With the advent of performance marketing and the concept of paying for each customer conversion rather than a set price for an advertisement, marketing program or advertising campaign, there became a need to attribute or measure every conversion. Whether a conversion was considered a sale, a phone call or some other type of customer action, the ability to attribute that action to a specific entity or campaign became a necessary part of the equation. Ultimately, performance marketing platforms were designed to track conversions and attribute those conversions to specific marketing campaigns or teams.
Meeting Different Needs
Since the arrival of performance marketing platforms, there have been a wide range of developments designed to meet the needs of the various end users. What’s important in a performance marketing platform for a call center may be different than what’s valuable for an advertiser or brand. For this reason many of the current performance marketing platforms are designed with customization and flexibility in mind. This allows today’s systems to take many different forms.
Call Based Platforms
A call based performance marketing platform is designed specifically for companies who depend on phone call conversions for their business. More generally, these systems can be used by a wide variety of business types within the performance marketing sector. Some of these companies integrate specific parts of the platform into their existing systems while others utilize the entire platform.
The Performance Marketing Sector
To elaborate on the various features of a call based performance marketing platform it’s instructional to learn how different business types in the performance marketing sector utilize such a system. To that end, this post will describe how performance marketing enterprises such as advertisers and brands, lead and call generators, sales organizations, qualify and transfer call centers and social media marketers can use various aspects of the platform to suit their own needs.
Advertisers And Brands
Advertisers and brands who utilize performance marketing teams to generate phone calls or leads that convert into phone calls find performance marketing platforms useful for tracking phone calls and attributing them to specific advertisements, marketing campaigns or hired associates. Advertisers can also employ their own online engagement widgets to entice customers into action by filling in webforms or clicking online buttons to initiate or schedule a phone call.
The performance marketing platform allows the advertiser to respond to direct requests through an automated process that reaches out to the customer and eliminates the need for manual outbound calling. Once the customer is ready to talk, the platform enables a sales agent to automatically get in touch. The system can also route inbound calls to ensure a prompt response and appropriate follow up. The system should also be able to provide or easily integrate with any existing call tracking protocols, customer relationship management (CRM) databases and advertising software.
Lead And Call Generators
Lead and call generators are the conduit between customers and call buying sales organizations, advertisers and brands. Lead and call generators employing affiliate marketers and publishers to increase the amount of traffic they receive may also be known as aggregators. As performance marketers, aggregators and lead and call generators need an efficient system to allow them to find, develop, analyze and pass leads onto the sales organizations, advertisers and brands.
A performance marketing platform meets this need by providing the lead and call generator or aggregator with the ability to manage buyer and supplier orders, analyze profit and loss statements relating to specific campaigns, affiliates and publishers, create lead effectiveness reports, monitor calls both in real-time and retroactively and initiate outbound calls or route inbound calls quickly and effectively. Ultimately, the marketing platform allows the lead generator to maximize its profits by increasing connections between customers and sales organizations, advertisers or brands.
Sales Organizations
Sales organizations can generate their own leads or buy them from aggregators or lead and call generators in order to make sales on behalf of advertisers and brands while receiving a commission in return. When generating their own leads, sales organizations can use the performance marketing platform to track the effectiveness of their marketing efforts with call tracking software.
Whether the sales organization is creating its own leads or buying them, the platform allows lead development with customer targeted text messages, emails and outbound phone calls. Online call-to-action and engagement widgets may also be used to convert leads into phone calls. Once a phone call is initiated, the system can quickly route it to the appropriate location and agent. The platform can also provide or integrate with CRM database capabilities and billing software.
Qualify And Transfer Call Centers
Qualify and transfer call centers are able to use a performance marketing platform to automate their phone call protocols. Rather than relying on error prone manual processes to initiate outbound calls, the marketing platform automates the procedure in order to increase the customer contact rate, lower the costs per contact and connect with the customer as fast and efficiently as possible.
The platform can also be used to increase the efficiency of inbound call qualification and transfers. With the help of information obtained from the CRM database, the qualify and transfer call agent is presented with an appropriate script to confirm the customer’s qualification. Once the customer is qualified, the agent uses the platform’s call distribution function to automatically transfer the customer to the correct sales agent according to pre-selected criteria. These criteria could be based on the geographically closest agent, competitive call distribution, round robin agent selection or whatever is deemed most important by the involved companies.
Social Media Marketers
Social media marketers monitor websites and apps such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to identify leads and convert them into phone calls for routing towards sales organizations, advertisers or brands. A performance marketing platform can assist social media marketers by tracking phone calls, attributing those calls to specific marketing campaigns and following up on the success of those calls once they’ve been transferred to the sales team.
A good performance marketing platform will also generate data that provides insight into which marketing efforts are driving phone calls and ultimately resulting in sales. This, in turn, allows the marketer to target new customers based on the actions of previous customers and promotes data-based decisions rather than choices made by simple trial and error.
The Performance Marketing Platform
As can be seen, a performance marketing platform can be many things to many different business types. Whether the business uses all or parts of the platform depends on its needs and existing infrastructure. Ultimately such platforms are utilized as a customizable way to increase revenue by efficiently processing leads, tracking their source and providing analyzable data to improve future efforts.