This isn’t a new problem …. how to measure lead generation from online activity is as old as the web itself. Not everyone had a shopping cart on their website year ago either, so ways of correlating offline business with online activity had to be devised.
Take for example a car company …. if you were browsing a new car on their website and then walked into a dealer to check it out …. there was no way that the brand manager could know that or even judge the effectiveness of their web presence.
What in turn happened was the dealer eventually looked to measure the leads generated by the website and posted a car configurator to the site where you could configure your own car and then send it to 3 dealers for a quote or print it out and take it to the dealer where they in turn would check off a box signaling the fact that this sale had come in with a print out from the configurator.
There are other examples of B2B tech companies that put a special 800 number in their white papers to signal the call is coming in from a download on the website. Still others have added click to chat or click to call type of functionality that when combined with a slightly re-engineered process means you can totally measure the leads.
A more recent example is Naked Pizza, a New Orleans healthful-pizza shop that has been marketing itself via Twitter. And recently it has started to track Twitter-spurred sales at the register. In a test run April 23, an exclusive-to-Twitter promotion brought in 15% of the day’s business.
Right now you have to think of ways to use social media as an “outpost” for your content and use that outpost to drive back to your website. I think in the next few years you will have ways of tagging pages with 1×1 pixels so you can effectively track the traffic to and from things like Facebook. Currently you can use tags in embed codes for video which is a step in the right direction for tracking. You can also track tiny urls used in Twitter feeds to see how many clicks you got to that url but its not integrated the way it is on your own website.
If we can get affiliate marketing right …. paying people based on traffic flows. Then we certainly can get social media traffic flows right in the long term!
Related posts:
- No Patience for the ROI of Social Media Discussion
- Throw Social Media in the Mix for Lead Generation
- Use Social Media for Consideration in B2B Marketing
- Mojitos As a Social Object: How a Miami Realtor Uses Social Media To Build Her Business
- The Social Media Handyman
Tags: Lead Generation, Social Media
Paul,
You are absolutely correct; tracking lead generation by embedding calls to action (800 numbers, discount coupons, code, etc.)are as old as marketing. We didn’t start using the techniques with the web, as you know. We have been using them forever within our profession.
I think this is but one example of when new media is used by those who either don’t know or don’t care that when new tools are melded with traditional solutions, the results are far more powerful.
Great example of how traditional marketing campaigns have been measured in the past and how closely it relates to the new media tools we use today.
The tools and strategies may be new but at the heart of our marketing efforts, there are still many similarities from the traditional days…and as Lewis mentions, the results of combining traditional and new media strategies together are much greater than doing without.
To quote David Meerman Scott, social media is about the spreading of ideas and less about generating leads.
Lead generation is not its native language. However, to satisfy the ROI legitimization factor, lead gen is foisted upon it. And so it must be.
That’s not to suggest that it can’t hold it’s own. For example, blogs are great tools for lead generation, so long as advertorial content isn’t mixed in with editorial. Prominently placing a strong call to action in the sidebar could suffice.
Consider what Chris Baggott is doing with Compendium Blogware. That’s a lesson he’s trying to teach.
I think forcing lead generation upon social media is tantamount to putting a square peg in a round hole. But, again, it must be. Maybe some pizza guys from Nawlin’s would be good role models to show us how. Next time I’m over there, I’ll let you know!
@ Paul – I agree very much with David’s theory on the world wide rave – but I don’t think it has to be mutually exclusive to lead gen
Paul, as with anything innovative, I think it will take time before we really know how social media pans out. Since it’s user generated, it has a life of its own and continues to morph as new users come on board. So, even if some believe it has value as a lead generation tool, there are others who claim it to be purely social, or purely informational, or purely to build brand awareness…
It’ll be an interesting journey to see where it goes in the next couple of years.
Just my 2 cents as a plain old marketer.
I think social media is all about engagement and awareness, which is at the top of the sales funnel and therefore I don’t believe that you can add this to the lead generation toolbox for B2B marketing, but I do truly believe that it is part of the sales process by enabling engagement within specific communities of people. With the advances in third party tagging and campaign tracking URLs this should help assist in proving the ROI of social media, showing the impact it is having within the sales funnel and help identify the relevance of this communication channel in the decision making process for B2B. For B2C direct selling that’s completely different scenario and Dell has proved this with the Dell Outlet Twitter account http://twitter.com/DellOutlet, this social media activity has provided Dell with a new sales channel, which can be tracked through unique promotional codes for the Dell Outlet Twitter account.