How to Use Social Media for Better Customer Acquisition

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.

The latter is the primary method for acquiring customers. In a nutshell, the idea is that if you engage people who are very interested in what you’re selling, they will tell others about it. Eventually, at least some of those people will buy something as well, even if it takes years to convert them. Below are some tips for offering that engagement.

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