The top problems facing CMOs haven’t changed for decades. CMOs need to optimize their budgets and drive cost effective opportunities into the sales funnel. Until recently, it was hard to quantify how a marketing organization was driving opportunities. In the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, marketing initiatives could be run across a wide variety of programs and channels, but it was nearly impossible to tell which channels were working. Marketing had to request that the sales team ask their prospects where they heard about the company. Marketing professionals were in the dark and hoped that good creative and hard work would fill the sales funnel. There was an aura of “magic” to Marketing, and the idea that you just needed to trust that it was working reigned supreme. It reminds us of the old Marketing adage that, “I know half my advertising is working, just not which half.”
Then something interesting happened in the 90’s as marketing began to shift to digital platforms: for the first time marketing professionals gained ad specific attribution. There was data, real data, and lots of it. Slowly the “magic” of marketing began to go away and be replaced with quantifiable results. Marketers could see that the money spent on a specific marketing channel directly led to a certain number of leads, and those leads converted to opportunities and produced a measurable amount of revenue. The marketing team could work with the sales team to determine ROI; a metric traditionally tracked by Finance was now part of the marketing vocabulary and CMOs had the ammunition to take control and grow their budgets. With this shift, marketing budgets, for the first time based on hard data, grew, and included more money for the tactics that were proven successful and the technology needed to help track the marketing funnel.
CMOs were happy with this new paradigm. It was easier to show success. For most it was a simple formula: use advertising and content to drive a user to a landing page with a form, get them to fill out that form, and then hand that lead off to Sales. It was simple, effective, and easy to track.
Then something happened to make the CMOs life a nightmare: smartphones.
With the advent and adoption of smartphones, consumers started spending more time on their phone versus their laptop or desktop. This meant that marketers needed to adjust their ad spending accordingly, and they did. According to eMarketer, in 2016 mobile will represent 60% of all digital advertising. And the most recent data shows that consumers now view over 50% of ads on mobile devices — and when they do click on an ad or visit a site they aren’t filling out a contact form with their thumbs. They end up using one of the primary features of the device in their hands: they call.
People still make calls. They want to make calls. If they didn’t, we would have an entire world of people with PDAs, small tablets, or other devices in their pockets that did everything a smartphone could do without an expensive voice plan. For the occasional call we could use FaceTime or Skype. But that is simply not the case. Call volumes are soaring. According to analyst research firm BIA/Kelsey, 162 billion inbound calls will be driven to U.S. businesses by 2019 from mobile marketing channels. Quite simply, there are many instances where people still want to talk.
If the move to digital ads illuminated the marketing landscape (by allowing you to track results and optimize your marketing spend), then the move to mobile ads has created a “black hole” in the middle of that circle of light. That “black hole” is phone calls. And it’s growing every day.
If consumers are spending more time on their mobile devices, and advertisers are following suit, and consumers are increasingly choosing to call a business rather than filling out a form, shouldn’t those calls be tracked just like a form? Shouldn’t marketers have the same level of data and analytics around the channels that are driving the most calls, leads, opportunities, and revenue that they have been getting from digital platforms the last 15 years? This is the value DialogTech provides, by shining a bright light on the black hole that exists in your marketing attribution. By providing attribution for call conversions and enhancing the sales processes with smart contextual call routing the black hole disappears, and at the same time customers are delighted that they are being provided the ability to communicate with companies via their preferred method.
For too long during this digital revolution the technologists of the world have been trying to steal our humanity from us by taking away what makes us unique: our ability to communicate, to have a dialog. They want to reduce everything to filling out a form online or forcing customers into a shopping cart, and the sheer increase of calls being made is showing us that people don’t want that. They want to be able to call, ask questions, and have a dialog, and by not offering that to them they will gladly take their business elsewhere.
At DialogTech we believe in the power of conversation to drive lasting, profitable customer relationships. Businesses that embrace the power of voice — that talk to their customers — have a unique advantage that will lead to healthy budgets, lead flow, and corporate growth.
