In theses days leading up to Affiliate Summit, I have been thinking about what it is that we do at HyperTarget. Now I’m not talking about all the fun we have at our offices here in Santa Monica, CA, the many wonderful day to day interactions we have with our clients, or the awesome performance of our sales team (without which we would quickly find ourselves doing nothing at all!). I’m talking about what it is that we do for our client’s businesses, and how we do it.
What We Do
I find it surprising when I talk to people about HyperTarget, how much confusion there is about pay per call marketing. After I finish explaining that I do not create phonebooks for a living (though if there was enough interest, I would) the next question is always the same, “Do you have a website?” I think that this question is not rooted in an ignorance of how business, especially marketing, is done today, but rather a real confusion regarding how we remain relevant in the digital space when we work with a marketing platform that is almost 150-years old.
The question is one that I encounter often, and for all intents and purposes is justly founded. Traditionally, we have tended to think of the telephone as an older means of lead generation. The first thing that comes to mind are those pesky 5 o’clock phone calls that annoyed many households and ruined plenty of family dinners growing up–nothing like bothering people to make them receptive to a pitch.
Change for the Better
Image courtesy of The Movie Network
However, when the first internet capable phones were introduced to the market in the early 2000s, the dichotomy that existed between phone use and internet access came to an end. Now, not only were the same networks providing the infrastructure for the exchange of telephonic and internet data, users could access this data in tandem. Suddenly, the user experience of researching a phone number and making the call were streamlined into a single activity.
It is with this development that pay per call has truly come into its own. While pay per call is an effective affiliate strategy across all platforms, the fact that people are researching purchases on a device that has the capabilities to make those fact-finding and converting calls opens up new possibilities for growth in the industry. This is only compounded by the fact that around 30-50% of inbound calls convert versus the 2.35% conversion rate of most pay per click campaigns.
Why Pay Per Call
This is the brilliance behind adopting a pay per call strategy for inbound marketing and qualified lead generation. First, the leads come to you. Whereas in the past the process of finding leads, buying leads, and networking may have been an absolute necessity in any sort of lead generation, today the problem is sifting through the enormous amount of data available to establish leads. Pay per call represents an inversion of the telemarketing paradigm as far as having an enormous source of potential leads out of which only those who are interested call you, reducing the need for outbound marketing.
The question remains, are these “Glengarry” type leads? Yes, and without the cold calls. In addition to the advantage of having leads call you, these leads are qualified by the fact that when they call you they are expressing interest in your product or service. That is why you see conversion rates that are typically over 25% in pay per call campaigns. And as great as it can be to build brand awareness through pay per click campaigns, the ultimate goal of any campaign is to be closing.
Do you think that this sounds like something that you would be interested in? If so, see how much power a phone call can do for your business:
