Spatial Analysis ? it is just what inbound marketing needs

Spatial Analysis – it is just what inbound marketing needs

I’ve discovered over the years that one of the major headaches for marketing professionals is the inability to access timely and accurate data to track the ROI as a result of their marketing campaigns. Seriously, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had colleagues in the marketing fraternity vent their frustration at the lack of tangible evidence available that measures the effectiveness of their campaigns.

This explains the excitement around web marketing and the advent of Google Analytics. Finally, the marketing profession had a tool that allowed them to track the effectiveness of their web campaigns. But that left me wondering what was out there to track inbound call data. After all, a significant aspect of most business is still generated via this channel. That’s what I am talking to Justin Graham about today. When he’s not sailing around Sydney harbour, Graham is CEO of Jet Interactive, Australia’s largest call analytics company and specialist telecommunications provider.

As a veteran of the telecommunications industry, Graham enthusiastically sets about explaining how, traditionally, customers conducting multi-channel marketing campaigns were only able to analyse web data by using Google Analytics and there was no tool available to allow inbound call reporting.

Graham observes that most business owners or marketers agree there is a wealth of marketing and customer insights to be gained by analysing the calls coming into a company, including response rates to adverting campaigns, the geographic distribution of existing customers and the effectiveness of sales channels – among many other things. It was this gap in the market that led Graham to work with Yellowfin, a leading Business and Location intelligence vendor to develop his call analytics offering.

As part of what Jet does, it collects call data records (CDR) for their customers and these provide a reference of where the call came from – the originating exchange. Graham thought that by taking this exchange data and overlaying the Australian Bureau of Statistics data, his customers could also look into the demographic profile of callers. By combining all of this data and geocoding it – that’s the process of working out exactly where on a map the exchange is – his customers would be able to highly detail spatial analysis. So he set about finding a solution that would combine GIS and Business Intelligence and could be deployed as a SAAS platform to his customers. He found exactly this with Yellowfin a web-based business intelligence provider that offers native integrated Location Intelligence.

So, I delve into what inspired Graham to work with Yellowfin to deliver his vision, to reshape the Marketing Analytics industry. He says Yellowfin’s integrated Location Intelligence allowed the call data to be analysed just as easily as web data. He sought a solution that would use maps to allow his customer’s to visualize their call data and regional demographic data in conjunction with standard tabular data. “Many telco providers offer their clients basic inbound stats, but this misses the rich insight that can be gained by including spatial data into the mix,” says Graham. “The benefit that we got with Yellowfin was that it all came out of the box – fully integrated. This allowed us to rapidly develop a highly interactive portal for our customers who are not GIS gurus but business people who simply need to visualize their data spatially”.

The value of call tracking is that it allows business owners to calculate a return-on-investment (ROI) for every marketing activity they undertake – traditional or online – paid or not. This is done by assigning unique inbound phone numbers to every channel of a client’s campaign for example a newspaper ad will have a different number to a website contact form.

Then he throws out there: “Did you know that 43 percent of inbound calls are generated from an online search? That’s why call tracking needs to be on the radar of all smart business owners/managers.” Good point.

Graham continues that since using Yellowfin for its Call Tracker solution, Jet’s customers have the ability to query the “where” as well as the “what” and the “when” from the call data collected, providing them with a distinct competitive advantage and a tangible way to track and measure the ROI of any marketing campaign and channel.

Life for marketing professionals has changed dramatically. They can now generate accurate and timely reports that calculate the customer conversion rate, where the call originated from as well as showing the demographics of that location. From here they can ask how does this fit with our products positioning and branding. Will this call have a higher conversion rate than other locations? What’s the population density and does this impact the propensity to call? Without call tracker they could not answer these questions and the headaches would linger.

It’s been refreshing to talk an industry expert like Graham who is getting out there and mixing things up for his customers. The end result is clear – Jet has revolutionised the industry with an online call analytics package that provides business owners, marketing specialists, advertisers and media with state of the art reporting tools that provides them with an unprecedented view of their inbound call programs.

Find out more
Yellowfin’s GIS capabilities
How Jet Interactive is using Yellowifn
Visit Jet Interactive