The recent research “Mapping Marketing to the Transforming Buying Process” conducted by DemandGen and Genius.com, reveals that while 82 percent of the marketers who used social media for lead generation succeeded in generating a minuscule one to five percent of total leads, only four percent succeeded in generating 20 percent of their leads through social media.
The survey also revealed that more than half of the marketers did not actually use social media to engage with their customers! Among those who did use social media, 78 percent of marketers tracked clicks, while less than half of them tracked anything beyond that.
These figures indicate that social media, as a lead generation and formal engagement tool, still remains underutilized. A reason for such underutilization could be the free and unstructured nature of the social media channels, which makes it difficult for marketers to measure or quantify their engagement strategies.
Without a quantifiable ROI, marketers remain hesitant to allocate budget, and end up skimming the water or socializing with fans or followers, without actually making systematic attempts to monetize such engagement or keeping track of whether such fans become leads.
Today, marketers have many tools at their disposal to that track the impact of social media interventions and to keep track of a prospect’s activity in the social media sphere. Leveraging such tools allow marketers to determine the channels that suit them most and formulate an effective social media strategy.
Regardless of the tool deployed, it is essential that the tool answers critical questions such as “Did the prospect respond to a tweet?”, “Which Facebook app did the fan interact with?”, “How many times did the fan visit the page?” and more. Even more critical, is the ability of the tool to help increase the effectiveness of social media for the marketer who is keen on doing so.
Reference: Gleanster Report: 4 Keys to Developing a Successful and Measurable Social Strategy
