Can You Defend Your Marketing Spend? Here’s How to Do It.

min read
Can You Defend Your Marketing Spend? Here’s How to Do It.

Do you feel that pressure? It’s the belt tightening on your marketing budget and it’s only going to get squeezed harder. You’re probably also feeling the tingle of someone watching over your shoulder as every marketing dollar you spend is now under scrutiny—and on the table to get cut. What’s worse, like most marketers, your performance expectations aren’t shrinking along with your budget, so you have to do everything you can to defend your spend and at least hang onto your existing budget. 

The 2-Minute Takeaway

  • Escape the data dead zone that occurs when you don’t track marketing leads that convert over the phone. Use call tracking to get attribution for every phone conversion, including the ones that happen in the contact center or at business locations.
  • Don’t sell yourself short. Once you eliminate your call data dead zone you can make more informed spending decisions and report all of the conversions your team drives.
  • Stop wasting money. With more accurate data to optimize your marketing—including call data—you can  build the highest-performing campaigns without increasing incremental spend.
  • Prove your value with easily-shareable, undeniable data that ties increased revenue back to your marketing efforts.

Escape the Call Data Dead Zone

Many marketers are unwittingly stuck in a data dead zone caused by lack of visibility into the customer phone calls their campaigns are driving. You spend a big portion of your marketing budget on ads and campaigns that drive calls, but you have no visibility into what the context or outcome of those calls are. That means no visibility into revenue you’re driving that converts in the contact center or at business locations. 

In high-stakes purchase industries like healthcare, home improvement services, automotive, telecom, and others, upwards of 60% of customers call before making a purchase. They’re often calling to get quotes, set appointments, and make purchases, and their calls are usually driven by your marketing efforts—and budget. 

However, many marketers have no visibility into what’s happening on the calls they drive to the contact center and business locations. So you’re spending your budget to send calls into the abyss of the data dead zone. It gets worse: with this lack of call data, marketers make uninformed spend decisions that waste money and undersell their efforts.

To escape the data dead zone, you can use call tracking software like Invoca to get full marketing attribution for every call (and conversion) your budget drives. With Invoca, marketers can attribute every phone call conversion to the marketing source that drove it — down to the campaign, ad, and keyword. It works whether the lead calls right from the ad or content — like click to call, paid search, or social media ads — or visited your website first before calling because Invoca tracks the entire digital journey that drove the call, This means you can escape the data dead zone to much more accurately prove the ROI of your marketing efforts that drive sales and defend every cent of budget you spend with hard data.

Stop Guessing About Phone Conversions

You’re a data-driven marketer and guessing about things isn’t something you do, right? That is, until it comes to call conversions. You wouldn’t imagine guessing about your retargeting CTR or the online conversion rate of your paid search ads and then making decisions based on those assumptions. But like many marketers, you might be totally okay with doing exactly that with phone calls. 

For many industries, 25-50% or more of their conversions happen over the phone, even if those calls started with a Google search or other digital journey. When 50% or more of your conversions might be happening on the phone, you can’t afford to make assumptions. When you guess about call conversion rates—or even assume that the volume of calls an ad drives correlates to conversions—you’re making bad decisions based on bad data that will result in wasting ad spend on campaigns that don’t drive revenue. 

You could even be selling yourself short by underestimating how many conversions your marketing spend actually drives. We’ve found that marketers who don’t track phone conversions overestimate their CPA by over 40%, and that’s going to negatively impact the budget that you get and the success you and your team report back at the end of each quarter. 

When you use a call tracking solution like Invoca, you don’t have to guess about anything. It can automatically analyze all of the calls that your marketing drives and determine the outcome of every call. When you know what’s driving conversions and what’s not, you can make data-based decisions on where to put your money. You can also accurately report on every conversion, your CPA, and your ROAS so you know that you’re not selling yourself and your team short. And every decision you make is backed up with hard data—not guesswork.

Use Call Data to Do More with the Budget You Have

Can you do marketing without using call tracking? Yeah, sure. Can you do it right? Not really. To make all of the right optimization decisions and be the best marketer you can be, you need to use all of the data at your disposal, including data from the customer phone calls your marketing budget drives. With Invoca you can:

Do More With Less Budget

When you know what’s driving conversions over the phone, you can target more cost-effective keywords and ad placements and make sure that your campaigns aren’t driving calls that don’t result in sales. You can also suppress retargeting to customers who already converted on the phone so you can use that budget to drive new customer acquisition. You can even  pinpoint leads who called, showed intent, and didn’t convert so you can add them to your nurture stream or retarget them with tempting promotions.

Increase conversion rates

By feeding 1st-party conversion data from customer conversations directly to ad platforms like Google Ads, you can accurately target high-value customers and the most effective keywords to increase your conversion rates. Check out our Google Ads Customer Success Stories to see how companies like Rogers Communications increased their conversion rates by 80% or more by using Invoca to optimize Google Ads.

Decrease Your CPA

Armed with true attribution, you can account for conversions that come from clicks and calls and accurately measure your acquisition costs, target the most effective keywords, and eliminate ineffective campaigns to reduce your CPA. When you can prove it costs less to acquire customers, you’ll be in the enviable position of either being able to drive more conversions with the same budget free up budget for other initiatives. 

Automate optimization and retargeting

Real-time integrations enable you to stream conversion data from phone calls to virtually any ad platform. Automatically optimize your campaigns and keyword bidding to drive more high-value sales calls to decrease your CPA, increase conversion rates, and drive more revenue. And with real-time conversion data you can suppress recently converted callers and stop wasting budget on unnecessary retargeting efforts. All while reducing manual processes and data exports.

Match Revenue to Your Marketing Campaigns to Prove Your Value

It’s one thing to be able to prove that your marketing is driving conversions over the phone, but it’s a whole different ball game when you can tie those conversions to the revenue they drive. Nothing does a better job of proving your value than showing them the money! By integrating Invoca with your CRM, you can tie every call conversion to the revenue that it drives. This enables you to accurately measure and report your ROAS and prove the value of you and your team's work.

With data from all of the conversions and revenue that your marketing budget drives over the phone, you can paint a complete picture of your performance, get more results from the budget you have, and defend your spend so you keep getting the piece of the pie you deserve. 

Additional Resources:

Infographic: Invoca + Google Ads Success Stories 

Interactive Guide: The Ultimate Guide to Conversation Intelligence for Multi-Location Businesses

Case Study: How Rogers Communications uses Invoca to optimize campaigns and reduce CPA by over 80%

Schedule a personalized consultation today to learn how you can defend your spend with Invoca.

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