Invoca Adds Context to Calls with Launch of Signal

According to our newly released LCM wave 18 data, SMBs find that call-based leads tend to be of higher quality than email (where SMBs reported 43% to be good/excellent), Facebook (35.3% good/excellent) and even in store visits (58.8% good/excellent). Between those SMBs that found call-based leads to be of “good quality” (33.2%) or “excellent quality” (35.5%) that’s an astonishing 68.6 percent. What does this mean? Increasingly, phone calls are becoming the bread and butter lead-type for the vast majority of small businesses.

This has led to a lot of interesting and complex challenges for marketers that service SMB campaigns – with the most pressing issue being how to attribute offline calls that came from online campaigns back to the campaigns themselves. Dynamic call-tracking numbers have been able to solve this problem partially, but still don’t provide the depth of analytics that are necessary to create the highest return on investment for marketing campaigns.

This is where companies like Invoca come in. Until recently, SMBs have had a difficult time tracking the digital path a consumer took that led to them placing a phone call. Essentially, once a person calls into a business from an online campaign, they would switch from online to offline and would appear “new” to the business. Existing marketing automation, retargeting, and CRM software platforms often go blind once this transition takes place.

Invoca and other call analytics platforms have developed solutions to bridge the online-offline call intelligence gap, and have been able to equip marketers with the necessary data and insight needed to maximize marketing campaign ROI. We recently sat with the Invoca product team to learn about Signal, their new phone call analytics solution designed to assist businesses with connecting keywords and campaigns to phone calls – layered with contextual data that aids in analyzing the content of the call in real-time.

A key element of the tool is dynamic session-based tracking. In the event a number changes from one campaign to the next, the customer will still be remembered and identified from the last time they clicked through and called. Once the call occurs, the software creates or links to an existing profile, attributes information related to the call, then allows for data dips into third party solutions, then finally routes them to another sales department based on a lead scoring and routing automated metric system.

Signal takes the context of the call a step further with sentiment analysis after the call has been connected and a conversation has begun. Pairing these two types of data while connecting it with keywords from the online campaign provides SMBs with interesting call attribution capabilities.

Call-based leads will continue to be the gold-standard lead-type for SMBs as mobile devices and mobile search continue to boom. We expect the interest/demand for call intelligence and analytics solutions like Invoca’s Signal product to grow as marketers continue ride the mobile-call wave.