I feel the biggest business benefits of social networks are the following; 1. Finding vendors/services provided by people you trust and 2. Making yourself visible so that others can find out what you provide. Since #1 is better suited for a different blog, I am going to focus on #2.
First of all, social networks aren’t going to be a huge source of leads for most people. I do, however, believe that if you do it right you can get some visibility and get people to gather interest in your product/service. The problem is that I don’t believe LinkedIn is the best place to get this exposure. In the past week I have had more people hit my website via a Facebook link than LinkedIn has referred me in the past year.
Why is that?
Traffic! It mostly has to do with the amount of hits your profile gets. Although I’m well-connected on both sites, more people visit my Facebook profile. People spend a lot of time on Facebook. They are browsing applications, groups, networks, emailing friends, etc. The possibility of someone bumping into your profile on Facebook is more likely. Facebook is just more ‘sticky’ than LinkedIn. In addition, the sheer numbers of people are quite larger on Facebook. I was able to connect with 60 friends within a month.
Anyway, I don’t feel online business networking is what it’s hyped up to be, but I do know you can gain some awareness of your services if you do it right.
I got a call this past week from a marketing manager that worked for a previous client of ours. It was odd to hear from her, as I had been thinking about their program the week before. I was wondering “what every happened to all those leads?†You see, we ran a very short, 3-4 months, lead qualification program for them. They had been successful at lead generation and were pulling in over 200-300 leads a week through multiple channels such as webinars, white papers, trial downloads. The problem of lead generation was not quantity, but quality. We proceeded to pre-qualify the highest scoring leads from their system. Leads that met qualification guidelines for sales were then passed along. Although, the quality of leads making it to sales from our program was good, few deals were closing right away. This was not unusual for us, as this was an enterprise focused program with a minimum sales cycle of 3-6 months. In any event, the company pulled the plug on several marketing lead generation efforts including our program. At the time, I knew this was premature.
Fast forward 9 months to now, I get a call and what do you know, it’s the marketing manager from this very company. She had taken a new position and wanted to run a similar program. Turns out, that after the program ended she continued to track the results. At month 5, just a month after the plug was pulled the deals started to fall. At 10 months our program, which cost the company less than $11,000 returned over $250,000 in revenues. For those who are counting (you know who you are), that’s over a 2100% return.
I believe for the most part, that people know lead generation today affects revenues next quarter in the enterprise space. This is why it can be hard for some companies to commit. They want to know immediately what affects if any their investment is having. The good news is there are a few key things that indicate early on that a program will be successful. I will cover these in the near future.
For now just remember that “patience is a virtueâ€, and one that few companies can afford to overlook.
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