With all the hoopla about social media marketing and the importance of ROI, I wonder how many businesses have spent time thinking about how they sell. Unless the cash register rings there is no ROI. For most of us the R (return) of the I (investment) comes from a sale.
Want to increase ROI? Increase sales. How you sell – or your sales cycle – should be determined by how your clients come to a buy decision. How your clients buy can vary based on many things such as product -vs- service, price-point, size of "client" (ie: decision by individual, committee, board, etc.) and a number of other factors.
A good rule of thumb is to consider your sales cycle to have 5 phases:
1. Awareness
2. Trust/Relationship Development
3. Information Gathering
4. Proposal
5. Negotiation & Close
A baseball game makes for a good, simple analogy. The objective of the game is to score a run (make a sale). Before you can score a run (make a sale) you've got to make it up to bat (have a presence, an awareness); and so on. (I'll go into more detail on the 5-phases in a future blog entry).
For most businesses the 'typical' social media channel is best suited to getting prospects up to bat (awareness) and then to first base (developing the trust / relationship). Twitter, Facebook updates, LinkedIn group discussions, Blog posts and comments, they all go to increase the awareness of and building our reputation and brand.
For example, you're trying to decide on a topic for a blog post. Think first, what "phase" of your sales cycle are you focusing on? Awareness? Building your reputation as the "go-to" business for your specialty? When you're tweeting, what is it you're trying to get across? That you exist? What's your objective? Knowing your objective as it relates to your sales cycle will help select the social tools as well as how you use them.
Amber Naslund, Director of Community for Radian6, (a social media monitoring & analytics company) had a great post responding to the omnipresent question, "How can I measure ROI on social media efforts?" Her initial response is what I've been saying all along; the first step is to set measurable objectives. But before you know what objectives to set, you have know what it takes to make a sale:
i.e. 1 out of every 5 inquiries leads to a presentation, 3 out of every 5 presentations leads to a sale.
If I've done my math right, 25 inquiries will turn into 3 sales. Therefore an objective could be to get 25 inquiries from your website contact form per day, week, month…etc. That's measurable.
Next, how will you lead people to the contact form; links in a blog post, tweets, Facebook ads? Keep in mind, however that if someone is ready to contact you they've already done some research and/or gotten recommendations. They are aware of who you are (up to bat), what you do and that you're good at it (on first base).
What are some social media tools and corresponding objectives you can leverage to (get more people up to bat) increase the awareness of your product / services? General discussion in group forums such as LinkedIn? Commenting on relevant blog and/or Twitter posts? What would be measurable? Since we're only talking about awareness perhaps it would be to grow your number of "engaged" blog subscribers and/or Twitter followers. Note: "engaged". This isn't just a numbers game. Quality over quantity if you want to ring the register. Another measurable would be to track the number of times your blog posts / tweets are forwarded, tweeted, re-tweeted.
What would you consider appropriate measurable objectives to indicate your success in "getting to second base", i.e. building up your reputation as the "go-to" person in your field? Perhaps increase in % of return visitors to your blog, multiple downloads of free material? Increase the number of times your blog posts are bookmarked on Digg, StumbledUpon, Delicious, etc. ? All easily measurable.
Setting meaningful and measurable objectives is the key to seeing meaningful and measurable ROI from your efforts. In order to to this, you've got to know how your clients buy – so you make sure you're sales cycle is on target.
Your thoughts?
