By David Forster
While Adster Creative operates on the digital side of the lead generation universe, some of our greatest results have come via what we internet folks refer to as ‘offline’ methods.
One of the best traditional methods to connect with new prospects is via the phone – though it took a bit of time, analysis, and refinement to fully realize it.
Our First Call Campaign
Our callers were hitting our target market with some pretty serious velocity. Hundreds of times per day, people were hearing about all of the wonderful ways that Adster Creative could help them grow their businesses.
Weeks passed, scripts were tweaked, and follow up call were made. We even made some sales. Yay!
However, when we looked at the initial data from a money in, money out perspective, it seemed as though our call campaign was losing a proposition.
That said, after, some time to understand what was happening, nothing could have been further from the truth.
Surge in Awareness for Brand
While companies like Managed Sales Pros are experts in building lists, warming, nurturing, and often times even closing our leads, we realized they were also doing something equally valuable – generating a lot of interest for our brand.
Every day, dozens of new prospects were turning to the web to get a better sense of what Adster Creative was all about.
What were they finding?
Google Adwords & Brand Protection
First off, by ensuring that our branded search was covered effectively by a well designed Adwords campaign, we could hone in on individuals explicitly searching for our brand name.
As you can see, there was a marked spike in these searches and clicks that correlate closely to our calling efforts. In fact, during the period of our call campaign, branded search increased over 65%!
We’d experienced a very real lift in people checking us out online, and that got me thinking about what they were finding through these searches.
Managing Brand with Local Search Optimization
Let’s say you’re one of the rare few businesses who has had the foresight to ensure your brand is protected and anchored into the top of Google with paid search.
However, many new prospects will want to go beyond just ‘finding’ you.
Sure, the friendly caller is more than happy to promise the moon and stars, but what does the Internet have to say?
By ensuring that Adster Creative’s reputation is well managed via local Search Engine Optimization (SEO), we’re not leaving this critical phrase of the conversion process to chance.
Further, in an effort to be wholly transparent, we work directly with our clients to solicit reviews on outlets like Google My Business, Yelp, and Yellow Pages.
Ultimately, this well ‘groomed’ first page of Google results ensured that when our call list prospects were investigating us online, they liked what they found.
Remarketing to the call list
While going this route takes a bit more effort and technical understanding, we realized that the ability to remarket (and especially directly to our call list) would deliver a massive amount of additional impact and value.
In layman’s terms, this strategy simply means that not only are you ‘calling’ your call list, you’re getting in front of them on the digital side of things as well.
Both Google Adwords & Facebook will allow you to import your call (email) list, and advertise to these individuals via Facebook promoted posts & ads, as well as advertisements on YouTube, Google search, and 1000’s of other websites via Google’s Display Network.
In this way, you can be top of mind with your customers while your call team move them through the sales process, as well as staying in contact with all those ‘I’m not saying no, just not right now’ folks after the calling stops.
Bringing it all together
Months after our call campaign finished, we realized some very significant things. While the actual call campaign came very close to breaking even, these factors knocked it out of the park:
- Retention on deals closed directly through the campaign eventually made it a ‘stand alone’ profitable endeavor.
- The lift in brand awareness had lasting effects – even to this day.
- We closed several more deals through remarketing and internal calling to the original list making the entire campaign a huge success.
What really works
As marketing evolves and users attentions spans continue to diminish, it will become decreasingly viable to consider that a single communication channel will deliver a satisfactory ROI. A call campaign is no exception.
If you are counting on your call team to do it all for you, you are simply not capitalizing on the full opportunity that exists.
By including a clever mix of digital into the fold, you can maximize your messages effectiveness – and watch your ROI soar!