The goal of digital marketing is to create leads for your business. Once you get those leads onto your website, you likely have a contact form or gated content to capture prospects’ contact information on your website.
However, although this is perhaps the most common method to capture lead information, it’s not the only way to structure your campaigns and sign up flow. A better option may be to generate calls directly with your pay-per-click campaigns.
Why is a phone call an effective CTA?
If you are using your PPC campaigns to generate leads for your business, generating calls directly from your campaigns may result in a higher conversion rate. As you likely know, time kills deals. Every unnecessary step – and delay – in your sales funnel presents a risk of losing a lead. While some pauses in the sales cycle are unavoidable, they should be avoided as much as possible.
By building campaigns focused on encouraging prospects to initiate calls with your salespeople directly from your ads, you can minimize sales cycle delays. Why send traffic to a landing page that then suggests a phone call as a primary CTA? Call-driving campaigns are a great way to avoid friction and keep the conversation moving forward through the sales funnel.
Many salespeople report that live phone calls are second only to in-person interactions for efficacy. Organizations’ conversion rates often reflect this. This is in part because your sales team can command the lead’s attention more easily. Additionally, people who call your team are qualifying themselves as likely sales.
PPC techniques to generate more calls
Moving your website visitors and ad viewer to calls with your sales team can be advantageous. However, this raises the question: How can you optimize your online ads to generate more calls? The following six techniques will help fuel your PPC success:
1) Encourage calls with CTAs
Calls to action are at the heart of marketing: your campaigns need to generate an action. You can include CTAs directly in your pay-per-click ads as well as on your landing pages. Simply changing these to focus on calling your sales team can be enough to increase your call volume.
Try to get a little creative with your CTA copy. Many ads encourage people to ‘call now.’ Finding more unique wording can help to make it more effective. Even simple additions such as ‘call now and get started in minutes’ can make your calls to action more compelling.
Of course, different language works for each brand and product. Explore a few options and track how successful each one is.
2) Leverage call extensions and call-only ads
Minimizing clicks is one of the best ways to improve conversion rates. If you want to convert your ads into calls in as few clicks as possible, you need to be using call extensions.
This ad feature, offered by Google, Microsoft and some others, places an interactive phone number on your ad. If the viewer clicks the phone number, it will immediately start a phone call. This is typically charged the same as a regular click, so there is no reason not to take advantage of this feature.
As a similar technique, you can use a call-only ad. This is essentially the same thing but the only option for the viewer is to start the call. Consider experimenting with call extensions and call-only ads to determine which offer the best results.
3) Prioritize call ads with your bidding strategy
Your bidding strategy should reflect the priority you place on generating calls. If you have call-only ads and ads with call extensions in your campaign, you can place higher bids on these. Even if you keep your average bid the same, putting the call ads at a higher rate will show Google that they are your priority.
This is an effective way to ensure that your call ads show more often. You can also adjust your targeting to get your calls ads in front of the audience that is most likely to respond to them.
4) Optimizing landing pages
Whether you are using call extensions or normal PPC ads, you will often have visitors arriving at your landing pages. If you want to increase your call volume, you need to ensure that your landing pages are optimized to encourage calls.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this is making sure your phone number is easy to find. Don’t expect your visitors to click through to contact us to make a call.
People tend to look for the phone number in the top-left corner of a web page on desktop. For even better results, consider making it front and center. Of course, you should experiment and use your own brand’s data to determine the right arrangement.
Best practices for high-converting calls
The above strategies will help you to maximize your call volume. However, you could quadruple your call volume without any major bottom-line results if your sales team is not successfully converting those calls. Poor conversion rates on calls tend to be either due to mishandling of phone calls or because of low-quality inbound leads. These are ways to improve call quality.
1) Monitor your calls
If you’ve ever heard ‘this call may be monitored for quality purposes,’ you know about this method. It is a must-do for any organization that takes inbound calls.
You may think that sampling and monitoring calls are micro-management. However, you wouldn’t let any other form of marketing go unmonitored. Calls should be no different. You may discover issues such as poor call quality or awkward greetings. Even making minor tweaks could net major returns.
2) Track your data
Data can and should inform everything in marketing. It is important to have numbers to guide your decisions. Make sure you are tracking your entire sales cycle, including calls. Analyze how calls are being generated and when they are converting.
The right call tracking system will help you to easily associate calls with your lead generation strategies. When you have data, you can experiment and make well-informed choices.
Start capturing more leads
The above tips will help you increase your call quantity and quality. However, you may be wondering how you can handle the increased volume: HelloSells has the answer. With 24/7 lead response, live lead transfer and other services, we can help you take more calls and ensure a higher conversion rate.
Call us today at 1-800-550-4955 to learn more.