I faced this exact challenge and found that it wasn’t my strategies that weren’t delivering—it was the sales process that social media leads were being put through. Once I identified that, I worked on building a better sales process for social media leads.

Here are 4 tips to help you convert your leads.

#1: Identify Traditional Online Leads
Consider the type of leads you have coming in from traditional channels and where they’re coming from. Some traditional online channels that are putting leads through your sales cycle probably include paid search, affiliate advertising, banner advertising and I’m sure there are others.

However, what is similar in all of these? They deliver leads with a call to action that’s for immediate gratification and results in a very “short” sales cycle. They drive the lead to a landing page to “convert now.”

#2: Identify Social Media Leads
Consider the type of leads that are coming from social media outlets. Some fairly common social media channels that are putting leads through your sales cycle probably include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and the list goes on.

What’s different? Think about where you’re driving these leads. They’re engaging with content, not landing pages. At the point where they get to a landing page, it’s probably the same landing page that you sent your other leads to.

#3: Differentiating Between Traditional and Social Leads
You can break leads up into three groups: those who responded to direct conversion points, those who responded to indirect conversion points and those who responded to engagement conversion points.

Direct Conversion Points: People have responded to an ad to buy your product or service. They’ve shown a clear indication that they’re interested in your product or service and are going to buy within a short time. They’ve responded by clicking on a paid search, affiliate or banner advertisement or have responded to an advertisement for an “offer” that they want.
Indirect Conversion Points: People have downloaded one of your ebooks, attended a non-product–based webinar or subscribed to your newsletter or blog.
Essentially, these people have provided their contact information in response to a “piece of content” that they want.

Engagement Conversion Points:
Those who have clicked on your tweets, followed you, become a fan on Facebook, liked your status update or even commented. They’ve interacted with you, but you don’t have their contact information because they haven’t filled out one of your lead forms yet.
Each conversion point is different and should be treated differently. If you think in terms of a sales funnel, these points would stack on top of each other. They could be used to represent an estimated time frame to the point of close or sales conversion.

The time frame will depend on the length of your standard sales cycle. For example, if your sales cycle was 1 to 30 days for your longest direct conversion point lead, you might find that social media leads represent 31 to 60 days for the indirect lead and 61 to 90 days for the engagement lead.

#4: Identify Where You’re Losing Social Media Leads

Where do your social media leads fit into your sales funnel?
If you’re treating the social media lead the same way you’re treating the direct conversion point lead, you’re likely killing the sales before they have time to mature.

The first step to converting social media leads is to understand where they fit in the sales funnel as we’ve discussed here.

The next step is to know what to do differently so you can facilitate their movement through the sales funnel to the sale.

You may find that you don’t have a sales and marketing process that supports this type of lead and if that’s the case, there will be some work to do before your social media sales results will improve.

Do your sales and marketing support your social media leads?
Immediate Action Item
Follow a few of your social media leads to see their path, document what communications they receive and when they convert or when they fall off. You can identify fall-off because they’ll unsubscribe to your emails or stop opening them, or they could even unfollow or un-’like’ you. If you spot-check ten or so leads who have responded to an indirect conversion point, you’ll immediately identify a pattern of where your sales process is killing your sale to give you the data you need for a more in-depth analysis.

To learn more, check out 5 Social Media Mistakes That Hurt Sales, the 3 Ways to Close the Gap Between Social Media and Direct Response and the 3 Ways Twitter Analysis Can Enhance Your Marketing.

How do you track your social media leads? Are they working? Leave your questions and comments here in the original POST.

Here’s the full introduction to COMMON presented by Alex Bogusky, Rob Schuham and John Bielenberg.

A COMMON STORY from m ss ng p eces on Vimeo.

More companies in the Inc. 500 are using social media as part of their business and marketing strategies, and they are seeing success and viewing social media overall as more valuable.

These firms, which include the fastest-growing private companies, have been using a mix of tactics, with Facebook as the most popular. According to a study released in January 2011 from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research, 71% of companies used Facebook in 2010, up from 61% in 2009. Twitter, at 59% in 2010, and blogging, at 50%, are also still high on the list.

If a company has used social media, it has most likely also seen success, the study found. Eighty-five percent of companies viewed Facebook as successful, a significant jump from 54% in 2009. Yet Facebook hasn’t matched message or bulletin boards, with 93% reporting it was a successful tactic. foursquare also saw a significant increase in usefulness; it wasn’t even measured in 2009, yet in 2010, 75% of companies reported it was a successful tactic.

As social media becomes more prevalent and valuable, the perception of it is changing. More companies view it as important, with 86% reporting social media technologies to be somewhat or very important to their business and marketing strategies in 2010, up from 79% in 2009. And growth is even stronger among those who consider it “very important.”

These fast-growing Inc. 500 companies see social media as increasingly important to their businesses because of the success they’ve seen, and marketers will continue to test various social networking sites to find the right mix for their company’s strategy.

