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In the past few weeks, I have had several clients who are having problems with the number of calls that they were receiving. They told me that their number of calls have decreased over the past few months, and they want to know what they should do? Should they start to look at solutions like the Yellow Pages, of AdWords campaigns?

The first question that I asked them all was “Do you know how your Customers found you”? Three of the five integrators told me that they did not know. That is a serious problem as without the data about where your customer’s come from; you really have no baseline to validate what service worked for you or did not. It is the same as not knowing what devices in your house use the most power so that you can control your energy consumption. In today’s data-driven society every business owner needs to know exactly how every customer found them so that they can continually maximize their budget.

Let’s start with damage control. The first step is to take a look at what activities you have done, or not done in the last 30 days and compare that two what you were doing for marketing when calls were high? The reason that this type of analysis is important is that your lack of calls could be due to a political situation, or something that is outside your control.

Once those factors are eliminated, then you should look at your Google Analytics account and see what your stats are looking like. When I look at these statistics, I look at what pages were entry pages and what pages users exited on. I also look at what type of device that users are looking at my site on. This makes a difference because if most of my viewers are on mobile devices, then I know that using mobile-friendly advertising techniques and social media will give me the biggest return on my investment.

Next, I look at a low-cost focused advertising campaign to attempt to stimulate calls by testing out positioning statements on my target market. I prefer Facebook for this type of campaign. To give everyone an example let’s look at the marketing and training business that I have created with my wife. I looked at the data from our website and set up some low-cost Facebook campaigns to test the market.

We were looking at seeing what type of training classes that we should be running to maximize profitability while keeping instructor costs low. I published ads promoting Microsoft Office Courses, Adobe Photoshop, and WordPress. For only $20.00 per campaigns that ran concurrently to the same demographic, I got 30% more calls for Adobe Photoshop than I did for the other two campaigns.

That means that when I look at spending money on Google AdWords, digital marketing campaigns, or SEO, I will have a better idea of who my target market is, and where they found me. I even went as deep to really examine my Google Analytics for my website and found that I was actually having more people look at the targeted ads on mobile devices.

The figure on the right shows me that 47.9% of the visitors to my website are currently looking at my website on a mobile device. This is extremely important to know when producing ad campaigns because it tells me that I need to put a call to action on the ad that provides viewers with the ability to call my business directly from the ad.

The figure in the middle shows me what countries my ads and blog posts are reaching. I can easily click on the Canada bar and see what parts of my city/ province are looking at my website. This information is critical to know for someone looking to increase inbound calls as it shows exactly what areas are calling your business, and which need to be developed.

The figure on the left shows me that peak times of day that people are looking at my website. This is important for us to know as it tells us when we could send messages to potential customers with the highest probability of them reading the message or clicking on an ad. If you are going to invest money in digital marketing, you want to make sure that you are getting the highest return on your investment.

The trick to digital marketing is consistency and a constant fine-tuning of your message. To be constantly aware of your ever-changing client base and how and where they found you. With some simple fixes and good data, the phone will start ringing in no time.

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