Social media's impact on web forms and landing pages
More marketers are embracing social media and inbound marketing practices for lead generation. That’s a good thing.
I’ve written about how you can leverage social media tools like blogs, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to drive interested visitors to your website or landing pages to register for educational content and other assets. It works.
But remember most people coming to your website aren’t coming to your website to buy. They are coming to your site for information. People start to question the value of giving up too much info on forms before you’ve earned their trust.
Have you thought about your web forms? Are you asking for far too much information before you’ve earned their trust? I wrote about this in my post, Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads. I would add that you need to leverage a robust lead qualification process too.
Earlier this week, I came across a relevant post by Chis Koch (@Ckochster) on “how old-school data capture is poisoning marketing and what to do about it.”
In his post, Chris dares us to rethink how and if we should gather information from prospects. He writes, “As social media becomes more prevalent in marketing, we’re going to have to rethink how we gather information from prospects.” Check out his post. I agree.
You’ll do better by thinking of lead generation as a process of micro-conversions that build an opportunity profile over time, such as requesting an email address, then asking for first and last name, later requesting a phone number, and so on.
I read of one company that trimmed down the registration to include an extremely simple, two-field form. Conversion rate more than tripled with this simplification. At the same time, the company expanded their email follow-up process and was able to increase the total amount of personal data collected over time.
Related posts:
7 Tips on how B2B marketers can leverage social media
How to use social media for lead generation
CRM, Lead Generation, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Podcasting, Sales Leads, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech, Weblogs
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As a social media marketer, I completely agree with you on this post. We recently simplified our signup process and experienced a much higher conversion rate.
I totally agree with you .. and you have done a great job such a great post !
keep writing such great posts.
This is spot on, especially with the proliferation of marketing automation systems. Better in lot of cases to give select pieces away with no information whatsoever, and encouraging people to forward the link on to friends. In doing so, many more people that presumably have an itch you can scratch will be cookied, tracked, and brought along gracefully down an “other-centered” funnel.
Brian – great post and a lot to think about here. As marketers we often want it all and want it all now. As a result, we get sucked into the thinking of, ‘if I am going to ask the prospect for their email, I might as well ask them for their name, phone number, address, mother’s maiden name, etc.’ However this can (and does) turn prospects away. (I’ve even seen some forms go so far as asking for budget and timeframe up front – what a turn off!) I agree with Todd’s approach of giving the prospect a taste – hooking them in with great content (articles, blog posts, podcasts, videos, etc.), getting them to share this content, and getting them interested. Once their interest is piqued (and some credibility is built up) you can funnel them to more in depth content where you ask for some basic contact information (white papers, webinars, etc.) and add them to a related nurturing sequence.
Thanks for the tips. I run a lead management, sales software business and always looking for better way, the silver bullet.
JR
Thanks for all the informative posts – I agree with your business/marketing reasoning in this post.
Any tips/suggestions to counter the other-side position that asking more questions actually is a type of ‘qualification’ since only those ‘really interested’ prospects will go through the effort of a ‘long’ registration form and provide their information.
MV
Well most of the marketers are carrying out extravagant marketing and consistently doing it. However there aren’t two opinions about the role of social media.. But the most significant thing is to gain trust and informative content which can enhance sale generation and profits alike..
Somehow i agree with you that most of the marketers on social media are jerks.. They are mostly involved in push marketing and pushing other every time with spamming links.
This post is especially useful for marketing newbies, particularly that most people come to a site looking for information, not to buy.
Your topic is very interesting and you wrote it well, Keep it up.
This post is very useful. Thanks