The power of referral marketing

Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool for professional services such as solicitors and financial advisors. It’s one of the most cost-effective and trusted ways to win new business.

Referral traffic is higher quality than search engine traffic and twice as likely to convert. A study by Implisit revealed that customer and employee referrals generate a conversion rate of 3.63%.

We’ve seen first-hand how valuable referral traffic can be. Using call tracking software allows you to understand the true ROI of inbound sales calls driven by referrals.

Analyse the marketing opportunities

Do you often ask your clients how they found your firm, only to be told “On the internet”?

Call tracking helps you understand how many of those clients came to you via organic search, a pay per click campaign, directly typing in your website URL or coming across your business on another website.

It works by assigning a unique number to each advertising campaign or, in the case of your website, a pool of dynamic numbers. When a lead calls you, the call is logged in your reporting portal along with the source, medium and any other data that may be relevant. In the case of referrals, you’ll have the:

  • referring website and page they were on
  • visitor journey through your website
  • point at which the caller picked up the phone
  • what pages they viewed when they were on the phone, and
  • what they did at the end of the call.

Identify the marketing source before answering the call

Call whisper is a feature that announces the source of the inbound call before you answer it. It’s an extremely useful tool if you’re running multi-channel marketing campaigns. You can quickly identify the advertising channel that the caller is responding to, for example: “Enquiry from The Law Society website” or “Call from Google AdWords”.

Call whisper also helps you manage your calls efficiently. This is particularly useful for multi-branded organisations or those who need to quickly direct calls to different departments.

Know precisely which websites send leads to you

Your web analytics will probably give you referral sources and they might look something like this:

Screenshot of Google Analytics report.

If you want to understand which websites are driving leads to yours, this information on its own isn’t particularly useful. Using call tracking, however, allows you to get a more accurate picture of which websites your inbound calls are coming from – a far more worthwhile report. If you’re paying to be included in a directory, for instance, you can immediately see whether you are getting an adequate return on your investment.

Conclusion

Do you know how many of your leads come from referrals? Accurately identify the source of all your leads and make sure you’re investing your precious marketing budget in your best performing channels.

About the author - Natalia Selby

Marketing Executive at Mediahawk, with 20 years experience in analytics and content management.