Social Media Isn’t Lead Generation… But It Can Help
How do you use social media as a marketing tactic? That’s what lots of people are trying to sort out, and there’s no established best practices or simple answers. Marketers are still experimenting and learning what works and what doesn’t. A big part of the challenge, of course, is that social media are fundamentally about people connecting with people for their own reasons.
That’s relevant and valuable for marketers. But there are still plenty of marketing activities that don’t fit with social media in obvious ways, and one of them is generating sales leads.
And so I read Valeria Maltoni’s recent MarketingProfs Daily Fix piece, Throw Social Media in the Mix for Lead Generation, with some interest:
While one can definitely use social media tools to nurture leads, the question remains if it is viable for finding leads in the first place. The first question is where to go to have a highly targeted environment to prospect. Will that be the same place where all your competitors are? I believe in integration, so the interest created by a social media tool should be augmented and supported by an invitation that entices people to check you out and buy your product or service (what marketers call pull).
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When using social media tools, you will need to develop an equivalent for people to signal to you that they are raising their hand to talk about business. Embed a call to action button at the end of your blog posts, for example, that provides readers with a choice: link here for further reading on this topic or click here to talk to us about a need you have or a problem we can help you solve.
Which means, of course, using social media as what they are: ways of fostering connections and community among individuals. This makes business sense: a company whose people are knows in online communities will be a place that people turn when they are ready to make purchases.
But I’m not sure I’d call that lead generation, because it doesn’t lend itself to the kind of process definition and analysis that make traditional lead generation techniques quantifiable and accountable. As one of David Reich observes in a comment:
It’s not very scientific, I know. But I’m not sure how else to do it at this point. If you approach it as simply promotional for lead-generation purposes, you may as well just take out a banner ad.
He’s right. Social media are unlikely to ever fill the role of a lead generation program: delivering qualified leads to a sales organization for action. Yes, social media activities will bring new customers in. They will help keep customers. They will help companies understand their customers better.
But true lead generation? I don’t see it. What do you think?
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John,
I don’t even see how embedding a “call to action” is social media. We marketers have been doing calls (and creating embedded links, buttons, etc.) for years before the term “social media” even came up.
Seems to me this is another case of a marketers glomming onto a hot term and retrofitting marketing advice.
As for lead gen, I do believe a call to action that gets a potential customer to do something is a “soft” form of lead gen. They’re interested, now what? The kicker is how do you follow up without abusing that interest? (Many people make the mistake of bombarding the person with junk email and snail mail.)
At Bulldog Solutions we’ve actually started migrating to the term “lead marketing” rather than “lead generation” — in part to address the observations you make here.
Especially in the B2B space, the Glenngarry Glen Ross days of simply finding a stack of names (leads) and tossing them to Sales to close…even finding-and-scoring leads and tossing them to Sales…is dying. There is simply too much information available to buyers through too many different channels for this to be effective.
I wrote a two-part article in our Marketing Watchdog Journal on the idea of “lead lifecycle management” that talks about lead marketing focussed on the buyer and the buying process / buying cycle (as opposed to the sales process / sales cycle): Part 1 and Part 2. That’s coming at social media kinda from the traditional “lead generation” perspective.
On the flip side, Geoff Livingston’s book, Now Is Gone, comes at it from the PR perspective.
The two approaches converge. I love the concept that Livingston hammers home that “participation is marketing” (and social media is all about participating). It’s a much softer/complex approach to lead generation, in that it merges with brand building, and it means you resist the temptation to pounce as soon as you get a new name in your database. You engage. You meet the lead’s needs through information and education. And, hopefully, you watch their behavior to figure out when they’re actually ready to talk to your Sales organization (I’ve also written a paper on how to use multidimensional lead scoring to do this…but I already have enough links in this comment that I risk getting flagged as a spam).
So, I guess I’d say “social media is lead generation…but it’s not your daddy’s lead generation.”
I struggle with this issue on a daily basis. As a B2B marketer at a small start-up, I have to use my budget wisely, which for me means all of my activities need to generate leads in one way or another. Social media is so prevalent that I feel as though I have to be a part of the movement, but is it ultimately doing anything for the bottom line?
Is social media like traditional PR? You have to do it, but there is no way to measure the results. You spend time and money trying to get something out of it but it is hard to see the ROI. I keep trying to master having a blog, creating a presence in the right Facebook groups and leveraging twitter, but how do I keep my job if none of this ever results in real leads?
I think a lot has to do with the kind of leads you’re looking to generate. If you’re in a high-volume, low dollar item line of business, the ROI on leveraging social media for lead generation is iffy at best.
For folks whose personal branding directly benefits their consulting business, or for companies selling lower-volume, high cost products or services, it might be a slightly different calculation.
If you think about the traditional marketing funnel, social media is … the marketer’s dream. It’s extension of the funnel, it’s the limitless funnel. It’s an audience the size of the ocean, given the number of people who are now engaging in the reading and sharing of social media, who can now find YOU.
All marketers need to do is attract the right people. At my company, we believe that is achieved through the effective distribution of fantastic content developed around the target audience’s needs and desires: content that provides REAL value, not collateral, information that is packaged to attract but also will help make their lives/jobs better in some way. (that value part is absolutely critical).
The challenges that companies have in this space is
-understanding the needs and motivations of the kinds of audiences that they want to attract
- creating content that is going to attract those audiences, and developing a profile of the people who comprise that audience based on an exchange of information for content(not necessarily just demographic information, but interests, preferences, and needs)
- gaining permission to continue to communicate and retaining that attention in the medium/media the audience indicates they prefer
- keeping their attention by segmenting, listening, and above all, continuing to generate EXCELLENT content - and giving them the option to enter the sales process when they want to.
There are many other relationships that can be developed with the engaged audience once trust built on value and expertise has been established. We’ve built highly targeted communities (title x in y industry) that are almost exclusively email-based, for example, because that’s how the audience indicated they wanted to communicate. For that audience, email *is* social media. Listen, provide value through content, use analytics to balance the feedback, and adjust based on both of these inputs, and not only will you generate leads through social media, they’ll be better qualified and more informed than in traditional campaigns. You’ll know if your content is working; if it’s not, your audience won’t grow. The larger your engaged audience over time, the more referrals, cross-sells, upsells and purchases will happen.
And lifetime ROI … off the charts. I posted on Twitter today about a content asset we deployed in 2005 as part of an online newsletter that is STILL generating leads three years later due to search engine indexing and corporate site searches. You’re not going to get that from a direct mail campaign.
It starts with a superb Content Strategy that draws the right prospects into your marketing funnel. Also, yes even EXCELLENT Content isn’t right for wrong prospects, those that don’t fit your products or services. Give these prospects a way out from your Content.
Most marketers are approaching social marketing from a tactical perspective.
If you’re talking to the wrong market, delivering the wrong message, it really doesn’t matter what media you use. In today’s world with folks bombarded with interruption marketing, your message falls on deaf ears and eventually you start to really piss people off.
Seems to me social marketing is the online version of word-of-mouth… the local coffee shop, the back yard BBQ, the Rotary Club meeting… where your clients and prospects sometimes talk about you.
How do you foster that conversation, in a good way, and attract people into your lead gen systems?
Look at how you’re doing it in the real world. It’s usually not about tactics. It’s about content. Delivering client products/services and an EXTRAORDINARY experience that people can’t help talking about.
It IS your Daddy’s Lead Generation… just a different tool.