A user’s
clickstream — the trail of clicks she leaves behind while surfing the web — has
to end somewhere, so why not on a place where that surfer can become a
customer?
That’s the
thinking behind web-based customer acquisition. Until fairly recently, that was
a relatively straightforward proposition: Just run some banner ads and search
ads and then continue the conversation through email.
Social media
adds some complexity. Nowadays, a tweet might lead to your Facebook Page or
maybe a detour to LinkedIn. A Google search might include a +1 from a friend
that will make you reconsider a brand while a Bing search will show what your
Facebook friends think of that brand.
Not everyone
has successfully navigated this new terrain. As Matt Lawson, VP of Marketing
and Alliances for Marin Software admits, “I don’t yet have a handle on it.” With
more variables comes more opportunities, though. Proponents say social media
provides a powerful new tool to convert surfers into buyers. “Social media
allows marketers to two things they couldn’t do before: scale one-to-one
conversations and publish their own content without a media partner,” says Joe
Chernov, VP of Content Marketing at Eloqua, a marketing automation firm. “These
two behaviors converge in customer acquisition.”
However,
Brian Solis, the principal analyst at Altimeter Group, says the modus operandi
for most marketers is still twofold:
- Build the size of the community.
- Hope that at some point that translates into customer acquisitions.
olis isn’t
alone in making this observation. Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s VP of Global
Sales, told attendees at a media event earlier this year that she considered
acquiring “Likes” to be the second phase for marketers on Facebook after
setting up a brand Page. The third was using Facebook to cultivate your biggest
and most-engaged fans.
Ask Your Fans What They Want:
It sounds
simple enough – Notice the interactions on your posts & identify things
fans really want from your social media page.
Become a Publisher:
Once you’ve
determined what your target customers’ interests are, a good strategy is what’s
known as “content marketing,” a.k.a. providing objective information. Since a
hard sell undermines credibility, marketers are more or less forced to become
publishers. Many are aware of this. A recent survey of marketers by Focus,
though, found that so-called “content marketing” was the second-strongest
performer for them over the past year, second only to email. (Social media was
No. 3.)
Another
upside of this strategy is that it provides a stream of content for your
Facebook and Twitter activities. After all, without frequent, interesting
updates, your fans will lose interest.
Provide Resolution:
If you
consider a user’s clickstream as a conversation of sorts, then ending things in
the middle is unsatisfying for the user and will end in frustration. Solis says
the reason for this is the common tendency to end the clickstream at the
company website. These days, there’s no reason to do that.
“The idea is
that brands can use social media to bring closure,” Solis says. “By studying
behavior, questions, answers, conversations, relationships, etc., businesses
can learn how to design content, landing pages, and overall experiences to
deliver the resolution various consumers seek.”
As an
example, Solis cites the use of QR codes. Most companies, he says, will run a
QR program that leads to the company’s homepage. A better strategy is to
provide “a new landing page that is optimized for expectations.”
Improvise, But Use Common Sense:
As mentioned,
Marin’s Lawson admits that customer acquisition via social media isn’t easy.
One major issue he has is that, compared to traditional tools like search an
ad, banner ads and email, social media is difficult to measure.
Lawson’s not
the only one who has that issue. No industry standard figure seems to exist for
customer acquisition via social media. That means that you may have a Facebook
Page with 10,000 fans that nets only four leads but won’t have any idea whether
that’s good or not.
Lacking a
well-worn playbook, many go with their gut. Eloqua’s Chernov, for instance, has
found that the hard sell is the wrong approach. “Selling on social media is
like the old joke about the two bulls on the top of the hill: They can run down
and cozy up with one cow, or they can walk down and get to know ‘em all,” he
says. “Companies that try the hard sell on social media get ousted from
LinkedIn Groups, voted down on Quora and ignored on Twitter and Facebook. The
hard-sell runs against the fabric of social media. Marketers are far, far
better off trying to help prospects — by talking about what they ‘know’ versus
what they ‘sell’ — on social channels.”
Article Courtesy Mashable
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, toos
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