Increasing social media conversions and leads

Gone are the days of marketers scrambling to prove the value of their social media efforts. In fact, not only has the value of social media been thoroughly proven, today, social media is actually one of the best ways for marketers to prove direct business impact. 

Social media marketing success can be measured a few different ways: B2B companies usually focus on social media conversions and leads to demonstrate the value of their marketing efforts, while B2C companies usually focus on measuring social media sales. 

When your target audience completes the action you prompted them to perform, you’ve achieved a conversion, and when you acquire the contact information from a member of your target audience who could become a customer, you’ve acquired a lead. Conversions, of course, show interest in your message, while leads are potential sales. And compiling metrics for both can help marketers prove the value of their content.

In what follows we’ll demonstrate how your brand can grow your business by increasing social media conversions and leads. For more details, plus real-world examples from top brands, download our ebook, “Driving conversions, leads, and sales on social media.”

Understanding the metrics and goals of conversions, leads, and sales is crucial to driving business value. In order to measure how your social programs deliver these metrics, it’s important to evaluate social data and other business data together. Social data can be an invaluable tool for optimizing your efforts to drive leads and sales. Engagement metrics indicate how well you’re building and nurturing relationships with your customers and prospects on social. Monitoring your progress in these areas can help you deliver conversions over time. Tracking activity and reach can help you understand more about your audience, their content preferences, and the most effective targeting strategies. Other important metrics to track include:

Traffic driven to web properties, which can be measured with web analytics and link tracking. When you know exactly where your web traffic is coming from — and from where those visitors arrived — you can demonstrate how well your CTAs are working.

Actual conversions and/or sales, which are measured through web analytics, marketing automation, and POS systems. These metrics are important to track because they indicate your success in inspiring your audience to take action.

Metrics regarding audience connections to a salesperson, which show whether or not salespeople are building relationships and engagement that can influence prospects.

For more details about how to recognize the success of your brand’s social media efforts, and specifically what types of goals can be helpful to set, refer to our ebook.

Some of the best leads and conversions come about organically — a person (or group) on social media happens to be talking about your brand, or one of your competitors, and you’re able to connect with that moment in a meaningful way. But while the impetus might be organic, you can’t afford to simply hope your brand will be in the right place at the right time to take advantage of positive social media chatter. Instead, follow these techniques to capitalize on important social media conversations that are already happening:

• Monitor brand mentions across digital channels using technology (learn how Khoros Marketing can help).
• Conduct keyword and hashtag searches to find prospects.
• Watch digital channels for media tagged with your products or service.

Work with what you have

The content you already have can be invaluable when it comes to propelling lead generation efforts. Here are a few ways to capitalize on what you already have with content curation:

• Implement gates on your longer content to make sure you capture the leads interested in them.
• Re-examine some of your longer assets, like white papers, and look for ways to create bite-size versions, like tipsheets or infographics, that capture the essence and entice people to consume the full asset.
• Sponsor updates or promote posts and Tweets to share a valuable new asset with a broader audience.

Increase audience advocacy

Word-of -mouth marketing is still incredibly valuable. In fact, it’s the biggest influencer in consumers’ decision making process. To encourage positive word-of-mouth referrals from your customers, offer opportunities for your customers to write reviews and share your content with their friends, family, and colleagues. Work to amplify positive messages and carefully respond to complaints and other inquiries. You can also increase advocacy by:

• Adding social sharing buttons to every page on your website.
• Actively monitoring rating and review sites like Facebook Reviews, Google Reviews, Foursquare, and Yelp.
• Sharing links to review and discussion pages via Twitter, and asking people to share their feedback.

For more details on all of the above, plus a comprehensive list of best practices for increasing social media conversions and leads, download our ebook.