How To Do Market And Competitor Analysis For Your B2B Business

Now that you know the trends of digital marketing for 2017, let’s start the research.

This part is very important for the success of your marketing campaign, as you want to gather as much knowledge about your competitors as you can and reverse engineer what they do with their own online marketing.

I will be showing you free and paid tools. Obviously, if you are using premium tools you’ll gather more data, but you’ll be able to get a bunch of good and valuable data with free tools as well.

It is very important that you document your research along the way.

Here’s a video about this whole chapter in case you don’t like reading.

• We’ll use the Follow.net chrome extension and SimilarWeb to learn more about the monthly traffic of our competition.
• Use Alexa.com to gather more information on the demographics and the geography of their traffic.
• We’ll look at SEMrush and Alexa to see their top pages and if they have any paid traffic.
• We’ll also take a look at iSpionage and SpyFu to check their advertising budget on PPC.
• Use Adbeat or WhatRunsWhere to see their display ads, placements, ad networks, and even their landing pages – these are high value, amazing tools if you want to save money on your advertising budget.
• Find out what your competition’s most shared and read content is online by using BuzzSumo.
• Use AdEspresso to check profitable Facebook ads and advanced techniques to uncover any online advertiser strategies.
• Use BuiltWith to check what technology they use to build their website and track their visitors.

Before we get started, open Notepad or Evernote (my preferred note app). Here is a template I made in Evernote that you could use to organise the data that you gather.

Traffic Statistics And Traffic Source Data Of Your Competitors

Head to Follow.net and create a free account. You don’t need a paid account for now.

Follow.net is an excellent free research tool that gathers data from many different sources from the Internet and presents it at a glance.

In our example we will be doing research on Hubspot.com.

After you have created a free account, type your competitors’ domains into the URL search bar and make notes in your chosen Notepad on the monthly traffic sections.

Follow.net will gather data from SimilarWeb and Quantcast regarding traffic statistics, but be aware that all of these are just rough estimates and different tools might show different data.

You’ll also get their last 3 months’ traffic sources.

If you want to know more about each source, head over to Similarweb.com and enter the domain to find out, for example, in Social, which social network brings them the most traffic, or which links bring the majority of their traffic to the site.

If you have a premium account with SimilarWeb, you can go into even more detail and check the last month only, and go over all the links that bring traffic to your competition.

This is a very valuable insight, as you could go out and build a relationship with the same site to drive targeted traffic to your website.

At MAN Digital, we do such in-depth analyses using SimilarWeb Pro, so just ping us here if you want me to do a free competitor analysis using SimilarWeb Pro.

One very interesting thing we can see with SimilarWeb Pro is its traffic channel analysis.

In HubSpot’s example, we can see that Hubspot.com had 4.47% of its traffic coming from emails in March 2016, and starting in April, they tripled this number up to 13% by July 2016. This is a huge change when you have 15M visitors a month.

We’ve just discovered an interesting insight about HubSpot traffic generation: they started to focus more on email marketing in April 2016.

I can actually vouch for this as I subscribe to their newsletters, and I started to get more content marketing emails from them. Emails like these:

If HubSpot is one of your competitors (which I would not like to have), hop over to their site and subscribe to all their newsletters to see what email marketing campaigns they use.

Demographics And Geography Insights

Now that we know about their traffic, let’s get more data on their demographics. I just love this tool from Amazon. In my view, it is the best research tool out there, just because Amazon has some data that nobody has at the moment (OK, except for maybe Google).

Just get a free trial on Alexa.com, gather the data, and cancel the subscription before they charge your card; 14 days is more than enough time to gather initial data.

In Alexa, I like to take the global rank of the website just to keep track of who is the best ranked by Alexa among my competitors.

Then we’ve got the geography and demographics, which is my favourite feature of Alexa.

Here is how it would look:

The most important pieces of data for me are Gender, Age, Browsing Location, and Education. I usually make a screenshot of this data and put it in the Evernote along with the other data I have collected.

