Be the first to know. Get our weekly newsletter.

newsletter_popup Join 25,000 of your peers. Get our stories delivered to your e-mail inbox every week.
Edit Interests

Articles Selected for You

No unread stories
 
ViralBlog Logo
Close this box

Sign-up to get the content you like


Our readers can personalize ViralBlog in Zite alike ways, and schedule e-mail alerts to get the most relevant answers to their specific questions.

Choose your sign-up method:

Could not connect to Twitter. Refresh the page or try again later.

 

By signing-up you agree upon our terms and conditions

 
28/10/2012 by
2378 views

Mobile Calls: The Next Frontier Of Big Data

Marketers spend a boatload of cash each year on web and CRM analytics – roughly around $20B. That’s a lot of change.

Mobile Calls: The Next Frontier Of Big Data

Marketing has, as ViralBlog recently and rightfully noted, “gone from art to big data.”

Analytics rule marketing and shape marketers. Marketers gather analytics ranging from website abandon rates and CTR, to conversion rates, repeat visitors, and time on site. Increasingly they are able to automate actions based on how many times emails are opened, pages are visited, and even how many times articles are read. Combining these on-line analytics with big data is powerful.

On-line marketers are now just now getting familiar with all this data. They understand it and they are figuring out how to use it.
And now, just when they were getting comfortable, here comes mobile.

 

Mobile is Different

An interesting ‘problem’ in the mobile space right now is that mobile marketers ‘grew up’ as online marketers. Thus, they have built in biases, habits, and traditions. Mobile marketers think like on-line marketers. They market like on-line marketers. They look at analytics like on-line marketers. And they optimize their marketing like on-line marketers.

The problem is this: mobile marketing is vastly different than on-line marketing.

It is different because, primarily, it generates calls at ridiculous levels. Consider the following:

  • Google says that 61% of mobile searches produce phone calls
  • Nielsen says that 73% of mobile searchers call a business as a result of their search
  • BIA/Kelsey says that mobile call volume will produce 70B new phone calls to businesses in 2015 alone.

In other words, mobile marketing – particularly mobile search – produces phone calls at historic levels.

So much for all that useful big data.

Mobile Is Different

Mobile Call Analytics

Call tracking has been around for more than a decade. Most marketers understand it and use it. But call tracking still doesn’t strike at the heart of big data. It merely tells you who is calling and which ad produced the call.

That’s hardly big and it is hardly data.

New call analytics platforms are not only providing call tracking, but are also actually analyzing calls themselves – conversations, keywords, and phrases – for big data. Imagine being able to score leads and determine propensity to buy based on triggers inside a conversation. Tie that information back to demographic info, web analytics, and even automation, and the results are truly mind blowing.

Big data and mobile marketing have wed in the form of call analytics.

 

3 Ways to Use Call Analytics (The New Big Data) to Improve Marketing

In the articles we write for ViralBlog we try to, not just provide big picture analysis, but rather, to provide practical use cases. To that end, we give you some specific ways to combine call analytics with what you’re already doing.

Lead Scoring– Incredible companies like Pardot, Hubspot and Marketo have mastered lead scoring in the on-line world. I’m not sure I would classify their products as ‘Big Data,’ but certainly they provide analytics tools that serve useful ends. They assign points to web leads based on things that lead does. For example: a prospect that downloads an eBook  and reads 7 emails would have a higher lead score than a lead that downloads a White Paper and doesn’t open any emails.

Lead scoring with call analytics works in a similar way, except the score would be based on caller demographics, previous on-line actions, and most importantly, on the words the lead actually said during the call. For example, if an auto insurance caller said they drive a BMW and live in California, they would have a higher lead score than a lead that drives a Honda in Des Moines.

This is just an example, of course, but think about the huge number of things said on a call that could indicate if someone is a good lead or not.

And then think about the vast number of things you could do – or automate with that information.

Improve!

Map Close Rates – New and sophisticated call analytics platforms, like LogMyCalls, can track close rates for specific ad channels and even individuals. You can actually generate reports that show what percentage of calls individuals are closing. Or, you can see the specific close rates for your latest banner ad, PPC ad or mobile campaign.

Automate Actions – Imagine being able to trigger marketing or CRM actions based on words actually said during a call. Imagine plugging in call analytics data with a marketing automation tool you already use. Imagine generating emails, dynamic content, lead scores, CRM triggers, remarketing, SMS marketing, or big data cloud triggers, all based on words actually said during the call.

Holy cow.

BIA/Kelsey says that mobile marketing will contribute to a massive increase in calls businesses across the U.S. receive. The word they use is ‘deluge.’ That’s a cool sounding word.

Let me be clear: it is critical to gather analytics from calls than ever. Mobile necessitates that marketers shed their habits and traditions and move into the ‘now.’ Mobile calls are that now.

 

Top image by: Van Run

 

Follow Category?

Follow Author?

Jason Wells

Follow Tags?

mobile dataFollowUnfollow