In marketing, there’s no such thing as a guarantee. Any marketer worth their salt will tell you how difficult it is to promise a specific return when there are so many variables in play, and when so much can be up to chance.

But Phorge, a digital marketing agency based in Sydney, Australia, which specializes in helping dental practices grow, has figured out how to provide new clients with the next best thing: A comprehensive and proven strategy to help them grow their business by at least 30 percent.

“Our goal — our pledge to our customers — is to help our clients’ dental practices grow by at least 30 percent in 12 months,” says Paul Hanney, founder of Phorge.

To arrive at that impressive figure of 30 percent growth, Phorge takes a full-service and data-savvy approach to digital marketing. They specialize in lead generation through ad buys, landing pages, email marketing, and upsells or cross-sells leveraged via a client’s existing patient database.

As this young company continues to grow and thrive, one tool has been particularly mission-critical to the Phorge team as they seek to keep their pledge to their clients: CallRail’s advanced call tracking and analytics.

A bevy of features and a better price point in Australia

When the company launched in 2016, they tried out a handful of different call tracking providers, but none of them quite fit the bill. They couldn’t integrate with Phorge’s marketing stack, they were difficult to use and had unintuitive UIs, or they were geared more towards enterprise-level businesses and were thus too cost-prohibitive to scale with Phorge’s growth.

Then, a few months after Phorge set up shop, inspiration struck thanks to Hanney’s avid diet of top-tier marketing podcasts. “I had heard about CallRail on Neil Patel’s podcast, so I thought I’d better check you out,” Hanney says. “And as luck would have it, you had just started launching your service in Australia, so it seemed like perfect timing for us.”

After comparing its feature set to other call tracking providers, there were many reasons why switching to CallRail was a no-brainer for Hanney and the rest of the Phorge team. “For us, CallRail had more advanced features and was far simpler to use than any of the competitors,” he explains. “Particularly, your javascript is just amazing — it’s one small piece of code that allows you to use so many different functions.”

He continues: “Certain features, like porting numbers, would take 10 times longer to use on [competitors’] platforms when compared to CallRail. I’m speaking from experience here, because I spent a long time working with other Australian call tracking services, and they don’t come close to comparing to CallRail.”

And for Hanney and his team, the proverbial cherry on top is CallRail’s flexible pricing plans, which ensure that he’s getting the most for his money and that he can scale his use of CallRail as Phorge grows and takes on more clients.

Transparency and ease-of-use means happier clients

As Phorge expanded their use of CallRail, they found a cornucopia of useful features that boosted their efficiency and productivity. Not only was CallRail more intuitive and easier to use than other call tracking software, the ability to create multiple user logins with different levels of access helped Phorge and their clients achieve truly impactful transparency and accountability for their work.

“We always set up a reporting-only login for our clients as they come on board, so they’ve got that straightaway as soon as they join us,” Hanney explains. “We find that clients genuinely appreciate this level of transparency.”

“When we launch a campaign, [the client] can login themselves to review their calls and qualify them,” he adds. “We also set up a weekly report for each client, and have custom alerts for things like missed calls, so they can follow up right away and make sure they’re never missing out on a potential lead. If the call is missed or abandoned, the client can be notified right away, which is incredibly valuable for any marketer. Some of our clients get hundreds of calls a month, so this goes a long way in making sure nothing slips through the cracks.”

But as seasoned marketers, the team at Phorge knows that you can’t just measure success by the sheer volume of leads or inquiries you’re bringing in — you also have to accurately gauge the quality of those inquiries to determine your ROI. Thanks to CallRail’s advanced analytics, Phorge can achieve a hyper-accurate appraisal of how their marketing is performing, whether they’re drilling down to an individual channel or pulling back to take a bird’s-eye view of how a client is performing over the course of weeks and months.

“Just because we’re generating phone calls doesn’t mean we’re also generating a return,” Hanney says. “So by reviewing inbound calls and inquiries alongside our clients, there’s more openness and accountability when it comes to determining whether Google, or email, or any other channel are getting the best return. That way, the client can also judge the quality of the inquiries themselves, and be confident that they’re moving in the right direction.”

A data-driven approach leads to better service and greater growth

It may have taken plenty of number-crunching to arrive at the 30 percent growth pledge they make to new clients, but thanks to the analytics they’ve gleaned from CallRail, Phorge can be completely confident in the business model they’ve chosen. With their data-driven approach to digital marketing, not only are they improving the efficiency and overall revenue of their business, they’re also achieving better outcomes for their clients to boot.

The analytics they’ve gathered have also helped guide and improve their business in ways they weren’t expecting. For one smaller client they worked with, Phorge found that their marketing was actually too effective — the client started bringing in more business than they could reasonably handle.

This experience led to Phorge being more selective about the kinds of clients they take on. Before signing a new client, they now conduct a thorough internal analysis to make sure they can handle a 30 percent increase in business within 12 months. This ensures that Phorge only takes on clients who are the best possible fit for their services, which ultimately means more revenue and better outcomes for both them and their clients.

For Phorge, all of this is only possible thanks to the insights that call tracking brought to their business: “If you’re not using call tracking in a digital marketing capacity, you’re essentially flushing money down the drain.”

“Ultimately, without having call tracking, you don’t know how effective your marketing is for your client,” Hanney says. “And that’s crucial for us, because our business is all about what kind of return on investment we’re bringing in for our clients — they’ve spent X dollars, so what kind of a return are they getting in leads and conversions?”

He continues: “If we didn’t have call tracking, we’d be completely blind to what return we’re delivering. Without call tracking, our entire value proposition as a business wouldn’t be there. It’s fundamental to the operation of our business, and for us and our clients’ success.”