Social Media Intelligence: increase ROI by converting leads

All of you are living in a commercial world, which means you are trying to sell goods or services to a specific target audience. To achieve these sales, you have quite some tools on your hands. But the question always remains: how can we increase efficiency, and thus ROI? How can we make sure that we get better leads with higher conversion rates?

Social Media could come in handy. No, this isn’t another blogpost about how your brand should invest in Social Media to reach out and connect to your target audience, it’s about how you can use Social Media for your own benefit: increasing ROI.

Imagine you get a lead from an action. You’ll immediately want to start working on that lead to convert it. But is that lead fit for your brand? Are they looking for your kind of business?

Every individual that’s using Social Media leaves bits of information around the web for everybody to discover, to see. You share likes, you share your passions, your business, your family situation, your big purchases, … So, before starting to invest in a lead to convert it, wouldn’t it be a neat idea to scan all possible Social Media in order to find out about our lead and then decide whether this lead is fit for our brand or not?

It may sound arrogant, but if you’re a car brand and you get a question about a test drive… you are happy: a new lead to convert! But when you look into the lead itself, you’ll see blogposts or FaceBook likes and links about cars. Conclusion? You’ve got a car enthusiast on your hands. Great, but the chances of a sell are very low… So why chase him as a possible client? Maybe you’ll hunt him down as a brand ambassador (make him write good about yourself) or you can just turn away from him and concentrate on other (more valuable or promising) leads.

What you are doing is actually determining, based on the Social Media behavior of your lead, whether he has a high potential of actually buying your good or service. We could imagine doing this based on emotional and rational elements: emotionals (is there a fit with the brand, is this my target?), rationals (do they need a car, how big is the family, what kind of job, …).

Unfortunately, these services are inexistent or very rare (I haven’t found one yet). Probably because of the fact that Social Media are widely dispersed and hard to go through with an external program… But rest assured: these kinds of profilers will become available! I just hope sooner then later…

If you have a business that works with few but high-quality leads (and thus a high-margin business), you could already start doing this on a small scale.

Even nicer would be to invert the process. Once you know what kind of situations and profiles are ideal (and easily to convert) for your brand, you could start looking for them on Social Media, the internet and maybe even the ‘real world’. FaceBook ads already give a small possibility by targeting on fields of interest and things a user likes…

If you have seen Social Media Intelligence Tools (as described above) or want to develop one… just drop me a line!