I also carry out more research on their demographics in Facebook Audience Insights. Just to double check the demographics.

Here is how I do it:

Go to Facebook Audience Insights, select the country you want to analyse, enter your competitor into the interest section (step 2) in the picture below, and select the demographics.

 

A very interesting section in Audience Insights is the Lifestyle one, which is only available for the US market though. It is a household-level consumer segmentation and visualisation suite by Acxiom. The life stage clustering system is called PersonicX.

Find out more here, where you’ll find a very detailed report about what each cluster means.

 

Besides this, you have information about their relationship status and education.

Why do I insist on this? 

If you understand the cluster you will understand the customer avatar much better, so you will be able to customise content more easily and create better products and services for your potential clients.

Next, go to the “Page Likes” tab, where you will be able to see what other pages this audience likes. This information will help you to gain an even more in-depth understanding of the audience, as well as helping you to create an audience to target on Facebook Ads later on.

OPTIONAL

Great, now if you’re active on Twitter, you’ll be able to get some nice data about your followers and learn more about your audience.

Go to Twitter Analytics and choose Audiences. Here you’ll be able to see a very brief overview of your audience.

I am interested in gender, age, interests, buying behaviour, occupation, and devices used.

In my case, my Twitter audience is 71% male, and 42% are aged between 25 and 34.

If we take a look at occupation, the majority of my followers are technical professionals.

Obviously, they are interested in technology, tech news, and entrepreneurship.

In conclusion, my followers are predominantly male, between 25 and 34 years of age, and are technical professionals. Now, if I am comparing this with HubSpot’s data from Alexa and Facebook Insights, it is very similar.

Now you might say, OK but these people don’t visit my site. Let’s check that on Google Analytics.

Go onto your Google Analytics (GA), to Audience, and then Demographics > Overview.

Surprise, surprise: GA also shows similar age and gender statistics to Alexa, Facebook, and Twitter. Now our research is becoming more accurate.

Data from Google is just amazing and it can make our research so much easier. It is in Google’s interests at the end of the day, as we (marketers) will spend more on Adwords if we have more tools and targeting data.

If we look at Interests in Google Analytics (Audience > Interests > Overview), we can see that our audience’s interests are also similar to what we found using the other sources.

I could talk about Audience Insights for ages. I hope this information has helped you to understand how to gather data so that you can build your buyer persona.

If you have any other specific questions about this topic, please don’t hesitate to ask me them.

Organic and Paid Traffic Keywords Analysis

Why is this part important?

Let’s think a bit about the psychology of searching. Why do we search online?

Go to Spyfu.com; there’s no need to sign up to a premium account for now.

Enter your competitor’s domain and check both their organic and paid traffic keywords.

SpyFu is an amazing tool. They collect data, in this case for 10 years, and will estimate the monthly PPC traffic of your competitor.

OK, now, you will not be able to see all their keywords with a free account. This is when I would say that, if you’re on a tight budget, you should go over to Alexa.com and get a free 7-day trial to collect all the data about your competition.

How To Download All The Organic And Paid Keywords Of Your Competition

Go to Alexa.com/keywords (get a free 7-day trial for the advanced plan) and download both their organic and paid traffic keywords.

You will now have a full list of keywords your competition is targeting. The organic section will show you the percentage of search traffic that this website is getting monthly.

OK, now you know what keywords your competitor is targeting for paid ads and what they are building their organic traffic for, you have a very good insight into what products or services they are focusing on.

Document this data, as we will use it when we need to build content.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog

B2B Digital Marketing Trends 2017

In our free 6-week long Marketing Automation Network course about B2B lead generation, I talked with Robert from Landingi about the digital marketing trends that will shape 2017. It is week 1 of a 6-week free intensive B2B lead generation video course series.

What we know for sure is that 2017 will be the year of the user experience around our customers.

