BoomTown Builds Valuable Voice Insights with Invoca

BoomTown, a company that helps real estate professionals with CRM efforts and other marketing needs, needed a way to boost its own marketing with prospective clients, who are typically brokers or lead agents.

Clients tended to learn about BoomTown, which is based in Charleston, S.C., through word of mouth, online research, or industry publications. Boomtown relied largely on prospects filling out an online form, with someone from the BoomTown sales team then following up, according to Brock Ward, its digital marketing manager.

In late 2015 and early 2016, BoomTown evaluated its marketing practices and realized that calls from prospective clients led to conversions at a much higher rate than online inquires and generated more revenue.

Calls are important for another reason: Real estate professionals are frequently in the field visiting properties and meeting with clients, and the unpredictability of their schedules make them more likely to call for information than to fill out a web form or send an email.

BoomTown execs decided they needed a platform that could extract information from prospects’ calls and put it back into the company’s own marketing efforts

“In my role as digital marketing manager, I was looking for a way to stitch together our offline and online marketing efforts,” Ward says.

The firm eventually chose Invoca’s Voice Marketing Cloud, which connects insights from voice conversations to the rest of the customer journey by bringing a full suite of marketing automation capabilities to phone calls. With call and voice analytics, users can learn who’s calling and why, in real time, and then analyze what’s said.

At the heart of the Voice Marketing Cloud is the Signal intelligence engine that can define, discover, and act on the insights it uncovers. Signal taps into hundreds of data points and uses machine learning to help users understand where calls originate, who’s calling, the outcome of those calls, and other insights into the customer journey.

Invoca “checked all of the boxes in terms of providing the business intelligence that BoomTown could use to continue to improve its marketing efforts,” Ward says.

Another plus was Invoca’s native Salesforce.com integration, which automatically creates a lead profile in Salesforce once a call comes in.

The Invoca Voice Marketing Cloud natively connects with all major digital marketing clouds, and BoomTown is able to use insights discovered during phone calls to create custom audiences for retargeting or expanding reach in any channel.

BoomTown had been receiving roughly 1,500 calls a month, and the integrations save reps roughly two minutes per call, freeing up reps to follow up with prospects and generate more business.

BoomTown has also added Invoca for Facebook, which enables the company to attribute phone calls to Facebook ads and gain other valuable insights to drive higher-quality leads. Invoca for Facebook is designed to integrate call intelligence with social media ads for smarter campaign optimization and more engaging journeys.

“The ability to connect our offline and online sales channels so seamlessly has been a game-changer,” Ward says. “Even though calls dominate our sales pipeline, we rely on Facebook advertising to build our brand presence and to educate our audience through video, with the goal of getting them on the phone. We saw a large increase in total call volume when we shifted our strategy to urge prospects to call first, rather than to complete a form.”

In a single quarter after adopting Invoca for Facebook, BoomTown gained a 63 percent lift in call volume and a 35 percent increase in sales from call-generated leads.

BoomTown’s advertising has become much more effective since Invoca Voice Marketing Cloud and Invoca for Facebook were deployed. Total call volume has increased 63 percent; call-generated leads have jumped 345 percent. That’s translated to a 20 percent increase in revenue, and to lowered expenses, with the cost per acquisition declining 82 percent.

Ward expects even more benefits with the Invoca platform. “We are just starting to scratch the surface,” he says.

The Payoff

Since implementing Invoca Voice Marketing Cloud and Invoca for Facebook, BoomTown has seen the following results: 

• an 82 percent drop in calls per acquisition;
• a 63 percent lift in total call volume;
• a 345 percent increase in call-generated leads;
• a 35 percent increase in sales from
• call-generated leads; and
• a 20 percent increase in revenue.