You don’t need to yell your sales pitch through a bullhorn.
Social Media is not simply another platform for interrupting people with your sales pitch. Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with selling stuff, and to do so takes a pitch of some kind. But, even I, the sales and marketing guy, get turned off by the direct, no pleasant introductory conversation, dive right in and get it on type of sales come-on, whether it is face to face, online, or in any other medium. Social Media extends that rule and even amplifies it.
I like people. I like getting to know people and I like learning what makes them tick and hearing what it is they have to say. This is at the heart of the concept that many refer to as AUTHENTICITY. We all have a bit of the voyeur in us (in a good way…). This is why we see our news filled with personal interest stories. This is also why many of us like when people add tweets about their personal life or what they are currently doing to their supposedly business focused online persona. Sure it is a bit like a soap opera, but it makes us feel connected to those people with whom we have a mainly one way relationship of listening.
So your voice – how you blog, tweet, post, update – has a big effect on how people will perceive you and how they will place value on your stream. As I start to follow more and more people on my personal twitter account, this is being driven home very clearly to me.
I pay closer attention to those who tweet in an authentic voice like a real person. This is even true with those tweeters who represent a company or brand as opposed to an individual, especially those who mix personal remarks and commentary with the content of their tweets to go beyond business announcements and attempts to get people to click on a bit.ly link. As my stream gets more cluttered, some people will get a larger piece of my attention…the authentic ones.
So, be a real person. Write in a real person’s voice, not in marketing copy. Be a helpful netizen. Don’t just focus on your company’s content or products. Join the conversation. Post things that are relevant but have no benefit to you. That way, when you do post a “pitch” or a product message it will be resonate and have a much greater effect with people who actually want to listen to what you have to say.
The most basic answer to how we get more $ coming out of the bottom of the funnel is to add more people to the top. Driving more traffic is an obvious goal and it is often the focus of online marketing activities seeking the classic hockey stick graph depicting a steep climb in site visits. For online conversion analysis, it is stop number one.
In fact it goes back to sales 101. My first sales manager at Merrill Lynch a thousand years ago (ok, maybe not quite that long) used to say that you know how many people you have to speak with on average to get a prospect. If it takes 20 conversations to get a live prospect, you should be excited each time you get a “no” because you are 5% closer to “yes”. While this was mainly a tactic to help sales people overcome the negative impact of being told “no” all the time, it actually spoke to a more important aspect of sales in general. It takes large volumes of input to get a reasonable output. Back then it meant, “make more calls”. Now it means “drive more traffic”.
There are countless ways to drive traffic to your site or store. Each one is measurable in its own way and each one has its advantages and disadvantages. We will drill into the specifics of each traffic driving tactic in later posts, but a non-exhaustive list in no particular order includes such things as paid search (adwords, etc.), natural search, affiliate programs, social media, direct outreach through email, referred traffic from links, word-of-mouth and viral marketing, etc.
It should also be mentioned that “traffic” is not always measured as visits to a website. In a later post, I will discuss how online interactions and “touchpoints” are increasingly taking place off the site, through such points of interactions as embedded widgets, the reading of feeds, etc.
All website analytics packages give marketers visibility into the source of their traffic and help them track which of their traffic driving programs are yielding the best results for growth in visits. Where measurement becomes trickier is when you start to look at the impact increased traffic has on your downstream metrics. This is key. It is not simply enough to focus on each step in the funnel as a separate and unrelated metric. You cannot assume that new volumes of traffic from new sources or new campaigns will behave and convert as the previous flows did. If you are lucky enough to be in a business where your conversion rates are rock steady regardless of who walks in the door, lucky you. The reality is that different subsegments of visitors will behave very differently at each step in the funnel. Visitors driven by paid search will act differently across the search engines that send them, the keywords in the search, their own geography, etc.
The important lesson here is that even when focusing on step one in the funnel, marketers must follow new traffic flow all the way through the process to determine if the effort or expenditure is worth the cost in time or dollars. Now, don’t get me wrong. There are secondary benefits to site traffic beyond whether a specific visitor ultimately monetizes – growth in your brand recognition, potential referrals through word of mouth, additional links to your site, etc. But if you have limited resources and need a direct ROI on your investment, you can’t simply grow the top of the funnel without following each new segment through the whole process.
At the end of the day, online marketers should be able to calculate the cost of a given visit and match it up with the ultimate revenue over time driven by that visit. It is then that differences in business model have the biggest impacts on whether a given traffic driving campaign makes sense. If you sell stuff and most transactions are one time events, you need to make that cost of acquisition fit in a very defined and limited range. If your model drives recurring revenue (through subscriptions or upgrades, etc.) you can afford to spend more to acquire the first transaction and thus more on driving the original visit.
The big lesson is to measure your cost of traffic driving but consider the needs of your business before you determine if a campaign is worth the traffic it drives.
Of course, many “traffic driving” programs involve the need for content on your site. Whether it is creating “linkbait” for SEO or creating informative content to drive word of mouth or return visits, the user experience is part of what drives the traffic itself. Thus, looking at each step in the funnel is often a fuzzy exercise at best, since they are so intertwined. In the next post in the series, we will look at the initial user experience as step two in the funnel.
I have recently started using Twitter a lot more. I tweet every so often but I also regularly follow some people that have smart things to say. What I have noticed though is the degree to which people are starting to share links to content on the web through Twitter. More precisely, I have noticed the degree to which there seems to be a shift away from blogging to share stuff and toward tweeting a tinyurl of it. Microblogging through Twitter or Tumblr, etc. seems tailor made for this form of “conversation” of callouts to cool and interesting things. Many of the people whose blogs I follow have definitely shifted their behavior to use Twitter more often and are posting more links there.
Blogs seem to be reserved now for more thoughtful analyses and longer expressions of ideas. To be sure, these posts still have links, but I would really like to see a study of whether their volume of links has declined over time.
Why is this an issue? Well mainly because the prime way people find stuff on the net, Google, is focused on determining contextual value and authority for certain topics based on the links connected to web pages. If the “linkerati” are increasingly doing their linking on microblogging platforms whose links are no-followed, where will this leave the value of the google index?
At least some of the small url services, like http://zi.ma, are providing link love value by providing 301 redirects in their urls so that when people just copy the small urls from Twitter and paste them in their blog, there will some value passed to the target page. But as the “net” disperses from traditional “pages” into other forms like tweets, where will this leave search? Where will it leave the link focused algorithm? I don’t have the answers yet, but it would be great to hear someone else asking or starting to answer the question…
