How to Get Call Leads with High Commercial Intent

If you’ve ever wondered how to get and leverage call leads who actually want to buy, here’s your crash course.

With the sweeping takeover of digital, experts and laypeople alike assume that old-fashioned phone calls went the way of the dinosaur. Why pick up the phone and talk when you could fill out a form, click through a social media feed or buy online? In response, small and medium-sized businesses have turned their attention from call leads – a once time-honored method of marketing – to more automated sales methods.

The problem with this is simple: Calling works. By ditching it, you’re ditching one of the most effective marketing strategies on the market today. In fact, its effectiveness is growing: According to Sales Hacker, the average call time in January 2016 was 119 seconds, but that time leaped to 254 seconds in January 2017. That’s a call time increase of more than 100 percent in a single year, indicating that people may feel some digital fatigue. It seems prospects are more interested in that traditional face-to-face.

Moreover, research indicates that calls have between 30 and 50 percent conversion rates. Compare that to conversion rates for Facebook ads, where the customer clicks the ad and buys online. Those offer a return on only 9 percent of ads. Pretty crazy, right? At a bare minimum, call leads give you three times the results as Facebook.

That’s not to say online advertising isn’t useful. It is the foundation of inbound call generation. This merely indicates that when you take your advertising to the next step, you do better. That’s pretty much true any time you extend your funnel. It’s especially true when your funnel addition has as much power as phone calls.

Today, let’s take a look at that power. We’ll explore who the audience consists of and how inbound call leads work. We will also discuss the power of qualified call leads and how to get the best ones. Lastly, we will take a look at what your ad creative needs to consist of, why mobile matters for getting qualified leads and how to get help today.

Who Is the Audience for Inbound Call Generation?

Typically, inbound call leads consist of consumers. These are people whom you can convert over the course of a phone call. Unlike businesses, which have to undergo lengthy discussions before they decide to purchase, consumers often convert in a few minutes. This is especially true once they’re already qualified with good advertising (explained below).

Also, typically, your pay per call leads have a more significant decision to make. If your prospect is going to buy a sweater, for instance, there’s not much discussion involved. However, if they’re going to sign up for an insurance policy, they want to know more. They need details: coverage benefits, premiums, out-of-pocket costs.

That’s where a call comes in. It’s particularly useful when a prospect truly needs a live conversation before they make a buying decision. Most consumers won’t plunk down money until they’ve had their emotional needs met and their questions answered. Many industries involve an extremely high level of trust before a prospect will convert. Just a few examples:

• Insurance policies
• Legal services
• Medical and dental services
• Addiction or psychiatric treatment
• Final expense plans
• Credit repair
• Water damage services

Note that a conversion doesn’t have to result in money immediately. In some cases, a conversion means booking an appointment. For instance, a medical center wants people to come in for diagnoses of various health problems, for which they may offer surgery or regimens. An addiction center wants people to join on an inpatient basis, or start coming on an outpatient basis. An attorney wants people to schedule a phone consultation to assess whether they can help.

At the end of the day, your audience consists of primary decision-makers. At most, they have to discuss their decision with a spouse or parent. They have a problem, they learn you can solve it, and they have the power to convert in the moment.

That said, how exactly does the process work?

How Does Inbound Call Generation Work?

As stated, most inbound call generation is set up for B2C companies. Those are the ones geared toward selling directly to individuals. So say you’re an addiction treatment center. Your inbound call process would look like this:

• Contract with an inbound marketing center to handle your phone calls
• Post an ad on Facebook explaining who you are and what you offer
• The call center waits for customers to call
• The call center picks up the phone and explains the offer
• They get rerouted by the call center once they’re ready to buy

The result? You pay per call, but only pick up your own phone when prospects have said they would like to move forward with a treatment plan. This saves your team time and money.

On the phone with you, they not only get their questions answered. They also feel heard. It gives them a sense that someone is looking out for them. And it increases the know-like-trust factor, which is critical in conversions. Until prospects know you, they won’t call. (That’s where ads come in.) Until they like you, they won’t move forward. (That’s where the call center comes in.) Once they trust you, they will buy. (That’s where your team comes in, making the final sale.)

This know-like-trust power is critical. It helps you weed out those who aren’t serious at every level. So how exactly does that work, and why does it matter?

Who Does Inbound Call Generation Exclude and Why Does That Matter?

One of the most potent benefits of inbound call generation is the quality of the leads. To see why this is so, let’s compare inbound call leads to cold call leads.

With the latter, you buy a list of leads who generally fit your audience profile. If you sell life insurance, for instance, young and middle-aged parents are your target. You then call those people, hoping to schedule a meeting. Most refuse if they even pick up. Of those you do convince to meet with you, many will cancel or reject you at the meeting. Only a few will convert. Estimates of cold call conversion rates clock in around 2 percent. That’s nothing compared to the 30 or 50 percent we saw above and makes truly poor use of your time – and your team’s.

