term goals for your company. You may even have specific goals per department, per quarter, per year, etc. If you don’t have any specific goal(s) to be working towards, it’s easy to get stuck in the day-to-day.

While being “busy” in these daily monotonous tasks may feel like you accomplished something by the end of the day, in reality, this is not helping you. Being busy doesn’t necessarily mean that you are accomplishing goals and growing your business.

To keep moving forward and be better, you have to make sure every aspect of your company is performing better.

And to perform better, you have to be reaching towards something other than the average, every day reactive processes.

Goal setting is a proactive process which requires preemptive thinking, managing, and performance.

It’s easy to get stuck in the reactive nature of the job—but instead of just answering the phone, putting out figurative fires, completing necessary paperwork or whatever your daily tasks may be, be sure to stop and get out of your comfort zone to work on improving your business.

CallSource’s Business Advisors always make sure to ask clients, especially new clients, what their goals are. What are they looking for insight into by working with us, and what are they working towards?

The most common answer anyone can say is: “We want to be better.”

OK—good start—but what does it take to actually get better?

Well, it takes an effort on your part as the business owner or manager, as well as the effort from your employees.

Don’t just set a goal to “be better.” See where you are at right now, and set up a timeline on processes to improve.

Be specific about your goals and communicate these goals to your team by having regular meetings, posting them in the break room or a bulletin board, on TVs, or whatever works for you.

You will need to create realistic goals.

You will need to create short-term and long-term goals.

An unrealistic goal is to say that you want your team to book 100% of appointments. A realistic goal is to say that your team is currently setting appointments at a conversion rate of 60%, and you’d like to see that improve to 75%.

Now, it is not realistic to say you want your employees to make this improvement in one month. But by setting smaller, short-term goals to reach this long-term goal, that is where you are creating successful goals.

Your team should be consistently reminded of their goals as well as their progress. Make sure to check in with regular updates. Take your goals a day, week, and month at a time.

Which leads me to step 2…

Step 2: Follow Through & Follow Up on Said Goals

It is true that slow and steady wins the race—it just takes consistent, daily, proactive effort.

via GIPHY

So what should you be doing consistently to stay true to your goals?

Daily

Ensure your employees are staying on track with their goals as well as that you are. Block off at least 30 minutes to an hour on your calendar for proactive tasks so that you aren’t getting stuck in those hypothetical fires every day.

Weekly

If you can’t swing a weekly meeting with your employees, at least make sure to get a weekly roundup from them on what they’re working on and how it aligns with the long-term goals that were set. If you are using CallSource or any call tracking and digital attribution platform, check your data at least on a weekly basis so you can see who is improving and where there may be any setbacks to address before they start declining even more.

Monthly

You need to be having meetings with your team a minimum of once a month – period. If you want to make sure you are achieving the goals you set out, it is imperative that you are proactive in staying on track and addressing any holdups. These meetings should be looking at data and updating the team on their progress – the good and the bad. Give kudos where deserved, and highlight areas that need to be improved as well.

If you need help deciding what kind of data you should be sharing with your team, download our free team meeting slide deck here.

Always

In between all of these days, just be sure to stay cognizant of the goals you set and staying on track with meeting those goals. Write them on sticky notes at your desk, post them in the breakroom, have a poster board in your office—find ways to keep them in the forefront of yours and your employees’ mind. Don’t worry about over communicating – you want everyone to be able to recite their goals back at a moment’s notice. The only way you are going to achieve above and beyond what you previously have is to be a bit obsessed with the outcome.

Step 3: Repeat, Ad Nauseam

The above notes do not only apply to January – remember – they are for the whole year through! The more consistent you stay, the easier it will get. Sure, you will have slip-ups and setbacks, but such is life.

Just like when dieting they say one salad will not make you lose weight just as one unhealthy meal will make you gain weight, having a bad day here or there where you perhaps get off track of your goals is not going to ruin everything. As long as you get back on track the next day with you proactive measures, checking in with employees, etc., you are setting yourself up for success.

If you are ready to start not only setting realistic goals but ready to follow through on these as well and have regular progress updates, we here at CallSource are ready to help you. Download our free team meeting slide deck for better communication with your team. Also feel free to subscribe to our blog for more insights, or speak to a representative today on how you can get your personalized improvement plan for your business.

How Do I Track My Customers on My Competitor’s Website?

