Tag Archives: social media

[vimeo 15964638 w=400 h=225]

GoingSocialTV ~ A new show about Travel & Social Media from JD Andrews on Vimeo.

Customer Service as never before

Small Businesses Change Social Media Expectations – eMarketer

The study of US small business found that those that do market via social media primarily use Facebook (82%), and that the most common activities are maintaining a company page on a social network and posting status updates or links to interesting content. About half of businesses that used social media also monitored brand chatter on social networks.

As small businesses have gained experience with social media, some have realized their expectations for the channel did not line up with the reality of the social web. As the wider marketing world begins to look at social as more of a loyalty channel than one for acquisition, small businesses are also finding that their hopes for spreading brand awareness and attracting new customers have not been fully met. By contrast, somewhat fewer small businesses had expected to use social media as an engagement channel, but nearly two-thirds have had success in that area.

The most common business objectives small businesses have achieved through social media marketing tell a similar story: Customers are connecting with companies through sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, but relatively few sales leads have been received through the sites.

Small businesses have found other frustrations as well. Many say their efforts take up more time than they had expected, although that percentage dropped from 50% to 43% between December 2009 and June 2010, suggesting companies are being more realistic about what’s involved in social campaigns. At the same time, however, the percentage saying their business had been criticized online nearly doubled, reaching 29%. Still, just a tiny 1% of small businesses said their image was hurt more than it was helped by social media—a number that’s also down, from 6% in December

via emarketer.com

Online lead generation continues to grow | Econsultancy

More companies are seeing the benefits of online lead generation (OLG), with budgets rising, and a greater proportion of offline sales coming from online activity.

The proportion of companies who are generating leads online with the intention of converting them offline has increased from 70% last year to 81% this year, while on average OLG is responsible for 42% of total sales, up from 40% last year.

These are some of the findings from Econsultancy’s Online Lead Generation Report 2010 (B2C), produced in association with Clash Media. More highlights from the report after the jump…

Online lead generation methods used

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is still the most widely used channel for generating leads online, and this has continued to grow, with the percentage using search engine optimisation up by 13% to 90% this year.

Email marketing (to in-house lists) is the second most widely used online lead generation method, up from 74% last year to 83% this year, followed by PPC on 73%.

Naturally, given the ubiquity of the subject, there has been a big increase in the use of social media for OLG. 66% of companies surveyed are using this channel to generate consumer leads, compared to 40% last year.

There has also been an increase in the use of rich media and video, while RSS is the only method on the wane, down 2% on 2009.

Lead generation budgets

The increasing importance of OLG is reflected in the allocation of budgets. The number of companies who say that OLG budgets have gone up in the last year has increased from 59% last year to 65% this year. This compares to 31% of respondents who say that offline lead generation budgets have increased.

38% of companies surveyed are now spending at least £100,000 annually on online lead generation. Last year, only 21% of companies surveyed said they were spending this amount or more.

The proportion of lead generation budgets targeted online has dropped slightly from last year’s survey, though still roughly the same:

Measurement

Measuring the effectiveness of online lead generation is an on-going problem, with only 32% saying they are either “excellent” (8%) or “good” (24%) at this. There are still significant numbers of advertisers who say they are only “average” (22%), “poor” (17%) or “very poor” (3%). There has not been any significant improvement since 2009.

How online leads are converted

Advertisers are most likely to convert online leads through email and online transactions (85%) and telephone calls (67%), followed by social media (23%) and stores (16%).

Since last year there has been a significant increase in the proportion of respondents using these email and telephone for lead conversion, by 10% and 9% respectively