By 2020, mobile will be the biggest online advertising market, with video growing the fastest, BI Intelligence estimates.

Here are our 7 marketing trends for 2017:

1. Video Marketing
2. Cross-device Usage
3. Personalisation
4. Niche Marketing
5. Mobile And Tablet Ads
6. Lead Generation
7. Influential Marketing

Video Marketing

We love entertainment, stories, and our mobile Internet bandwidth is getting faster, which is why video is getting more and more popular online.

Video ad spending grew +557% sequentially from Q2 2016 to Q3 2016, according to a recent report by Smaato.

This is crazy guys, +557%.

So, start making videos of your products and services before it’s too late.

Video doesn’t need to be hard, just make sure that you are using real stories, personal stories if possible, and that you are putting that little human touch into it.

Before you even touch video, make sure you have the right message to match your market.

Here are a few easy useful tips for leveraging video marketing.

• Use Facebook Live to make announcements, do webinars, and for blogging.
• Make short demo-videos of your products and services.
• Use Snapchat for daily tips – especially when you are attending conferences.
• Build compelling pre-roll ads on Youtube.
• Try out Instagram Video Ads – here is a simple explanation on how to build an Instagram video ad

Cross-device Usage

According to a study carried out by Ninthdecimal, retailers who use ad campaigns across several devices to engage with consumers experience higher rates of engagement and visits to their stores than those focusing on one device alone, such as just sticking with the traditional desktop computer, for example.

We already own multiple devices; we have iPhones, work and personal laptops, tablets, and even smart TVs. We might even have smart watches if we are geeky enough.

Luckily, we can leverage Facebook and Google’s technology to remarket to all of our audience on different devices.

TIP: “Start building remarketing campaigns on Facebook, Youtube, and Google. Be present on each of your audience’s devices and help guide the conversion.

When a cookie is placed onto your computer by an ad using SilverPush, an “audio beacon” is also emitted that can be detected by mobile devices in the vicinity that are also running SilverPush software.

They are therefore able to recognise that the same person owns these two devices. In an interview with TechCrunch, the CEO of SilverPush, Hitesh Chawla, explained that the biggest obstacle for this technology was distance.

So that they can achieve a more accurate understanding of their customers’ cross-device behaviour, marketing and tech companies are extremely keen on the idea of being able to identify and track their customers across multiple devices.

That way, they can tailor their advertising campaigns to their target audiences more effectively.

Mobile And Tablet: They Are A Must

Last year in Q4, mobile and tablet surpassed desktop Internet usage worldwide.

The percentage of ad impression is the same on mobile devices as it is on desktop.

If your website is not responsive yet, stop reading this, get yourself a web developer fast, and ask them to optimise your mobile website.

There’s no more doubt about it. You need to have a responsive website with an excellent UX.

Google is rolling out AMP and soon, if you don’t have an optimised mobile website, you will be losing a lot of Google rankings.

TIP: Assuming you have an optimised mobile website, create mobile ad campaigns for all of your advertising efforts and leverage the usage on mobile.

Awesome TIP: To get yourself up and running fast and not lose out on mobile traffic, start using Facebook Ads within Instant Articles or Facebook Canvas, available only for Mobile. It’s just amazing how beautiful it looks and how easy it is to set up. Learn more about it here.

Personalisation

Personalisation drives brand loyalty and all of us should pay close attention to what Spotify or Netflix are doing in terms of personalising the experience we have on their apps.

31% of people consider themselves to be brand loyalists, with 41% of these stating that they would be happy for retailers to use their purchase history to personalise the content that is sent to them.

But according to a study carried out by Boston Retail Partners, retailers are still not attending to these consumer preferences.

This is a huge opportunity.

TIP: Use tools like Omniconvert to survey your customers and build personalised content for them for the next time they come onto your website.

For Example:

Landingi.com created different landing pages for their clients according to who their audience is.