December 22, 2017 by Kevin Dieny Leave a Comment

I’ve recently finished publishing the #DigitalAI campaign showing off Digital AI, and it’s been well received. Inspired by the desire to track consumers onto competitor websites, Digital AI was born. For this post, I am going to review the history of the Digital AI product and the tools it provides to enable you to track your customers onto competitor websites. The topic has been written about a lot, and I intend on adding additional clarity. If digital tracking, dynamic numbers, and tracking consumers who defect from your website is something you want, sign up to learn some more.

Tracking customers on your competitor’s website.

You can deploy certain tricks to track users across domains, devices, browsers, and time but there are limitations in tracking codes. Since you are limited to what you are currently using, let’s attempt to solve the problem of tracking consumers onto your competitor’s website with what you are already using. Before going down this rabbit hole, I want to add that we offer a solution for this, packaged up and ready to go, called Digital AI.

The fundamental problem with competitor tracking is ownership.

Since all the tracking codes embedded on websites all over the web are running all the time, you’d think that there would be a way to find out what happened after consumers leave your website. The short answer, sorry… you don’t get to see it. Why? You see, the reason you do not get to know is that you may only see data from tracking codes that you own and utilize. It would require you to have your tracking code installed on every website to get all of that tracking data.

Frustrating, right?

Well, then how do websites obtain competitor data? At least for now, as of writing this, everyone’s information is considered private. The web browsing data across the internet is tracked by dozens of big data companies who have access to every businesses’ competition, but that information is protected by privacy laws.

For the most part, an individual’s data is private, secure, and encrypted. When large data queries are made to analyze the data and pull out insights into competitor’s, every user is made as anonymous as footprints in the snow. This means that marketing research and analytics tools can have access to trackable data, but at a steep price for those with deep pockets and access.

Here are the basic steps you can follow to widen your tracking capability:

Switch to a Tag or Code or Pixel Manager
Utilize Cross Domain Tracking
Improve The Quality of Data with Custom Dimensions

1. Switch to a Tag or Code or Pixel Manager

The most common manager is Google’s Tag Manager. I will refer to this as that is what I have been using for years and it allows me to make manageable changes and customizations to a vast amount of websites.

I would recommend that you take the time to set it up with the best practices of implementation including conventions, standards, protocols, etc. The result will be a single-stop-shop of all things tracking.

2. Utilize Cross-Domain Tracking

I will again reference this regarding Google Tag Manager because that is what I have been using and what I know best. Before you can start utilizing Cross Domain information you need to set up your tracking code to allow for it. You’d want Cross Domain tracking if you want to track individual users that hop around on your websites. The alternative is that every visit will be seen as a unique user and your traffic numbers will be inflated with artifacts.

Within Google Tag Manager, using the newer interface of creating a Google Analytics Settings Variable, you will see the Tracking ID field, and the Cookie Domain field, at the beginning of creation. I am skipping beginner steps here to focus on the ability to implement cross-domain tracking between websites you own and have tracking codes on.

The setup for one of our variables may look familiar. The value you want to consider is the cookie domain field, entered as “auto.” Second, you will drop down More Settings, and Fields to Set to allow inter-linking as shown below:

In the field value, type “allowLinker” or select it from the list that will appear. Enter “true” for the value. Now you are ready to add your referral websites. I will give you a shortcut after I explain.

Referral lists are the URLs of the websites that you own with tracking codes that will be sending traffic between them. This is done to facilitate the cross-domain transfer of individual users between the sites you list. So gather up the list of your websites and write them down. We are going to add them to a constant in Google Tag Manager.

The final field in the Google Analytics Variable is the Auto Link Domains field. Here you will click the grey “add” block on the right and add a constant. In the constant value add all of your website domains and subdomains one after another, separated by commas. Example: “callsource.com, marketing.callsource.com.”

Taking control of your Cross Domain tracking ends inside your Google Analytics. Navigate to your Google Analytics, and within each website, you need to add referrals to all the others.

This sounds tedious. It is.

There are workarounds, but this is the manual approach.

The referral exclusion list is located in your administrative panel, under the property, and finally nested under Tracking Info. I feel for you if you have over a hundred websites, I really do. For most of us, there might only be one to twenty websites to add and keep track of.

Once you have added all of your websites here that could be sending traffic, you are done. You should be tracking multiple sites now and that traffic will not fall under referrals and will be associated across domains that you own. It’s a work of beauty.

3. Improve The Quality of Tracking Data with Custom Dimensions

This final step is a deep-dive, and if it’s worth the effort for you to learn this, I would ask why you haven’t considered trying out Digital AI. I need to add that this last section contains information that I am sourcing from a heavy hitter in the analytics industry named Simo Ahava.