Keep your business ahead of the digital curve. Learn more about becoming an eMarketer Total Access client today.

Check out today’s other article, “Consumers Eager for Mobile Shopping Adoption.”

Fonte: eMarketer

Acesse o site aqui

Como funciona o Meu Combustível
A utilização do Meu Combustível é bem simples e baseada no Google Maps. Acessando o site já é possível ver onde existem postos de gasolina assim como os preços praticados em cada um deles.
Para fazer a busca você deve informar o seu endereço ou cidade. Também podemos utilizar um filtro por tipo de combustível (gasolina, etanol, diesel e GNV). Clicando sobre cada um dos postos encontrados podemos ter informações sobre o preço, endereço, nome do posto e a data da última atualização. Infelizmente o Meu Combustível não funciona em cidades menores.

Fonte: Design Tecnológico

That’s right: YouTube is bigger than Yahoo. Zappos, as one example, added simple videos of people holding shoes and moving them around to its sales pages and increased conversion rate from 6% to 30%. When I look at the traffic sources for my book trailer on YouTube, the biggest referrer isn’t my own blog. It’s The Huffington Post. I customized the video and text content to a niche (but sizeable) outlet that didn’t exist two years ago: Huffington Post Books.

With proper targeting and syndication, this 50 second video almost immediately propelled my book from an Amazon rank of approximately number 150 to 30, now stabilizing at number four in all books. We used RankForest to track this sudden change.

The 50-second length was deliberate and was also later edited to 30 seconds for in-video advertising on YouTube.

At least 30% off all the video views (more than 6.3 million) on my main YouTube channel come from search or organic referrals. By putting up videos, particularly on YouTube, you open up a whole channel for sharing and connecting to the biggest word-of-mouth platform in the English language.

2. The Full Resurrection of E-mail
Groupon has an e-mail list of at least 15 million strong in the U.S. (the company says it’s 30+ million if you include international), which goes to show that a true permission asset can be worth nearly $6 billion on the bidding table.

E-mail addresses are a safer long-term investment than social media features. Think about all the money companies spent advertising their MySpace pages in 2007. Even on Facebook, your direct messages to fans are relegated to a second tier inbox no one reads. This is something you don’t have to worry about happening in e-mail marketing. Among 20- to 35-year olds, at least, their physical addresses change more frequently than their e-mail addresses.

The smarter marketers will budget “social media” acquisitions based on lifetime value (or a set duration, like 6 months’ retail purchases) of e-mail addresses.

One major retailer did the math and learned that an e-mail subscriber is worth roughly $20 a year in annual online revenue. Knowing this number allowed the retailer to:

Calculate the value of the real estate it gives the e-mail signup box at the register in stores. It turns out to be one of the most lucrative converters in an already competitive area.
Easily say “Yes” or “No” to requests to participate in contests/sweepstakes by judging return on new e-mails acquired.
Calculate what the company can spend to build its list.
There are companies like Opt-Intelligence that can be paid a CPA (cost per action) for what are called “co-regs.” Co-reg example: If you’re signing up for an account at NYTimes.com, and it says “Get 4 issues of Golf Magazine FREE!” someone paid for that because they knew it will make money based on lifetime value.

After the above-mentioned retailer quantified what an e-mail subscriber was worth, the company was able to double its subscriber base in less than eight months. The majority of that growth came not through spending money upfront, but from the redirection of already existing resources in ways that weren’t possible before calculating that number. Let’s say that added 500,000 e-mail addresses, each worth $20 in 2011; that means an additional $10 million in revenue with no significant capital outlay.

Aaron Ray uses the same tactics for the “free agent bands” (major acts who’ve left a label) at The Collective. He figures out how many tickets you sell through your fan club, how many downloads come from your e-mail list, and how much traffic you can drive through Facebook and Twitter. It’s critical for two reasons: 1) For accurate revenue/sales/attendance predictions, and 2) As ROI metrics to justify investments for growth.

This also allows loss-leader campaigns. Even if the math on a Groupon deal is razor thin, a smart retailer (online or offline) can acquire e-mails through a special form they set up and add an extra $20+ per transaction, per our hypothetical example.

Many companies can afford to give product away for “free” if they have the right metrics. Most companies don’t, which leads us to number three.

3. Large Companies Will Waste Money on Vanity Metrics

There’s a difference between “actionable” and “vanity” metrics. Just because your competitors are on Foursquare doesn’t mean that you should be. Could it make sense? Sure, but you should run the numbers — the right numbers. Impressions, page views, and undefined terms like “engagement” are at best gameable and at worst meaningless. Some social media consultancies define their success metrics well (including, in rare cases, “engagement”), but beware the services that don’t. Remember that those who got rich in the gold rush weren’t panning for gold; they were selling pick axes. Apple isn’t chasing Facebook updates, and Steve Jobs isn’t worried about getting blog posts up before noon. Apple’s doing just fine, as are many companies quietly focusing on the tools they know best.