When they were using a simple general landing page for the whole audience group, their conversion rate was a mere 8%. But when they started to use personalised landing pages according to who was visiting them, the conversion rate skyrocketed to 31.4%.

Awesome TIP: Add your customer avatar’s influencer and if you have the name of your lead/customer, add it to the landing page and get a conversion rate of up to 57%, the same as what Landingi got when they used this strategy.

Niche Marketing

2 years back, I was working in a very niche market – the triathlon market at triathlonresearch.org. Its founder Sam was in the US army; he was a triathlon hobbyist, so he was not an expert in the field.

But because of his marketing skills, he saw an opportunity in this niche and built a digital publishing company around it. It involves helping triathlon stars like Craig Alexander (7-time Ironman Winner) or Gwen Jorgensen to build and sell their online training programmes on how to be a better triathlete.

He succeeded in this very niche market by working with the best, because the competition was very low, and because he made it his mission to understand the pain and passion of triathlete wannabes.

Sam was always eager to learn more about his niche market. He was going to all kinds of triathlon events, participating himself in training sessions and even racing.

By doing that, he was able to not only understand but also experience the pain of his market.

As he puts it in one of his blog posts:

Triathlon racing is a powerful demonstration of our humanity – our courage, our fears, our doubts, and our joy, all wrapped into one intense experience.

He knew all too well that he was able to speak their language through all the stories, ad copy, and webinars he was conducting.

Again, he was not a triathlete. He just understood the power of niche marketing and dominated that market for a while.

Images source: triathlonresearch.org

If you try to target all markets you will be in big trouble, because you’ll find yourself surrounded by a load of competition and it will be hard to showcase your unique value proposition.

A rule of thumb is to start narrow and then grow wider.

Start talking to one group of your audience and be specific about their needs and desires so that you can attend to them with your product and services.

Benefits of niche marketing:

1. Less competitive – a small market means less competition. Carrying out good research across a small market makes it easier to find out the strengths and weaknesses of your competition and makes your product or service better.
2. More affordable – you won’t be spending money on a broad target group, so you won’t waste money on advertising.
3. Customers are more loyal – you will be able to nurture, teach, and understand them much better.
4. Audience is easier to target – you know where they hang out and what their interests are, which makes it easier to target and offer them your solution.
5. Focused – trying to offer different services for each market can be inefficient, whereas having one nice one will help you to be much more efficient and focused on one single market.

B2B Lead Generation

This is a big one and the main topic of our guide.

We’ll touch more on this in the prospecting and outreaching section of our guide.

Nevertheless, building a list and segmenting is crucial for your business, as you want to speak with as many people as possible.

Here are some lead generation techniques for you that you might not know about:

1. Quora and Reddit – One of my favourites is to go out and find the questions that my audience is asking.
2. Guest posting – You might find this odd, but writing on blogs where your audience hangs out can bring new free leads to your business.

How you can do it?

1. Research the best blogs and online media sites in your niche
2. Pitch your content to them
3. Write valuable content with a CTA at the end, which links to a landing page where you offer free value
4. Capture the leads
5. Start separate email marketing campaigns for leads coming in through guest posts, as you might want to personalise the content
6. Our example article on lead generation for the Marketing Automation Network is here

LinkedIn profile views hack – Use this at your own risk, but this is working for me as we speak. Add an Iframe with your LinkedIn profile page into your webpage header

LinkedIn Hack

<iframe src=”LINK TO YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE” height=”1″ width=”1″ frameBorder=”0″></iframe>

[/ht_message]

This way, all of your webpage visitors will be considered as LinkedIn profile views.

Now you can start sending them sales follow-up emails. We’ll talk more about how and what emails you should be sending in Chapter 3.

