Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/602622
12 FEDA News & Views By Tom Martin, founder of Converse Digital tom@conversedigital.com founder of Converse Digital By Tom Martin, founder of Converse Digital marketing topics. Because of this, you assume the members of this group want and need your advice about develop- ing B2B sales and marketing strategies. So you devote more time to the group beyond just posting your content. You monitor the daily update emails, you par- ticipate in various discussions and begin to connect with other members. Meanwhile, you're not seeing as many clicks from another LinkedIn group, so you dial down the time you spend there to focus more attention to that click- happy LinkedIn group that seems to love your content. In your mind, you're focus- ing your very limited time fishing where the fish are swimming. But you have a big problem. The click data doesn't tell you if the group activity is converting to new leads, downloads and subscriptions or if you're just help- ing educate a lot of people that will never do business with you. At best, if you're using Google Analytics (GA) and proper GA Goal design, you can corre- late activity with growth in downloads or subscribers. But you wouldn't be able to track conversion activity down to the individual LinkedIn group or post. Turning Links into Leads The missing link (pun intended) here is conversion tracking. It's not enough to use Google Analytics to determine that your social and content efforts are driving traffic to your website. You need to separate the window shoppers from the real buyers. The only way to do that is by tracking conversions and linking those conversions to personally identifi- able information like an email address. For every social media post you make, you need to understand how many clicks and conversions (downloading a white paper, subscribing to a newsletter) were generated. And you need to know who converted from each source so that you can better plan future content and social efforts against the source channel (a LinkedIn group for example). To do this, you need to invest in a social media man- agement and tracking platform that will produce customized short links for each social post you create and track traffic from those links all the way through conversion. There are a number of enter- prise level solutions that will do this or you can use something like Oktopost, which is what I use, that provides this click vs conversion tracking and report- ing for less than $100 a month. How Conversions Inform Your Strategy Let me share a simple real-world exam- ple of how I use Oktopost's conversion data to better target my business devel- opment efforts. The single most valuable benefit to comparing performance by click and conversion is time and effort management. These insightful reports can be quite eye-opening and really help you focus your limited time and atten- tion to drive the best results for your business. During the pre-launch for my social selling book, The Invisible Sale, my firm, Converse Digital, designed a campaign Turning Links into Leads D oes your company use social media platforms in its sales prospecting program? If you do, how often do you debate the effectiveness of these tools? What metrics do you use to establish the true ROI of your social selling efforts? Are you defining success by the number of likes, shares, comments, tweets and retweets and clicks your content receives online? That's the problem with social media ROI discussions today. Unless your com- pany ponies up for enterprise level social media management software, you're left to use free or low-cost platforms that offer little more than click tracking data. But it's all you have, so you use the data to develop and manage your ongo- ing social selling strategy. The problem is once you upgrade to a social media monitoring platform that includes con- version tracking, you begin to see a very different world —a world where not all clicks are created equally. A Click Is Not a Lead The world loves free, insightful, help- ful content. That's why you can't overval- ue a click on a link. Many content mar- keters mistakenly believe all clicks signal a prospect need when often it's simply a person taking advantage of more free information. For example, let's say you post a lot of content around a B2B digital sales and marketing strategy and consistently see good click-through numbers on those links. Specifically, you may see a lot of clicks from inside a certain LinkedIn group that focuses on B2B sales and Turning Links into Leads continued on page 26