I will summarize and interpret the information from his extensive post for you. Essentially, there are ways to log extra data into your google analytics that will be useful in adding depth and dimension that is unprecedented.

Custom Dimensions are fields that can exist in Google Analytics with values that you set, without requiring the API. Instead, we can use Google Analytics to run scripts and generate values from the information that is scraped off the cookie and page and inject it into the tracking code. These custom dimensions will then show up on your dashboard after a few days, and you can run reports on it.

The 4 Custom Dimensions that Simo refers to are:

Client ID
Session ID
Hit Timestamp
User ID

Client ID

The Client ID is based on the session metric that is a value already created by Google Analytics. Google Tag Manager can be set up to extract this value and added to the Custom Dimension. Gathering it does require custom JavaScript and loading triggers based on events… so it’s somewhat complicated. Unless you have it in a custom dimension, you cannot pull this data out of Google Analytics or filter it in any way since it is not exposed on the front end.

You would want to know this to get more detailed session information out of your users. Do not go through the trouble of getting this unless you plan on utilizing it. This leads us to the next Custom Dimension…

Session ID

The Session ID is also based on the session metric but is randomized in the way Simo is using it. The values are grouped into sessions, but they blend together in the front end. The only way to identify if two distinct visits belong to the same session is to ungroup these sessions.

Hit Timestamp

Unlike the two Custom Dimensions before it, this dimension is hit-scoped, meaning it will be based on logged in visitors. Simo points out that this is done for privacy reasons so that I would stick with a hit-scoped method. The hit scope does require users to be logged in when they are visiting to get these metrics. You may be able to get this information by switching to a session or user-scoped view, but that is a “grey area,” as Simo says.

This value is found in Google Analytics but is not passed into the reporting. The value represents the exact moment that a tracking code is fired. You can use this to verify databases but also to see discrepancies between collected times and reported times.

User ID

The final Custom Dimension is the User ID, from the Universal Analytics tracking that groups together the fires, sessions, and Client IDs. The reason you would add this is to tie everything you have done so far all together. The User ID matches a user to their session and timestamp by the Client ID. If you have a very complex network of web pages… these four methods allow you to merge them into a clearer picture. You should know that users are not the most accurate to begin with, which is why robust solutions are created to clean it up.

In Summary

Check out Digital AI if you want a customized solution that is a white glove and built for you with cross-domain, cross-browser, cross-device, and even cross competitor tracking built in. Avoid having to purchase large ticket competitor research or even highly complex solutions to tracking and tagging.

If you must, I have outlined a detailed way to set up your website tracking for multiple sites of deployment using Google Tag Manager. Also, you’ve been shown how to add cross-domain tracking to your websites using that same tool. Finally, we did a deep dive into Simo Ahava’s solution for cleaning up the artifact-laden User information passed into Google Analytics using Custom Dimensions.

There are elements to help you improve your tracking so you have cleaner data that you can confidently say represents your actual web traffic. You can use this information to validate traffic counts no matter what business or model you deploy. If you have more tips, questions, or want to anything, you want to share? Go ahead and add it to the comments below.

Why You Should Track Phone Calls from Emails, Ads, and Events

December 19, 2017 by Tiffany Reifer-Tran Leave a Comment

When tracking your marketing efforts, it is important to get the full picture of all your marketing pieces.

As a CallSource Business Advisor, it is always interesting to me when clients choose not to track calls for marketing sources for their business. The first question I always ask is “Why don’t you want to track this? Don’t you want to know if the ad source is working?”

So before I tell you about a client who was shocked to find out what tracking these ad sources could do for their business, I will start by saying:

You should track every piece of advertising that is generating calls for your business!

Now that we have that out of the way, let me tell you about a client who was able to reallocate $100,000 within their marketing budget by tracking all client-facing ads including their emails, and events.

Bob and I had been talking for a few weeks about some new ad source deadlines he had coming up. He was adamant that he did not need to track a particular campaign as this specific ad source had been around for years and had always displayed their main office number for its entire run so far. He was convinced that this local publication had branded his company, but I was finally able to persuade him to try tracking it this year.

Since they were marketing for his business all throughout his local area, this truly was a great opportunity to find out his return on investment. Were these local ads really branding his business? That was what we were looking to discover. While I was hoping it was as lucrative as he had believed it to be, I was still skeptical as the ad agency had not been able to provide him with any information on the ad performance. They had essentially created this great bundle for him that seemed too good to be true.