On the other hand, inbound call leads hit that 30-50 mark, giving you 15 to 25 times the returns on cold calling. Your team only devotes time to leads once they’ve passed a two-tiered benchmark: they’ve clicked on an ad, and they’ve spoken to a call center representative. This not only eliminates the need for cold calling; it also eliminates a lot of people who might otherwise call without serious intent. That includes:

• Price shoppers, who are only looking for the lowest possible price and don’t actually care about the value you bring to the table
• Uneducated shoppers, who have made no effort to understand your product or market, and want you to explain it to them from the ground up
• Resentful shoppers, who hate that they have to spend the money and want to argue you down on price or dispute the value of your products and services
• Non-shoppers or competitors, who only want to keep you on the phone long enough to learn the trade or market and make use of it for their own ends
• Disinterested parties, who don’t know they’re disinterested until they get you on the phone and pick your brain

All of these people are a horrible time suck. Too often, though, businesses get sucked into talking with them in an effort to convert.

Again, qualified call leads exhibit none of these qualities. With a call center acting as the gatekeeper, you only get leads once they’ve read your ad, called the center and spent several minutes on the phone with a representative who isn’t you. Because the call center has scalability on their side, they can offer much better rates to you for those minutes on the phone than you can provide to your own employees, saving you money and keeping their time sacred.

All of this only works, of course, if you have great ad creative.

What Should Your Advertising Creative Include?

To generate call leads with high commercial intent, you need good ad creative. If yours is unclear, milquetoast or off-putting, the call center won’t get leads. That means they’ll never get to you. As such, you need compelling content that sucks your reader in.

Foundationally, your advertising needs to include the same essential characteristics of any type of marketing, including:

• A clear statement of who you are
• Which services you provide to your customers
• The benefits they can expect to get
• What happens when they get in touch with you
• A time period

In the above example of a treatment center, for instance, your ad must state that you are an addiction center. You should say that you provide treatments (either general or 12-step, for example). You should include benefits – sobriety, health, happiness, family ties. Then explain what happens when they call, such as talking to a real individual and making an intake appointment. Then the time period: Today? Tomorrow? Next week?

In this example, time is obviously of the essence. Addiction is dangerous. Overdoses happen all the time. So your ad might include a promise that “confidential, compassionate help is just a phone call away” and a call-to-action to “call now.”

In other cases, however, time periods may vary. A layaway service could promise to get your coat paid off in a month. A car company might promise same-day financing. A law firm could get your case resolved in less than three months. In this case, your benefits will include both what they get and the time period in which they get them, along with a clear call-to-action that most likely includes “call now” as well.

Why Do You Need a Strong Mobile Presence?

According to Marketing Land, clicks have dismal rates of return. Conversions “top out” at 1 or 2 percent for online advertising, as opposed to upwards of 50 percent. And mobile is king among those conversions.

Of the top phone call sources, 16 percent of calls come from offline channels, while 30 percent come from non-mobile online channels. A full 54 percent, however, come from mobile-only channels, indicating that you need a strong mobile presence to succeed. That means, in turn, that you need a marketing company that can set up an effective conversion funnel beginning with mobile ads and routing through a call center, before finally arriving at your telephonic doorstep.

If you consider the buying cycle – awareness, consideration, purchase – then it’s critical you appear on mobile. That’s where most people do their searches, for local and non-local services alike. If you don’t show up there, you have entirely skipped the “awareness” step. Needless to say, it’s pretty important that people know about you, or they can’t possibly get in touch.

One extra advantage of mobile is that your calls-to-action can link directly to phone numbers that callers simply have to click. Voilà: they’re in touch with your call center, and shortly afterward in contact with you. That’s not to say you don’t need a desktop version as well, because you do. This merely means if you don’t have a mobile presence, you’re missing out – so make sure the marketing company with whom you work has a thorough understanding of both platforms.

How Can You Get the Help and Call Leads You Need?

If you’re looking for a call center to take care of your inbound marketing services and increase your conversions, look no further than Digital Market Media. We know you need call leads, and you need them now. We can help you generate those leads with smart marketing strategies. We dispense with the hassle and headache of cold-calling and instead put buyers in the driver’s seat. By the time they call, they’re ready for you. Sounds like a good deal, right?

If you’d like to learn more about call leads and how they can influence your overall marketing plan, please feel free to get in touch today. Our friendly and knowledgeable team is happy to guide you through the process of setting up an effective inbound marketing system and put you on the path to higher sales, better business, and ongoing success today.