The humble phone call was once a marketer’s most powerful tool for reaching potential customers. While cold calling has gone out of fashion, many consumers still want to talk to a real person before they make the decision to buy. Today, you’re 10 times more likely to make a sale over the phone than over the internet, and when customers call, you need to be prepared to collect important data!

Here are a few reasons why call tracking is the most important thing you can do as a local business to get new leads.

Inbound Phone Calls are the Lifeblood of Local Business

The great thing about inbound calls is that the person calling is already familiar with your brand. As a local business, you probably already get calls every day. Are you collecting data from those calls? You should be.

If you’re not measuring your inbound calls, you’re not managing them. So how do you accomplish that? Read on to find out.

Inbound Call Tracking Gives You Valuable Info about Your SEO Performance

Every local business should be conducting Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to ensure they appear higher up on local search results for their industry. Assuming you are already doing SEO, you can find out how well your campaigns are working by tracking your inbound calls.

Call Tracking Tells You Where Calls are Coming From

When you’re marketing on multiple channels, call tracking will tell you which ones are the most successful. You can use a different phone number for each channel (i.e. Facebook, paid Google Ads, landing pages on your website, etc.) and make sure your contact info is prominent and easily accessible. When calls come in, you will know where they came from by the number they used to reach you.

Help with Inbound Call Tracking

As a local business owner, you may not have the resources or time to set up your own call tracking campaign. That’s ok! Many local businesses choose to outsource their marketing and SEO to a digital marketing firm like TIC Digital Marketing. If you need help setting up an SEO campaign with inbound call tracking, get in touch with us by calling (858) 280-3792, by sending an email to [email protected], or by filling out the simple online form below or on our contact page.

Action Plan

Take a few minutes to apply what you’ve learned in this post!

1. Think about your current incoming calls to your business. Are you picking up or returning every call?
2. Do you have a method of tracking your incoming calls? Important things to track include caller contact information, location, what they need, and how they found you.
3. If you wanted to look at call data from the last 30 days, where would you find that data? Is it easily accessible and readable for you and your team?
4. Consider using different phone numbers for different marketing channels – this way you can determine where a customer found you without having to ask them directly.