Bob reluctantly agreed to use tracking numbers. He used a unique tracking number for each of the four different ad mediums this company was advertising for him for the entire year. Come to find out at the end of the year; they hadn’t come close to breaking even, never mind making money, on the cost of these ads. These ads brought in fewer than ten new calls for the entire year. Bob was convinced that this local marketing was doing wonders for his company. It hadn’t even scratched the surface of what I would consider a decently performing ad source. This rings especially true— with a $100,000 price tag.

Bob effectively reallocated this money the next year and was able to successfully recoup more than double his ad cost. Bob has not published another marketing piece without a tracking number since. This even includes their office emails. You would be surprised at how many clients call off of those as well. Plus, this allows you the insight into employee performance on these types of calls as well.

I’ve said it before, but I will leave you with this—if it is client facing and has a phone number displayed on it, then you should be tracking it.

If you want your business to succeed, it is vital that you make decisions based on real data, not guesswork or “intuition.” We are serious when we say real data helps businesses make better-informed business decisions. CallSource also has a great support team that looks out for our clients, just like I did with Bob. If I hadn’t convinced him to use tracking numbers, he would still be throwing hard earned money out the window.

If you’re curious to know how CallSource can help you, call (877) 225-5768 and speak to one of our representatives today.

6 Creative Ways to Show Appreciation for Your Customers This Holiday Season

December 11, 2017 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Because your customers shouldn’t be a one-and-done deal, make sure to keep them thinking of you.

As a B2C business, it is always a goal to acquire new customers – but isn’t it also a goal to retain those customers and keep getting returning business from them, too? To keep your customers coming back and choosing you as their go-to car dealer, dentist, HVAC company, or whatever business you’re in, there is something very important you must do that should not be overlooked: customer appreciation.

In fact, if you don’t show your customers how important they are to you, you risk losing them forever. POOF! Gone.

It’s been reported that 68% of customers leave a company because they feel that the business does not care about them. So, what better time than holiday season and the end of the year to make your current customers feel extra special and valued? Here are 6 creative ways to show customer appreciation this month.

Send Some Holiday Cheer

This is probably the most obvious way to show customer appreciation around the holidays – send a holiday greeting card to your existing customers. This one doesn’t even have to be any fancy marketing ploy; just a simple greeting card with holiday wishes will show your customers that you are more than a business – you are their local, personable business. If you can swing it, hand-written signatures will add even more of a personal touch.

Not-So-Secret Santa?

This one may not be a secret – giving a small gift to customers who you do business with during the month of December is a great added touch to your sales. If the customer has to step foot into your business or office for their appointment, give them a candy cane, small gift card, or something branded with your logo that they can keep. Same goes if your business model is one where you visit the customers at their home – give them the small gift, or leave the trinket behind if they are not present, along with a business card.

Be Your Customers’ Christmas Carolers

Although it may be more effort than some of the previously mentioned ideas, creating a short, holiday-themed video to send to clients will really show off your business’ personality and brighten their day. You can re-write some words to a simple song such as “Jingle Bells,” or create your own short song and dance. Have your employees dress in holiday attire for the video shoot, or perhaps create a cartoon version of your company. You can send the video via email to your current customers’ contact emails on file. They will definitely get some enjoyment from the video, and probably think even more positively of you after viewing it.

Host a Holiday Contest – With Rewards

Social media is a great tool to leverage with this customer-appreciation tactic. This one works two-fold as well – get involved with your current customers and show your appreciation for them while simultaneously getting free publicity from them. You can open a contest on Facebook or some form(s) of social media where your customers follow you having them share a photo or status about your company to their followers (holiday themed, of course). Your prize can be a coupon for their next appointment, a gift card towards their next purchase, or perhaps something more solid like an electronic device, toy, or branded swag.

12 Days of Customers

We’ve all heard of the 12 days of Christmas – so why not put a fun spin on that with an opportunity to showcase your love for your current customers? On the 12 day countdown to Christmas, you can highlight a story, photo, or a tidbit about your most rock star customers. If you know their social media profile, try to tag them to get the most reach for your post.

Random Giveaway

Direct mail is a great kind of advertisement to leverage during any holiday season, especially at the end of the year. Send holiday-themed direct mail pieces to your existing clientele, with a special treat for the first 50 customers to respond. Just like with the holiday contest idea on social media, you can give a specific amount off their next purchase with you, have a special prize, or maybe include a scratch-off ticket with specific offers. Whatever you decide to do, make sure to use a tracking number on your piece to see how well your current customer marketing/customer appreciation mail piece performs.

