It’s not as sexy as e-commerce, but sometimes a person just needs to make a call with their mobile phone and talk to a real person. And if your marketing department doesn’t track where those calls are coming from, you can’t understand the true value of your mobile marketing spend.
That’s what DialogTech for Mobile Marketing aims to do. Launched by DialogTech, a Chicago-based developer of call analytics and automation solutions, DialogTech for Mobile Marketing is a marketing solution for tracking, controlling and optimizing revenue-generating inbound phone calls that come via your mobile marketing campaigns with keyword-level call attribution data for Google call extensions.
In an interview, DialogTech CEO and CTO Irv Shapiro said that with the explosion in the use of smartphones and the corresponding shift of market budgets over to mobile, people are reaching out to companies more and more often by phone. They see an ad, end up on a company page, and rather than navigating a cumbersome “contact me” form on their mobile device, they’re tapping the hotlinked phone number to make a voice call.
“Mobile advertising is exploding, and as a side effect call volumes are exploding,” said Shapiro. “Our mission is to make it easier for businesses to handle that transition to a mobile world.”
The increase in call volumes may seem counterintuitive – especially for text-loving millennials – but Shapiro said unless a transaction is simple, everyone wants a real person on the line.
“We’re paying a lot of money to have a phone in our pocket, when we could just use Skype or VoIP,” said Shapiro. “As humans, we want to talk to each other. It’s what humans do.”
DialogTech’s internal numbers back him up – Shapiro said customer calls tracked through their platform were up by one-third over the last six months. As mobile-generated calls continue to increase – and inbound callers are more likely to be ready to buy — he said marketers that aren’t tracking these calls are understating their mobile conversions by as much as 50 per cent.
“Marketers that aren’t optimizing around this experience are missing a wave, and not properly representing their business value or properly taking their business to market,” said Shapiro.
The DialogTech solution allows for the tracking, controlling and optimizing of inbound phone calls from any mobile source, such as Google or Facebook, providing reporting and tracking on what’s working and what’s not.
“We can give them accurate information on what keywords are driving calls,” said Shapiro.
With the DialogTech portal integrating your Google AdWords and other mobile advertising platforms, users can see all their call activity in one place, and route calls contextually to the right salespeople. The reporting combines Google AdWords and Analytics with call data, and companies can choose to record a call (callers are informed the call may be recorded at the outset), have it automatically transcribed, and then run deep analytics against those conversations.
“We make it really easy for you to manage a large campaign that embraces mobile,” said Shapiro.
At the backend, DialogTech offers integration with Salesforce to track what calls have been converted into closed sales. It also integrates with more than a dozen marketing optimization platforms, and features an open architecture APIU for integration with other systems.
The solution is sold as a monthly subscription service starting at $150/month for small and medium-sized businesses, and packages can be customized based on call volume for larger businesses. Canadian customers include Pt Health, Colorworks Canada and Weed Man.