The importance of call tracking for television ads

TL;DR:

• Combining TV ads with call tracking can bridge the gap between traditional and digital advertising to give you more actionable data on how your ads are performing by tracking how many calls were influenced by your TV ad, and how many of those calls became qualified leads.
• Call tracking creates a digital footprint for your television ads, improving your visibility into campaign performance and enabling insights that benefit your entire advertising strategy.
• If you’ve ever integrated offline campaigns with call tracking software, you’ll find that the process is similar for TV.

Television is an awareness-level advertising channel that offers broad access to targeted local and national audiences. It also has a long history of being used to drive phone call referrals to local businesses.

Although TV primarily exists as an offline channel, call tracking tools make it easy to connect TV leads to your CRM and your marketing analytics. You can also use TV campaigns to refer customers to a landing page URL that features a custom call tracking number, bridging the gap between traditional and digital advertising while streamlining the customer journey from awareness-level ad to inbound call.

Here’s a look at the benefits of integrating call tracking with your television ads, and tips on how to approach this process.

The benefits of connecting television ads to call tracking

Even with the rise of streaming and other digital video services, TV remains a popular and effective channel for customer engagement. For smaller businesses that can’t get value out of the high exposure offered by broadcast TV advertising, cable TV ads, as well as on-demand and other TV viewing experiences, offer more refined targeting with smaller audiences, which leads to better value for your ad campaign.

The benefits of TV ads are elevated even further when combined with call tracking technology to optimize both your customer engagement and your ability to track campaign performance. Call tracking improves data visibility for offline TV ads by creating a digital log for your lead generation efforts — and giving you information to help engage leads in the future.

Custom landing pages and call tracking numbers can also help you direct TV viewers to custom URLs that align with the messaging of your advertisement. Call tracking makes it possible to create a unique phone number for your TV ad that allows you to collect call details in your CRM or Lead Center. This lets your business seamlessly log interactions from this TV viewer along with other interaction details to track their full customer journey. This allows you to connect that TV ad view with other ad campaign engagements the potential customer may have, such as viewing marketing emails or rediscovering your brand through future Google advertisements or a Google search.

Although TV advertising is still regarded as one of the most effective advertising channels, and one of the most reliable channels for reaching your advertising KPIs, some aspects of TV ad performance remain in the dark. Call tracking makes it possible to create a digital footprint for those ads and improve your visibility into campaign performance.

The insights gleaned through call tracking’s integration with TV ads can improve your TV campaign performance, and it can also generate insights that benefit other campaigns your business may be operating.

How to integrate call tracking with a TV ad campaign

Integrating call tracking with a TV ad campaign is easy — especially when you work with a call tracking partner that has managed these integrations in the past. If you’ve ever integrated offline campaigns with your call tracking software, you’ll find that the process is similar for TV. Here are the basic steps involved in this process:

• Create an offline tracking number. An offline tracking number is used to segment calls from a specific offline source, like a TV ad, and collect data from that source specifically in your CRM. If you have a custom URL that you use in your ad, you can also use this phone number on that landing page to track all inbound calls from that campaign.
• Run a test call to make sure it registers in your CRM as a TV-connected inbound call. You’ll want to make sure the offline tracking is properly set up before you air TV ads that are connected to call tracking.
• Make sure your phone number is in your ad. This may be a no brainer, but double check that you are using your phone number that is unique to this campaign in your ad, whether you purchased air time on a major network or sponsored a spot on a YouTube series.
• Use call tracking software to automatically log caller ID information. As your TV campaigns run, call tracking will generate a dedicated list of callers driven by those campaigns. This can provide important context to help you understand your TV ad performance, along with the relationship between TV and other advertising channels.
• Integrate each TV-driven call with a full phone call history with each caller. Once callers are added to your CRM, you can consolidate each prospect’s call data with past and future engagements through other ad channels. This provides a comprehensive view of your history with that caller, which can enable better multi-channel attribution, as well as better engagement tactics for your sales team.

Even with offline campaigns, call tracking can create a data map that connects television and other channels to your digital marketing and sales infrastructure.

Best practices for using call tracking solutions with TV ad campaigns

Want to make the most of your call tracking-television ad integration? Be sure to implement the following tips and best practices:

• Use marketing attribution to understand the relationship between TV campaigns and concurrent digital marketing campaigns. Perhaps the biggest challenge of offline, unconnected marketing campaigns is the inability to understand the role these campaigns play in your overall strategy. When you have big blind spots related to poor or unavailable campaign data, marketing attribution is nothing more than a guessing game. But integrating call tracking with your TV ads allows you to paint a complete picture of how campaigns work together to generate leads and new customers for your business.
• Implement a marketing attribution model to calculate the value of TV in driving conversions and revenue. Once you’ve chosen the right attribution model to contextualize the performance of your campaigns, you can adjust your TV strategy — along with other marketing campaign strategies — to optimize performance and maximize your returns for both your TV campaigns and your marketing efforts as a whole.
• Instruct sales team members to prepare for referrals coming from TV ads. Sales teams should review the TV campaigns your company is planning and be prepared to pick up right where those campaigns leave off. Sales team members should align their approach with the messaging of those ads and the types of customers and pain points those TV ads will be referring to. This ensures a fluid handoff from ads to a sales team representative, which in turn improves your customer experience and, hopefully, your close rates.

Bring TV-driven leads into your CRM

If your TV advertising isn’t connected to analytics and other data-driven marketing tools, you’re sacrificing too much business intelligence and the insights that come with them. Call tracking software offers a convenient, reliable, and powerful option for filling in this gap in your marketing data without missing a touchpoint in the customer journey from TV ad audience member to newly converted customer.

Don’t spend on TV advertising without knowing how this channel is growing your customer base and driving your ROI. Seek out a call tracking solution that can integrate seamlessly with your existing marketing software.