How do you show your customers appreciation, both around holiday time or year-round? Drop us your ideas and successful ways you appreciate your customers in the comments below!

Why Basic Call Tracking Isn’t Enough: Get Deeper Into the Funnel

December 4, 2017 by Tim Tran Leave a Comment

Call tracking is better than having no call attribution at all, but are you using the data to its fullest potential?

Basic call tracking isn’t enough. It is a great first step to track your calls, but a deeper dive into your call data will reveal information that will allow you to maximize not only your marketing efforts but your business as a whole.

Don’t rely on your instincts alone. Leverage your basic call tracking data to help you learn where to focus in on and set goals for improvement. If you need help dissecting any of your data or tips and tricks, subscribe to our blog and or drop us a line on how CallSource can help maximize your call data.

If you have been following our blogs, we’ve talked about how beneficial call tracking is to your business. Basic call tracking provides you with the information regarding whether your ad sources are generating phone calls for your business and if that ad spend was worth it. This is all great information, but there is a wealth of data that you can use for your business that you might not even be considering.

Taking a deeper dive into your data

Call Volume
When we talk about tracking calls, the first thing we think about is call volume. We know it may be hard to expect your business to answer all calls that come in every day if you have a higher than average call volume, but know that there is potential revenue tied to any calls that do go unanswered during normal business hours. By understanding that there is ebb and flow or trend in your call traffic, you can utilize the call tracking data to maximize staff scheduling for those peak times and create a follow-up plan for missed calls.

If a lot of calls are consistently being missed, that is a different story than just regular ebb and flow. Besides following up on missed calls, ask yourself if it makes sense to add more call handlers to your team? Can schedules be rearranged? Take a look at your call volume data to make data-driven decisions to maximize your business’s profitability.

Call Attribution
The next step in focusing on your call tracking is to examine the calls that were connected and answered by your business and categorize each call by their caller attribution. Doing this allows clearer view of which ad sources are bringing in actual revenue-generating prospects and which ones are not.

This will provide an overall view of your marketing health helping to determine which ad sources are generating actual prospects for the business. It also shows whether or not you need to have “that” conversation with any of your ad marketing vendors. Remember, there is a difference between leads and actual prospects.

Leads = Callers dialing in who are interested in a product or service
Prospects = Callers dialing in who are interested in a product or service you can provide

Make sure your advertisements aren’t misleading and are targeting the right types of callers. Determining your call attribution will help you dial in and have a better focus on your best and worst performing ads.

Call Handling Skills
After understanding where your calls are coming from, when to maximize staffing, and knowing what ad sources are generating actual prospects you will also need to focus on how these prospects are being handled by your staff.

After having spent “$x” amount on making the phones ring, it is vital to determine if you are or are not getting them into the business or setting up that appointment. Listening to the prospect calls allows you and your leadership staff to hone in on these calls and understand what is being said to these prospects that leads to an appointment—or doesn’t.

This serves two purposes within your business team—it helps you understand who your top performers are, and who needs additional training. You can incentivize top performers and create a culture of friendly competition within your four walls to get more “yeses” and maximize business profits. Check out how to incentivize your sales team with non-cash incentives if you need ideas.
Contact us now to learn more!

How to Generate Hot Sales Calls from PPC Campaigns While Staying ROI Positive

December 1, 2017 by Kevin Dieny 1 Comment

You have multiple priorities to keep in mind in marketing and sales – here’s some tips to keep both in the forefront of your mind.

You are tasked with what seems impossible: “Generate hot sales calls from a PPC campaign while staying ROI positive.” If you worked at a marketing agency, then this would probably be in your everyday tasks while working with clients. But unless “Advertising,” “PPC,” “Traffic,” or “Affiliate” is in your job title, then I’m sure you have other things to focus on besides trying to generate calls from digital advertising.

Let’s jump into an extensive “how-to” for generating hot sales calls for those who have other things to focus on, as well as for experienced PPC managers looking to shore up what they know.

A task like “Generate hot sales calls” implies a current condition or state where this does not exist. “Scale hot sales calls” refers to a state where this is already occurring. I am going to assume that you are currently not generating hot sales calls from your PPC campaigns, so I’ll focus on the former. Since this is your task to work in an environment where something successful is desired but does not yet exist…welcome to marketing!

