4 Ways to Boost Content Marketing by Tapping Into an Unlikely Source: Consumer Calls

The ultimate goal of content marketing is to foster consumer relationships that drive conversions and grow a brand’s customer base. In order to do that, content marketers need to understand which parts of their marketing are delivering purchase-driving information to customers—and which aren’t.

Many content marketers have discovered the unlikely secret to accessing rich, timely, firsthand insights that improve customer acquisition and revenue—consumer phone calls.

Conversation Analytics Is the Solution

In today’s mobile-first world, many consumers that visit a site via search or digital advertising convert by calling. Search, social, and display will drive over 162 billion calls to US businesses in 2019. That’s more than double the amount they drove in 2014. Call volume to businesses is exploding.

Getting insights into these calls and conversations at scale is a powerful way for marketers to improve SEO, content marketing, and conversion rates.

Conversation analytics works by transcribing the call, then using powerful AI algorithms to analyze the transcriptions, telling marketers:

• If the call was answered or sent to voicemail
• The exact words and phrases spoken on a call
• If the caller was a quality lead
• What products/services they were interested in
• What the sentiment of the caller was
• If the caller converted into a customer
• Which sales agents and business locations are converting the most, and least, calls into customers

Analyzing conversations from consumer calls can also serve as a powerful lens into how well your content converts potential buyers into customers.

Give Consumers the Information They Need to Convert

Analyzing what is being said on phone calls placed to your business can help you better understand what information your content marketing is missing. Phone conversations are rich with high-quality insights into what consumers need to know about a product or service before they make a purchase or book an appointment. By analyzing those conversations and incorporating insights from them into your website content and overall messaging, marketers can anticipate their audience’s needs and convert more website visitors to customers.

The leading wholesale provider of equipment and supplies for the foodservice industry, Central Restaurants, uses DialogTech’s conversation analytics technology to, among other things, analyze what happens on the calls their content generates.

“Most of our orders come from phone calls, and this is especially true for higher-priced products that people might not feel comfortable buying online,” said Nathan Smith, Marketing Database Analyst at Central. “We can analyze calls from a specific product’s webpage to see what questions callers are asking, then have our content team update the details on that page to answer them.”

Throughout two years of using DialogTech’s conversation analytics and call attribution technology, the Central team was able to understand exactly which channel, ad, keyword search, and website interaction drove calls that convert. Smith says his team has increased calls by 23% and new customers by 13% year-over-year.

Shorten the Customer Journey

If you notice a particular web page or blog post is driving a high number of calls, it’s important to understand why. Are consumers calling because this content features a high-selling product or service? Is this particular piece of content exceedingly successful in convincing readers they should become a customer? Or is the content lacking in key information, leading to high number of calls to inquire about product details?

Conversation analytics can point to the pieces of content that drive the most calls and, through AI-powered technology, help you understand what customers are saying on these calls.

For example, Galeton.com, a B2B work clothing and safety gear e-commerce site, was looking to boost conversions. The Galeton marketing team ran a series of website optimization tests covering 78 website elements. One of the biggest revelations from their testing was from their product detail pages. Customers were calling Galeton’s agents to ask which size they should purchase despite the fact that the sizing chart was on the page—albeit at the bottom. Galeton moved the sizing chart above the fold and boosted their conversion rate by 13%.

Understand Which Content Drives High-Quality Calls

Analyzing phone calls can also inform other aspects of your content marketing program, like the creative for search and display ads. When combined with call attribution, conversation analytics can tell you which specific ads (or marketing channel, keywords, or webpage) are driving the most calls, and the highest-quality calls.

This level of in-depth understanding of your call channel allows for ad optimization through powerful methods like A/B testing.

Your marketing team can develop multiple versions of the same ad and, with call attribution and analytics, understand which creative is delivering the highest-quality and highest-converting leads over the phone.

Increase Search-Driven Site Visits

If people are asking questions about your products or services on the phone, they are also likely asking those same questions in search engines. Answering those questions by creating digital content will increase visits from SEO (including voice search) and achieve higher SERP rank for your brand. This leads to a more informed and more purchase-ready consumer audience.

To learn more about how conversation analytics can help brands use what happens on calls to optimize ROI across channels, download our free guide, The Digital Marketer’s Playbook for Voice Analytics.