1. Use Gmail Ads and target job titles as keywords. This way, if your prospective customer uses Gmail and they have the job title you are targeting in the email signature, you will be able to show ads in the promotional tab of Gmail.
2. Use LeadFuze to prospect on LinkedInHere is a short tutorial on how to use LeadFuze. An awesome thing is that you can get up to 4,000 leads if you are using F6S.com’s offer. Check it out here.
3. Export your LinkedIn contacts, upload them as a Facebook audience, and start running Facebook lead ads to your free giveaway, offer, ebook, or just invite them to your webinar (if you’re running one).

Here is a short tutorial I made on how to do it.

--- Tutorial video coming soon ---

PRO Tip: Use UTM tags when you share links on all of these sources so that you can find out which is your best lead source.

B2B Influencer Marketing 2017 (Advanced)

In short, word of mouth is what influencer marketing is. It is used a lot in ecommerce. Below you have an interesting survey.

54% of women around the world have purchased a product or service after seeing it in an influencer’s post, according to a survey by Bloglovin.

B2B can benefit a lot from influencer marketing, here’s how.

Every week I listen to Mixergy, and a few other podcastings, and they influence my buying decisions on marketing tools and courses.

Why? Because the quality of the content is very good and I know they don’t recommend rubbish.

I understood this and built my business with the help of local influencers. I partnered with local businesses, investors, and authorities that helped me grow my business.

Here are the top 5 strategies we used and tested for B2B influencer marketing:

1. 1. Attend meetups, TED talks, and conferences run by influencers and engage with them; don’t sell anything at first, just buy what they sell and be their client to begin with. Networking with influencers on a F2F basis is key, but if you are just selling and not bringing any value to the relationship, you will not succeed.
   2. Partner with investors, and ask them if they need help in your niche in exchange for putting you in contact with other companies or investors if you do a good job.
   3. Guest posting and review posts: I mentioned this in the lead generation section too and it is very valid here as well. Reach out to bloggers and media where your audience is hanging out and write how-tos, and about strategies and the benefits of using your niche product or service.
   4. Sponsor review posts about your product the same way ecommerce businesses do, do pro bono services, or offer your tool as a giveaway in exchange for a review on an influencer’s blog or community.
   5. Identify rising star bloggers (not yet influencers) and ask them to interview you and share your story. I did this here.

All these strategies are worth testing in any niche, B2B or B2C.

Just be where these influencers are online and offline, add value, don’t be salesy, and remember to buy first before you sell.

Conclusions

It is very clear that video on mobile will be the biggest trend this year: Facebook Live, YouTube, and Periscope videos will grow a lot over this coming year and that’s a fact. So go and get your content ready for video.

Now, if you do this well and ensure that your content strategy involves getting across all devices at the right time, as well as choosing your niche market to work in, you’ll definitely be way ahead of your competition.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog

Playbook on B2B Lead Generation and Nurturing. Introduction

We would like to introduce you our new guide on B2B Lead Generation and Nurturing which you can find here.

Some of the content from the guide will be published on our blog as well, but you don’t need to wait. Go to the Playbook and learn more about lead generation, nurturing and awesome tools which can help boost your business.

Now, B2B is not a short-term shot and it will be changing a lot in 2017. We’ll be talking about a few simple techniques and how-tos, whilst at the same time diving deep into the WHYs so that you don’t leave our guide with more questions than you came with.

You’ll find a few how-to videos and we’ll also share other reference e-books, courses, and guides.

The key points you’ll learn about:

• We’ll go over all of the digital marketing trends for 2017 in detail, and we’ll explain how to take advantage of them.
• We’ll teach you how to do competitor analysis and market research the right way. Many people skip this part because they don’t know where to start. We’ll make sure that we show you all of the free and paid tools so that you can get the best insights from your market.
• LinkedIn prospecting is key for B2B. We’ll show you how we do it and how to outreach to your audience.
• Content is key for successful B2B lead generation, and relevant quality content will help you to become an authority in your niche. We’ll show you how to write and create the right content for your audience.
• Quality content is not enough; we need to continually make it relevant for our audience. We’ll show you the importance of conversion rate optimisation and how you should get started.
• You’ll be able to free up your time with marketing automation, leaving you to focus on creating better products and services for your audience. We’ll teach you a few automation hacks so that you can nurture and attract even more customers.

