CUSTOMER CASE STUDY

How RingBoost finds new clients and improves customer loyalty with Awario

By Ellen Sluder, VP of Marketing at RingBoost

About RingBoost

RingBoost is the nation’s largest marketplace of custom phone numbers, including local, toll-free, vanity, easy-dial, tracking, and exhausted area codes. We work primarily with business owners, but also service individuals who want to be more memorable.

Custom phone numbers are affordable marketing assets that improve your brand, increase advertising response rates, and promote inbound calls from prospects and customers resulting in higher revenues and long-term loyalty.

Introduction

We got an e-mail for a free trial, and I started using Awario. We hadn’t been using a social listening tool before, we’d been using only Google Alerts. And GA was really failing us, it didn’t do full-scale social mentions monitoring. Their quality and frequency were going down and relevant mentions weren’t coming in. You could no longer depend on GA. So it was great to find a social listening tool to taste and pilot run.

The Goals

Of course, we monitor our company name and we also track our direct competitors. At RingBoost, we sell vanity numbers, easy-dial phone patterns. There are 3 or 4 companies that do exactly what we do.

But there are a few of mindshare competitors, actual phone providers. They have tons of products and they’re constantly competing to get more market share. So they’ve started talking about phone numbers too, which creates more marketing pressure for us. Even though we know we are the best, the carriers have a much bigger marketing budget, and they can get the word out. It’s confusing to the marketplace. So we track our direct and mindshare competitors.

I’m also doing some PR efforts. I’m tracking Ellen Sluder (myself) and Paul Faust, our co-founder and spokesman.

“We appreciate the possibility to set email alerts based on our individual preferences. Anything mentioning RingBoost, Ellen Sluder or Paul Faust comes in daily. But the competitors' alerts come once a week.”

The Process

There are several things that I lookt at.

First, I always look for opportunities to respond. We have our social media platforms, and I have a marketing automation system where I can log in and look at all of them. But Awario is so much faster. It gets delivered straight to my inbox, so it’s in my face.

“Someone’s talking about us, and I can go and reply to it right away, retweet it, share it. If somebody is saying on social media “Hey guys, I’ve just used RingBoost, and it is amazing”, I can jump in and thank them. So that they know they’ve been heard.”

Depending on the results we get, we can go in the settings, and add a keyword and take some keywords out.

“It’s great that it is such a self-service platform. You can really set it up any way you want it to be.”

We do use Boolean search, not for the searches that are tracking our names, brand or direct competitors. But for lead generation, we do. The code would be like “vanity AND NOT makeup”.

The Results

Better relationships with customers

It’s been almost a year we’ve been using Awario. It helps us react faster and connect with our prospects and customers in no time. If they’re talking about us and recommending us, we know about it right away. The fact that it’s delivered in your inbox is perfect for us.

Awario is helpful to keep a finger on the pulse of what’s happening out there. Not everything needs a response, but it’s good to know. What’s great about Awario is that it goes back in time and just picks up all web references.

Definitely, our response time got better. All notifications are delivered to my inbox and I can handle them right away. The best part is the peace of mind.

“Nothing is falling through the cracks with Awario. Earlier, with Google Alerts, my coworker would get an alert and I wouldn’t. There was a feeling of insecurity and I would be doing my own search for our name.”

Awario saved us a lot of time. Now we can redirect the time to creating the content, as opposed to tracking the content.

Working better as a team

It’s great that we can have multiple people manage it. I have a marketing associate and when I’m out of town, she gets in and checks the notifications. It’s all in one spot and it keeps the history for you.

Keeping track of our media partnerships

Once we hired a company that talks to lawyers, small law firms who are one of the target groups. We did a sponsored post and a part of their package deal was a social media network where they get certain influencers to post about the article.

“What was great for us, we did not just depend on the data from this media company, we could see and track it in real time. It was really helpful to make sure they’re not inflating their numbers.”

Staying on top of competition

We’re also doing competitor research. Among our direct competitors, we are the best, in our direct marketspace we are the biggest. But it’s really helpful with the mindshare competitors like telephone providers who are now talking about phone numbers. We track them to get a sense of what they’re doing, to get ideas from other people.

“There’s one competitor who doesn’t have a customer service you can reach by phone. So they’re doing most of their customer service over Twitter. And I can see what people are complaining about, and say “Hey, RingBoost does that”.

I’m not saying this directly on the thread. I can reach out to them personally and say: “you can always call us by phone, unlike some other competitors…”

It’s very important for us to be out there, to have more messages and more positive sentiment. When we find that our competitors are getting up, we have to work harder. We want to be the dominant message in the market. If our competitors are stepping up their efforts, we have to step up ours even further.

Finding new platforms to market on

We have profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. But nobody in the marketing department uses Reddit. And the fact that Awario pulls a Reddit feed helps.

“We found a thread where someone was talking about wanting a vanity number. I actually asked my personal friends if anyone used Reddit: "Can you log in this thread, to say you recommend RingBoost?” And we got a sale from it!”

It was not a huge sale, but it’s still something we wouldn’t have seen. And it created another backlink.

Awario is extremely affordable and powerful. We used to spend much time looking for mentions. Every modern business has to know what’s being said about them, has to be a part of the conversation, just to look alive.

B2B businesses tend to be a bit slower and stodgy, a bit more serious. That’s not our personality. We’re way faster, we keep things moving, and we need tools that help to support this pace. That’s what Awario does for us.