Step 1 – Make a list of marketing assets before you start the project

In marketing, you first have to start with an inventory of what you have to work with and go from there. Start with answering the following questions:

What is the budget for this task?
Who will be in charge of running the campaign and acquiring the creative assets?
What methods of digital advertising are we going to use? (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc).
What marketing tools do we have access to assist us in this task? (Advertising tools, email marketing tools, landing page or thank you page creators, etc).
What is our sales process for handling the “hot sales calls” that we generate? What about the follow-up or missed opportunity sales calls?

After making this list, you might see some first steps that need to happen before you start generating hot phone call leads. You start with a list to identify the constraints you will be facing. The shorter your list in general, the more constraints you will find that crop up and delay or throw off your task. Have an answer for each bullet point above, and you will have enough to jump ahead.

Step 2 – Defining a “Hot Sale” and their buyer intensity in the marketing funnel

The more precise you define a “Hot Sale,” the better your PPC campaign will perform. We’ve previously talked about how to create better marketing qualified leads, but how do you ensure those MQLs become a “Hot Sale”? The quality of your leads is dependent on not only how well you can define what makes someone a qualified lead, but how well you can speak to these specific consumers with a relevant message.

We will use hot, warm, and cold to signify the buying intensity of sales prospects going forward.

Cold leads/prospects are at the top of the funnel and may not know your company, or there is a problem to fix.
Warm prospects need convincing and are most likely in the middle of the funnel.
Hot prospects are sales prospect further down the marketing funnel and ready to buy.

Let’s picture this funnel…

Each section of the funnel has a specific goal, and you might be surprised to find out that it is not always, “Call Me!”

The goal at the top of the funnel, where your cold prospects are located, is to make people AWARE. Awareness is defined as: informing people of a problem, of their current state, of a better state, and finally of who your company is and what you’re passionate about doing that nobody else does.

The goal of the middle of the funnel is only to segment people into WARM or HOT groups. This is done by tracking the engagement types who you identify as someone who may be interested in buying. Deciding what to track is ultimately up to your company and what interactions consumers are having with your properties online. Draw a line in the sand and decide what is warm, or someone who needs more information, and hot, meaning someone who you confidently feel is ready to buy. Usually you won’t get this right the first time, but with trial and error and testing, you will get better…

The bottom of the funnel is where HOT audiences are sent. The goal at the bottom of the funnel is to send your prospect to a persuasive page to call you, set an appointment, or to engage with you in some fashion. The highly subjective part is being persuasive, but if you’ve done the work before this point and segmented them correctly, you should have sifted the leads with the highest buyer intensity.

Step 3 – “Hot Leads” Consumer Messaging

“One Man’s Loss is Another Man’s Gain.” – Proverb

There are two categories you need to figure out to be successful in defining and speaking to your hottest consumers:

Relevance	Value
Identify your target audience, discover their pain points, and speak to them in a way that solves for their needs quickly.	Provide a quality offer to your target audience that will seem irresistible to them right now.

As referenced in the proverb above, your target audience should not be similar to anyone else’s. Even amongst your competition, your target audience should be distinct and aligned to what you sell.

Using the analogy of Subway and McDonalds, both are targeting more market share of the healthy fast food market—especially amongst the 18 to 30-year-old segment. Even still, one should be specifically going after the sandwich crowd and the other the burger and fries crowd. You see examples of this in commercials where advertising hones in on a specific segment of a targeted audience and tries to speak directly to them—such as the new “McVegan” burger that McDonald’s is testing or Subway’s “Fresh Fit” sandwich menu.

Although it is important to make your business stand out, don’t get too hung up on this step of really individualizing your messaging yet or blame this step later if your campaign doesn’t work out as intended. But I can’t give you this brief without also sharing a tool to help you make your marketing both relevant and valuable. I like to use DigitalMarketer’s Avatar Worksheet to stay on message and identify my hottest target audience.

Step 4 – Why phone calls as a sales generation method?

Limiting your sales generation to phone calls is a heavy constraint. However, there are some reasons you should consider generating phone calls as your main sales means from PPC campaigns:

You are an appointment based business.
You have a team that is trained to handle sales calls.
You have a team that is trained to handle sales calls.
You track your marketing phone calls and already have a budget dedicated to scale this.

Let’s talk about the last point, tracking your marketing phone calls because it’s something you can easily add-on to your business. Shameless plug aside, you can only improve your marketing by tracking it and having a plan in place ahead of time to utilize the findings.