With that in mind, let’s dive in and see how you can prepare your business in order to master B2B Lead Generation for it in 2017.

Through the strategies you’ll learn here, the best case scenario is that you’ll become a marketer that converts your audience into paying customers.

What Industry Is This Guide For?

 

 

Our main expertise at MAN Digital is in SaaS and IT. So we have created this guide with this sector in mind. But it can also apply to any other type of online business in the B2B space.

What Is Nurturing, Lead Nurturing, And Customer Nurturing?

Before we start, I want to make sure that we are on the same page with some terminology. This is not new terminology, but we want to make sure that you have an understanding of the vocabulary we’ll be using, so that it provides more clarity for the marketing, sales, and customer service departments of your business.

 

 

Nurturing (as a marketing term) is a process of continual communication with a company’s target audience across all stages of the customer lifecycle.

 

 

Lead nurturing is therefore a process of continual communication (or interaction) with a prospect that improves a company’s chances of converting that prospect into a customer at some point in the future.

 

 

Customer nurturing (or Customer Success). This part of the process refers to the communication that happens after someone becomes a ‘Customer’, in order to move them along to the ‘Loyal Customer’ stage.

 

Nurturing = Lead Nurturing + Customer Nurturing

When we use or hear the term nurturing, everyone in your organisation should understand that we are talking about communication with customers and prospects across all stages of the customer lifecycle.

Source: Myk Pono on Lead Nurturing and Scoring.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog

Our Digital Marketing Automation Methodology – INFOGRAPHIC

 

How we revolutionize digital marketing campaigns?

Customer Journey Audit

We start with what you have.

Our intelligent programs analyze all your historical sales data.

The software tears through as many data in an hour as it would take a human week to analyze.

The Result

A clear, top-down summary of your “Customer Journey”.

You’ll know exactly what worked in the past, by what degree.

The “sweet-spot” becomes clearer.

The single most effective way to position your offering.

Marketing System Build

We know your customer journey, so now we can lay down the tarmac to make it smoother for future customers.

Traffic

1. Create customer personas.
2. Craft engaging content that speaks to their individual needs.
3. Paid promotion and organic traffic are used to hook in more potential customers.

Engagement

1. Define the length of sales funnel – How long do we need to nurture prospects?
2. More content is produced that goes into greater detail and value.
3. Remarketing means anyone who touches your website can be brought back in.

Sale

1. Your products or services are promoted in a way that leaves customers happy about how they were sold to, and willing to buy again.
2. Everything leading up to the sale is tracked. Nothing is left in the dark.

Our systems give you 20/20 vision into the traffic you reach.

Profit Optimization

The system is built to make optimization easy.

• Track the result of every dollar spent.
• Group individuals into segments.
• Split test what works on each segment.

Squeeze every last drop from every dollar spent.

Real-Time Content Personalization

Dynamic Content = Content that changes depending on who’s looking at it and when.

e.g. auto-updating copyright notice in a website footer.

Go far deeper with self-adjusting email newsletters and web pages. Make all your content ultra-relevant to every prospect.

Future-Proof Your Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing is being eaten up by A.I… and that’s a good thing.

Machine learning enables software to plow through mountains of data, allowing marketers (like you) to take their heads out of mind-numbing spreadsheets and focus on the important questions.

Track who clicks what, when, and where.

Make content that tailors itself to different visitors.

Test different theories to find out what really makes you money.

 

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog

My Process For Setting Up A Solid Call Tracking System INFOGRAPHIC

 

Phase 1: Choose A Call Tracking Provider

Always use a SaaS service with cloud PBX technology. They will be able to handle any sudden peaks in traffic, and troubleshoot other issues.

