Putting your marketing efforts out into the world is a lot like casting a fishing line out to the sea—it takes time, patience, and a whole lot of effort, but when you come up with a big catch, it all seems to be worth it in the end.
The only difference is that with marketing, you’re casting out more of a net rather than one line in hopes of getting the attention of more fish (or buyers). It’s an arduous process, and when you come back into port to showcase your wares, you hope that you have the stuff to show that it was, in fact, all worth it.
Any avid angler will be the first to tell you it’s not so much about casting out hundreds of thousands of times to be successful, but rather knowing where to look for their catch. Getting hundreds of thousands of bites (potential leads) to your call center is nice, but how many are you actually pulling in? Validating marketing campaigns and activity has been an uphill battle for years, and with the oversaturation of information today, it’s becoming ever-more important to be able to prove to executives that your “bait” is actually working. With that in mind, here are just a few things to consider as you strategize your next outreach campaign.
IS YOUR CALL CENTER HELPING PULL IN DEALS?
Unfortunately, there still exists a large stigma amongst executives that marketing is an expense and not a strategic investment. And perhaps more unfortunately, the burden falls upon the marketing team to prove otherwise.
While acknowledgement of the importance of marketing in the eyes of the C-Suite is on the up-and-up, there is still heaps of pressure for marketing to perform with hyper-efficiency. Today, for most companies, attention is fixated on generating online sales, but there’s also the responsibility of pumping value into the organization’s call center through marketing efforts. There is no arguing that your organization’s marketing department has a direct effect on the success of your call center and therefore the entire business.
Call centers are often thought of as the gatekeeper for satiating unhappy customers. While it certainly does help with that particular business need, it can also be a great tool for generating leads for the company.
HOW IS THIS IMPROVING YOUR BUSINESS PROCESS?
With the help of automated call scoring, you can completely revamp how you think about lead generation as a result of your call center operations.
Take this scenario, for example. Say a retailer spends $100,000 on digital marketing/SEO to drive leads to their site and then to call them for more information. Of the 1,000 calls they got from that phone number, how many were:
- Leads to qualified buyers and
- Leads that actually turned into sales?
There are a few other things that marketers also need to know about these efforts:
- Are they just providing easier access for existing customers to reach out?
- Are they just allowing for unqualified buyers to take up resources learning about the product and then not making a purchase?
- Or are they enabling actual prospects to continue the evaluation of their sales cycle and actually make a purchase?
With automated scoring and keyword searching, you can easily and quickly pinpoint those words that qualify a caller as a hot lead for potential business. In turn, your marketing team is able to see the direct effects of their outreach efforts at a glance, further guiding future campaigns and driving more productivity from the marketing team.
It can be tough proving return on investment for your business in a clear and concise way. However with the help of automatic call-scoring and speech analytics, you will be able to empirically show the effectiveness of marketing efforts as it relates to the success of your call center.