(TIP! Do you want to know what marketing source you are getting the best appointments from? Check out CallSource’s solution, LeadMetrix)

There are a few other types of lead generation that can occur before you start making sales on the phone with them. Although we are assuming you have been tasked with generating hot leads for sales calls through PPC, you should also consider gathering leads through other means and then closing them on the phone.

Some of these basic methods employed include but are not limited to:

Form-fills to capture leads from landing pages
“Contact Us” phone calls or emails
Online chat platforms
SMS text messaging capturing

You don’t need to use all of these tactics, but consider how they would work for your company.

Step 5 – The Medium, Platforms, and Local of PPC Campaigns

We have now identified and explained all of the major constraints that a typical marketer would face in the task, “Generate hot sales calls from a PPC campaign.”

On to implementation…

My advice—plain and simple—is start with a local search segment of your targeted audience if possible. I recommend this from my experience in PPC. Don’t just take my word for it, here is a great article from ReviewTrackers on how local search is best for bottom of funnel.

Start with the easiest method to capture sales from PPC campaigns before getting more complex. Local advertisements are the easiest because you are overcoming a lot of the issues people have with PPC ads and their reluctance to trust them by saying you are a real company just around the corner from them.

Other platforms could work just as well for you and each of them has its pros and cons. Research by emarketer this last September details the growth of digital advertisement platforms and highlights a trend that digital ad spend is only increasing.

Taking it up a notch is the question of which platform would work best for generating hot sales calls?

I would recommend the following, depending on your target audiences:

Adwords for local search
Facebook for most everyone
LinkedIn for longer sales cycles or specific age groups
Bing for devices and age groups or even as a cheaper alternative to Adwords (not always cheaper)
Yelp for testing against Adwords
Instagram if you are a very visual company
SnapChat if you are gunning for millennials

…The point is go where your targeted audience is hiding, because your competitors probably are.

Finally, consider the medium you are utilizing for these PPC campaigns. I look at the content that is being linked to on multiple levels in order to test what works best for the structure of a keyword based search campaign:

The Brand Level
The Categorical Level
The Keyword Level

Brand Level
The brand is your company name and offers you the chance to target search marketing with a message to accurately portray your brand in a way that positions it for sales calls. Brand targeting should not be overlooked. When it comes to performance, they typically have the best Click Through Rates (CTR) and high-quality scores, which directly reduces your costs in running advertisements on those platforms. Someone who types in your company name into a search engine might be looking for the phone number… why not give them that opportunity and test this hypothesis?

Categorical Level
The category level should be made up of your products or topics that align with what your company does. If you do not have products that are clearly defined, consider looking at your mission statement for ideas. Assuming you have products, break them up into exclusive categories and make content and messaging to target an audience for each of those products.
Categories often coincide with price as lower priced products or services are easier entry points to a sale then a higher priced one. Targeting people for categories should take people to the product they searched for, and that corresponding landing page has to do a few things to be successful:

Make them aware of a problem they have.
Talk about the pain of that problem in the current state.
Refer to the ideal state (or the potential after).
Clearly make it your passion to help them solve this.
THEN… and only then… talk about your product as the solution you want to provide for a specific set of problems.

Keyword Level
The keyword level takes this even further, and so I do not recommend this for marketers just getting started. The reason that keyword level is more difficult is that you are isolating specific problems people are having through search terms and matches a highly relevant and valuable solution page for them.
People will type in hundreds of queries, so building quality content for all of even the most popular searches will take considerable time and effort. Every grouping of search queries has to be paired with a highly relevant piece of content which you have to build. For example:

Search Term: “personalized 833 vanity numbers”

Relevant Hypothetical Article: “Personalize your own 833 vanity number for your business [Article on Blog]”

Valuable Hypothetical Offer: “The Best 833 Vanity Numbers for Small Businesses [Downloadable List]”

In this example, the search term matched, a highly relevant article was displayed as an advertisement, the article makes mention of a downloadable offer for lead capture during and after the article’s content that sends people to a form to get their name, email, and phone number.

You would have to repeat this process for every valuable keyword in order to maximize the keyword level. These steps are simplified for categorical and brand as your need for content is much smaller since matched keywords are grouped into anything relevant to the category.

Before I move on from search marketing I do want to point out the click2call, call-only ads, and “call me now” buttons that are found in these platforms. My advice is to use these for remarketing lists for people lower down your funnel, but consider giving them the option to call you straight from the advertisement as well. Do not neglect the call extension, but also don’t jump straight to “call me!” unless you had a segment that was already hot.