In-house call tracking is what large corporations have been doing for a long time, and it takes the resources of a corporation to make that option viable. SaaS has opened this technology up to the rest of us.

It also makes sense to choose a call tracking provider who is also a Google Partner. Click here for the list. My personal preference is RingoStat.

Phase 2: Set Up A Tracking Number

If you’re a business that operates locally, get a local number. This helps give you an SEO bump.

Get a call-tracking enabled phone number.

Set the destination number.
This is your business’s root phone number.

Use that number for a marketing campaign that you want to illuminate.
Don’t muddy the waters by using it everywhere. When you want to compare two different marketing channels, use two different numbers.

Phase 3: Hook Up Analytics

If you’re using Google Adwords, you’re now ready to get maximum mileage out of the “Click to Call” feature. Pop a tracking number into that field, and you’ll have added a layer of Google Analytics on that number.

Google Analytics is a common integration for call tracking platforms, so you can use it even without an Adwords campaign. Double check that the platform you want to choose has this feature before you hand over your credit card number.

Focus on one metric above all others – First-time callers. It will take about 3 to 6 months of call data for this metric to emerge from the noise, since at the start, everyone will “technically” be a first-time caller.

Phase 4: Generate More Calls

The next chapter is packed with my favorite techniques for increasing the volume of inbound calls.

The “master technique”, however, is deceptively simple.

Test.

Now that you have tracking in place, you can watch any change you make to your marketing systems ripple through your results. However, that won’t help you much if you make changes at random.

Be a scientist about it. Choose one thing to test at a time, and keep everything else the same. Implement the test, and wait until you have statistical significance before you make a decision on the change you’ve made one way or the other.

This is the one principle to rule them all when it comes to optimizing your results in business.

Test, track, analyze, repeat.

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog

Call Intelligence: Advanced Call Tracking INFOGRAPHIC

What would you do if you could track the number of times your leads expressed interest or raised objections, or even the level of sales skill your phone reps exhibit?

These are known as conversational metrics, and they’re only possible with call intelligence.

It’s expensive now, but in the near future, I’m sure it will become much more affordable.

Using call intelligence to its full potential requires following these three basic steps:

1. Gather Useful Insights
2. Personalize the Customer Experience
3. Strategize with the Data

Gather Useful Insights

Call intelligence addresses the blind spot in your marketing analytics. Use it to attribute revenue and conversions back to your marketing campaigns and get in-depth insights about your customers.

Call intelligence can capture the following data points (and more):

• Peak phone call times
• Repeat vs. new call
• Call outcome
• Average call duration
• Geographic location
• Caller intent
• Phone type
• Demographic data

This kind of data is either impossible or time-consuming to track any other way. That’s why I’m so sure this is the future. When this technology becomes more affordable (just as basic call-tracking has done over the past decade), any business will be able to fill up the last gaps in their analytics and see exactly what’s making them money.

Personalize the Customer Experience

Custom Call Experiences

For example, set up distinct menu prompts for first-time callers and repeat callers. This customization can even be based on the caller’s online activity.

Leverage Conversation Analytics

Use signals from a phone call to customize a caller’s experience after the fact. For example, put them on retargeting or nurturing campaigns depending on keywords they say during the call. Or use the results of phone calls to test different sales scripts, thereby improving the experience of all callers.

Follow-Up Right

Put callers into follow-up campaigns based on call activity. Since you know their entire journey, online and offline, you’ll make sure the right message goes to the right person at the right time. No more accidently retargeting a converted customer with a discount for something they just bought!1

Act on the Data

1. Double Down on Successful CampaignsWith call intelligence, you don’t just know which channels bring you the most calls. You know which bring you the best leads.
2. Determine actual conversion pathsDo most people call straight from a well-placed search ad? Or do they decide to call only after some email nurturing? See their whole history laid out in front of you.
3. Tie revenue to phone callsInstead of measuring success by call volume (which can be very misleading), measure it by actual revenue and know which cogs in your machine are making the cash register ring.
4. Test and OptimizeThere are many things that could make your sales jump up, and with a stable tracking system, it’s fun to experiment. Review the results at the end of the week or month or quarter.

