Invoca Signals a New Direction in Call Monetization

Call Monetization and marketing company Invoca today announced its new voice and call analytics platform, Signal. It took the opportunity to also announce it has added Salesforce.com as an investor in its Series C round, which we initially covered back in January.

From today’s press release:

While platforms like Google Analytics have given marketers valuable insight into website interactions, with Invoca Signal, marketers gain valuable insights discovered through voice interactions. Invoca Signal helps companies analyze and act on every inbound sales conversation. The technology listens to what happens on an inbound call and automates the next action by applying scoring techniques with valuable metrics and conversion data relevant to the marketer’s unique sales and marketing processes.

This builds from a topic we’ve been covering here, in written reports and webinars a great deal lately. Smartphone penetration and resulting search volume is driving lots of commercially-oriented phone calls to business. We estimate 65 billion calls from mobile search by 2016.

That compels technologies to drive, track, analyze and manage all these calls for businesses of all sizes. It’s particularly a good opportunity for local media companies which already have advertiser relationships and location targeted advertising bundles that continue to evolve.

Beyond local, the opportunity is also growing in the enterprise space and at the large brand level. That’s especially true within high-value verticals that close business via inbound calls (think call centers). That includes lots of insurance, auto, financial, and professional services to name a few.

Invoca specifically zeros in on a lot of these enterprise opportunities and has done a lot to plug into Salesforce, leading up to the enterprise giant’s investment today. If you think about it, customer relationship management and inbound lead optimization tie right in with call tracking.

We’ll continue to see all of this advance with Invoca and other leaders in the call monetization space. These players are innovating around different flavors of call tracking, analysis and monetization, and we’re seeing quite an ecosystem develop. See our recent webcasts on the topic.

Lastly, we’ll be publishing a white paper next week that unpacks all of this, including supporting data, case studies, and our signature analysis of the opportunity at hand. Tomorrow we’ll provide a deeper preview of that paper and below is a recent analyst round table discussion. Stay tuned.