“Actionable” need not be expensive. The conversion from SlideShare to purchase from my WordPress blog, both of which were free, helped me to sell more than 4,000 books on Amazon in less than 12 hours. If you’re spending more than $5,000 per month for insight, make sure you’re getting actionable data that you can at least correlate to sales.

Much of social media is trackable, despite the noise. Don’t get tricked with new lingo or you’ll end up with an embarrassing motto straight from here.

4. Ads & Conversation Will Impact Different Conversion Rates
I recall once seeing a Zynga billboard while driving up the 280-N from the San Francisco airport to downtown San Francisco. There was no tagline, and I joked to my passenger, who was in the financing and IPO business: “I’m not sure who that’s intended to sell.”

He laughed and responded with “Dude, that’s not for end users. That’s to get the attention of the bankers driving from SFO to downtown.”

Remember, you can have multiple audiences for your ads. At American Apparel, many of its best known ads ran in obscure publications or in short bursts on niche websites. Millions of people know about them, however, because blogs thought they were so interesting that they wrote articles about them.

In that case, the press was the audience and the public only indirectly so. The public was a later side effect, but not the first target. One good test of whether your advertising can become a conversation: Would people notice if your ads stopped running? Clickthrough rate is not going to answer that question.

This is why advertisers should start monitoring chatter about their content and come up with ways to track and value that. You also need be able to think big picture so you can know that sometimes negative chatter is still a good thing (it means people get emotional about what you do).

Does this violate the actionable metric rule in my third point? Not at all. It’s another feedback loop and easily measurable, whether in press mentions (including blogs) specific to an ad, or even product development impact.

For developing product, Amazon is well known for “working backward” from internal press-release response. That is, it starts with the reaction or response from its intended audience and designs its advertising messages — or products — backward from there. Google also used this approach by launching Google News without chronological or geographic filtering, only afterward responding to requests and implementing the chronological feature. There was a ton of debate and fighting internally for both features, and they let the market decide.

“Listening” isn’t enough. Tracking the number of Twitter mentions tells you nothing. The bigger question is: What are we trying to build or accomplish, and how will we digest and use this data?

If you nail that, you can nail your competition to the wall. They’ll be too busy chasing the latest shiny web service.

Fonte

Em campanha assinada pela Markitetus, o site www.ateliermoet.com.br contou com divulgação via mídia on line nos principais sites de luxo e lifestytile, além de campanha e-mail marketing para mailing selecionado. Integrando toda a campanha, desenvolvemos um aplicativo inédito para mídias sociais Twitter e Facebook, onde os usuários podem compartilhar as garrafas personalizadas com os amigos.

www.spicybh.com.br

Este blog foi a peça central de uma campanha de lançamento, amparada por multi-plataforma de comunicação em mídia on e off line, mídias sociais e S.E.O. O conteúdo foi gerado por 5 (cinco) personalidades da cidade, nas áreas de artes, gastronomia, hospitalidade, arquitetura e design.

www.influencersfilm.com

É sério. Você pode plugar o seu notebook no drive USB. Que nem esse cara aí. A ação é parte de um projeto artístico de Aram Bartholl chamado “Dead Drops” e, tenho de dizer, é loucamente criativo. Não sei quanto a vocês, mas se eu visse um drive USB dando bobeira em um muro eu morreria de curiosidade se não soubesse o que tem nele.

E também fico me perguntando sobre o que as pessoas compartilhariam em um drive público até, bem, algum idiota resolver colocar um vírus e zoar com o computador de todo mundo. O que você faria? [Dead Drops via MAKE]

Entretanto, moradores de 51% dos lares não costumam usar as redes sociais frequentemente, apesar de conhecê-las. Outros 14% dos entrevistados ouvidos pela Kantar dizem desconhecer os novos sites de relacionamento.

Em 30% dos lares das duas cidades os usuários usam as redes sociais para manter contato com pessoas distantes. Outros 23% dos usuários divulgam fotos, e 10% dos internautas conhecem pessoas do exterior. O uso das redes para fazer novas amizades é a resposta de 9% dos internautas.

Em 5% dos lares os usuários dizem que usam as redes para acompanhar os recados e atualizações do perfil dos amigos, outros 3% escrevem comentários, inclusive sobre produtos e serviços. Outros 2% dos internautas divulgam seus pensamentos nos sites.

Segundo a Kantar, as redes sociais mais acessadas pelos internautas brasileiros são o Orkut (98%), o Twitter (14%) e Facebook (13%). Em outros países da América Latina essa proporção é diferente, com o Facebook liderando a preferência dos usuários (53%), seguido pelo Orkut (46%) e Twitter (12%).

FONTE: IG