Phone number tests:

• Position
• Size
• Font / Style

Landing page tests:

• Calls to action
• Messaging
• Design

The 3 Core Benefits to Using Call Intelligence

1. Increase in call volume
2. Better lead quality
3. Greater marketing ROI

You don’t have to change your phone number or do anything with your phone system.

1. Increase in Call Volume. With insights into what’s actually driving phone calls, you’ll know how to drive more. e.g.
2. Better Lead Quality. Improve the entire customer journey, including their experience on the phone, so you can get more of those high-value calls.
3. Greater Marketing ROI. With proper analytics setup, you can improve all your channels constantly. The first step is seeing the exact ROI of every channel, laid out in front of you. The second is watching it go up.

Learn more how to do call tracking like a boss with our Ultimate Call Tracking Guide

Sources:

1. Think With Google, The Role of Click to Call in the Path to Purchase
2. Search Engine Journal, An SEO Beginner Guide: What is Call Tracking and Why Should I Care?
3. Less Everything, Adding A Phone Number To LessAccounting Increased Our Paid User Base

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog

What Are The Dangers Of Call Tracking? – INFOGRAPHIC

I hear a lot of common concerns about call tracking. Most are quite valid, so let’s address them here to make sure you don’t make the mistakes that many do.

Keeping the same number (for NAP consistency and vanity numbers)

Your Name, Address, and Phone number ought to be consistent across the indexed web. This is NAP consistency, which is an important ranking factor in modern local search.

Solution:

1. Dynamic Number Insertion
2. Using Javascript to swap out numbers, depending on the visitor.
3. Keep the number semi-consistent
4. Your rankings won’t take a massive hit. Keeping one number per paid campaign, for example, will help you much more in marketing intelligence than it could hurt you in SEO.

Your SEO guy holding onto your numbers

I wish I didn’t have to say this, but some shady SEO practices are going on out there. Some agencies try to keep their finger on the button of your campaigns, so if you want to show them the door, all the progress they’ve made for you goes with them.

There are two steps to preventing this:

1. Educate yourself on how call tracking works. Use it on your own for at least one advertisement, just to get a solid understanding of the process.
2. Make sure any contract you have with an external marketing team addresses the ownership of numbers generated for call tracking purposes.

Dirty numbers

Eventually, a phone number goes around the block. It doesn’t commonly cause a problem, but from time to time you might get a brand new call tracking number that another business once used. It might have been a spa resort or a drug dealer. There’s often no way to find out. Either way, you’ll get a few calls from disappointed callers looking for the other business. It’s a small price to pay. The longer you use a dirty number, the fewer wrong calls you’ll get (and it’s rare in any case).

If you’re concerned with having a number which used to be associated with something shady, simply do a Google search with the number in quotation marks, including the various ways phones are written (with/without the area code, with/without the digits grouped together). If it’s not indexed by Google, there’s nothing to worry about.

Legal Concerns

In the United States, call recording is legal from cost to cost. There are some regulations, which depend on the state. See this article by Digital Media Law to read up on these regulations. Before you begin, simply check whether you need to be registered as a call recorder in areas you will be targeting.

Most regulations simply require you to notifying the caller that their conversation will be recorded. I’m sure you’ve heard a pre-recorded message telling you this in the past.

*Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, and nothing I say qualifies as legal advice.

Learn more how to do call tracking like a boss with our Ultimate Call Tracking Guide.

Sources:

1. Think With Google, The Role of Click to Call in the Path to Purchase
2. Search Engine Journal, An SEO Beginner Guide: What is Call Tracking and Why Should I Care?
3. Less Everything, Adding A Phone Number To LessAccounting Increased Our Paid User Base

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog