- April 28, 2015
- Content
Trend Watch: Social Conversion
Social media is no longer a tactic or channel that B2B marketers can choose to ignore or use optionally. It is a powerful tool to communicate with your customers, distribute your content, and increasingly, a way to drive conversions and build sales pipeline. According to eMarketer, social media is one of the top 3 sources of lead-to-deal conversions, behind only referrals and company websites. Looking further at opportunity-to-deal conversion, social jumps up to 2nd.
So what does it all mean? In short, B2B marketers need to take a closer look at the activity they are generating across social channels and start paying more attention to social conversion.
3 ways marketers can start generating and converting social opportunities
#1 – Share everything
According to Content Marketing Institute, 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn and 88% use Twitter to distribute content. If you have content and you have a social media account, there is simply no excuse not to share content across your networks. Your social networks are made up of people who have chosen to follow you and will be, by default, receptive to what you distribute. If it worth posting on a blog or your corporate website, it is worth sharing.
There are resources to help you measure what is being shared by whom and how often, but more on measurement below.
#2 – Measure everything – starting with the basics
Although on the rise, measuring social media ROI continues to be a challenge for marketers – only 37% of marketers are able to accurately measure the ROI of their social media activities. in order to get to the point that you can effectively measure conversions from social media, you have to start with the basics in order to truly understand how impactful your social media investment is. Do you know how many followers you have? Do you understand the traffic you are driving with social media?
Also, when you share content on social channels, be sure to use personalized links so that that activity can be tracked back to traffic, opportunities, revenue, and deals. Free sources like bit.ly, or Google Anlaytics URL Builder help you create personalized tracking links for content, campaigns, etc. You would be amazed at how many companies don’t do this.
#3 – Figure out how to engage your followers beyond social channels
It’s all well and good to make sure you convert those that respond to you via social media, but are you actively profiling followers and pursuing them across channels?
Do some homework. For instance, tools like Twiangulate, FollowerWonk, and SimplyMeasured can help you analyze Twitter followers by company, title, etc. By doing some detective work, you can make sure that your followers live in other places – specifically your marketing automation and CRM solutions. Do your sales reps know if a prospect or customer also follows your company on social media? If make it part of their workflow in your CRM system, this can create valuable touch points in their social selling efforts. Flagging users that follow you on social in marketing automation streams can also change the complexion of your attribution models when it comes to lead sourcing.
There are a number of different sources and experts out there that provide direction on social conversion but this is a short list to get you started. If you have any tips to share with the audience, please feel free to leave a comment or you can connect with me directly on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Social conversion image via Shutterstock
content marketing, lead conversion, Marketing ROI, social conversion, social media marketing, social media ROI