Specificity is King

The more specific you get (Keyword > Category > Brand), the more personal you can make content and offers. You should be trying to speak to a specific, targeted group of people so that you get higher relevance and value.

What about the other platforms that are not search?

Image based advertisements
Image based advertisements require a landing page, and you should always do that! A landing page can be an article or a product detail page, but your consumers should be sent somewhere that they are likely to convert.

Retargeting
Retargeting is huge, and if you are not doing this, you are ignoring the ability to segment your visitors. I recommend implementing image ads as retargeting PPC campaigns because they really have to work hard. In comparison, search advertisements allow personalization by matching keywords that a consumer is looking for to a potential solution you provide.

In retargeting you can only segment that audience based on what the platform allows. Most platforms allow you to pixel an audience or upload a list that is matched to their database. By uploading or targeting specific pixeled visitors you can find people that are warm or hot based on their engagement.

I’ve seen clients go after their cancellations with some positive results because they have new pricing, a new product, or unique service addition that sets them apart. This means that as you conduct your business online, especially with advertisements, remember that marketing is a long term strategy and it often takes many touches to finally make a sale.

(TIP! Have you considered a reputation management strategy for your business?)

Adding touches does not always guarantee a Hot lead or a sale but it does improve the chances that marketing will be successful. Your purpose for this whole PPC campaign task is to build a marketing strategy that will inform you enough to know how many touches on average it takes for someone to become your next client. You can only know this if you track your marketing activities.

(TIP! Do you want to track consumers from multiple sources without lifting a finger? Check out Digital AI)

Step 6 – What does ROI positive mean for marketing?

Marketing is a long-term strategy.

Okay, I get it, but I need results tomorrow, so what should I do?

A key element I have purposely left out of all these steps is the time frame. I have left it out because technically you could be ROI positive if you take a long time, with highly calculated steps, and spent just enough at each stage to get what you want. That oversimplified explanation can last months or years as marketing teams make incremental changes until they achieve return on investments (ROI) that are double, quadruple, or even 100x their spend.

That’s impossible… 100x?

The truth is products that take double or triple-digit returns are usually able to sell themselves. I wouldn’t always credit a marketing team for that kind of return unless they started out with utterly abysmal marketing and did a 180.

Achieving ROI is based primarily on the LTV (lifetime value of a customer). Once you know how much value an average sale is bringing you, you have your breakeven point for ad spend. You need to break-up your budget accordingly for testing.

The continuum that marketing lives on is that as time is shortened costs usually go up. If you want to be ROI positive tomorrow, your chances are very slim.

My advice is to consider time in your equation.

In order to become ROI positive and start multiplying your return, you need a well-oiled marketing machine. I have laid out the steps that you need to master, and I mean it when I say you must master them. You have to assume that you will fail along the way – the key is failing quick. Learn from your mistakes, take calculated risks, and plan on increasing your budgets only after you have made wins.

Marketing optimization is a job all its own.

Most people think marketing ends when an advertisement is first turned on and calls start coming in (or maybe they don’t); this is when optimization starts. You will only improve what you bother to track. Here are recommendations for constant improvement and to get ROI positive going forward:

A/B Testing (avoid multivariate until you have a large team or lots of content assets)
Content Testing
Time of Day Testing
Day of the Week Testing
Format Testing (videos, infographics, television ads, etc.)
Cannon Ball Testing

Cannon ball testing is when you make a dramatic shift (as opposed to iterative testing) and change a ton of things all at once. Analysts scream and optimization specialists jump out of the window when they hear you are doing this… but sometimes you have to. You need to experiment with changes and sometimes you have to make big shifts until you find some semblance of success.

Summarize everything for me for watercooler conversation

In summary, put on your lucky thinking cap and go down this step by step list to learn how to generate hot sales calls from PPC campaigns while staying ROI positive:

Make a list of marketing assets before you start the project
Defining a “Hot Sale” and their buyer intensity in the funnel
“Hot Leads” Consumer Messaging
Why phone calls as a sales generation method?
The Medium, Platforms, and Local of PPC Campaigns (The MVP)
What does ROI positive mean for marketers?

By the end of this when someone says, “What is your return on ad spend (ROAS)?” or “What is your return on investment (ROI)?” you can confidently answer and have the insight to explain how you are actively improving. Even if it’s not rainbows or pots of gold today, you can celebrate the fact that you are making attempts and failing fast because marketing is a long-term strategy and you will get there!