Converting Social Interest into High Intent Website Visitors

Lilah: Welcome to our webinar ‘Converting Social Interest into High Intent Website Visitors. We're really excited to have a chat with you today. You've got myself, I'm Lilah Waite, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Lead Forensics and we have Pete with us. So, Pete, I'll let you introduce yourself.

Pete: Thank you, Lilah. I'm Pete and I am the Head of Digital at Lead Forensics.

Lilah: Super. So let's jump straight into it. I think we do have some people still joining us but hopefully they'll be able to catch up. Obviously, if you do have any questions throughout today's session, then do let us know by filling out the question section and if we get a chance to answer those questions specifically, we will answer them today. Otherwise, we will be sure to follow up with you after the session. So, first question then for you, Pete. How do we go about increasing our followers? Let's start at the base point, first of all.

Pete: Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's quite a common question. It's one that a lot of people ask and there are a number of ways you can go about increasing your followers. So you could expose your brand to new audiences using paid activity. You can flaunt your socials on your website and on your content. You can actively engage with relevant influencers on social media in the hope that you'll acquire a few of their followers. Or you could even perhaps engage with your current audience, encourage them to share some posts or ask for follow referrals. I'm sure we're all guilty of adding a friend for an Instagram competition to win a holiday in the Bahamas but all of this is kind of worthless if we're not providing our audience with value. What's in it for them to follow you? So businesses need to really spell that out. What it is that they do, why they're different to the competition and what value do they offer to a follower? Now, a consistent social strategy will provide a platform for the audience to grow organically. So as long as you are showing that value to a follower and to your current audience, that will grow. It's just making sure that you're communicating those sorts of social USPs, if you like.

Lilah: OK, so there's lots of ways that you can grow your audience kind of organically. You don't necessarily need to do paid advertising, that sort of thing. As long as you're offering value and then — almost like that peer-to-peer referral — and potentially, as you say, influencer to referral, can actually drive more traffic, potentially. Is that right?

Pete: Yeah, absolutely, yeah, absolutely. So if you are offering that value, no matter what ways you go about it, they’re going to work. Whereas, if you're not offering that value in the first place, if you're putting paid activity behind that or you're engaging with influencers, people aren't going to follow you if you're not relevant to what they're after.

Lilah: OK, so make sure you're adding value and you're sharing something relevant to the audience and then you mentioned kind of @ mentioning. Do hashtags work?

Pete: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, putting in relevant hashtags, particularly on LinkedIn and Twitter which are most relevant for B2B, they're sure to get you founded again — you're adding relevance in there with those hashtags.

Lilah: OK, good. So let's just move on to the next question. So once you've got your following kind of built, I'm guessing that becomes like a bit of a flywheel? So, once you've got your engine moving in terms of generating those followers then it can just kind of leave it to sort of run and run and run from there and get bigger and bigger. But obviously then once you have your followers, you need to then be able to engage with those followers. So what is the best way to engage with your audience?

Pete: Yeah, you're absolutely right in saying that it's like a flywheel and picking up momentum. The best way to engage with your audience or one of the best ways, is usually through educating and solving problems that they have. So, that could either be issues that they're currently looking to solve or perhaps ones that they're not even aware of yet. That could be as simple as sharing a link to your latest educational blog or ‘how to’ video, converting one of those into an infographic. The chances are that you've all spent a lot of time and investment in your content already. This is just another avenue to exploit that. Again, we mentioned influencers already. These don't need to be paid influencers, it could just be a very high-profile influencer on social media and it could be perhaps sharing someone else's content. It might be content or even just a tweet, like a stat for example.
Retweeting that for your audience, you're providing that value again and you're engaging with each member of your audience. Commenting on the tweet to raise your own profile. It's really important, though — this is perhaps the most important — to engage with your audience, when they engage with you. So, it's making sure that you acknowledge your @s, your comments, your direct mails, where relevant. Social media is all about engagement but that works both ways, regardless of whether it's a prospect or a customer and making sure that they've got a platform to speak to you as much as you're speaking to them.

Lilah: OK, so when people engage you don't just ignore it, you have to then use that as an opportunity to communicate publicly. Is that right?

Pete: Yeah, completely. Of course, where it's relevant but absolutely it's an open platform. People use social media in a myriad of ways not just for liking pictures of puppies, there's far more to it than that. Most people will do their research before making a purchase and social media is one avenue to do that. If you're not replying to questions and comments, that could be detrimental to those who aren't asking the questions let alone to those that are.

Lilah: And so you mentioned puppies there and it was talking about adding value and that sort of thing. What about in B2B, can you be a bit jovial or can you be a bit funny or is it all about infographics and white papers?

Pete: No, of course — it's important to show your human side. I think, probably something I want to touch on a little bit later, but it is important to show your human side and to show that you aren't all robots. But, this isn't the B2C space and there's going to be a little bit less excitement on social media than you would see in B2C. But, you've also got to remember that while your educational content might not be super exciting compared to B2C, actually when you're at work and you're trying to solve particular problems, that becomes exciting when you see the answer given there. If puppies become relevant at some point, then absolutely share that sort of thing because it does make a difference. It is showing that there are people behind the screens at your business.

Lilah: OK, and if you do engage with your audience, what's the best way to do that? Do you do that on behalf of the business or should you be a representative of the business? Should you include a link to your website or to a FAQ? Should you even include links in there? Or does that de-personalize it? What's your view in that regard?

Pete: Yes, that's an interesting question. I think ultimately that kind of depends on the brand and what the tone of voice is for that brand. For example, if it's very personable, you may want to approach them as a representative of the business and include a name from someone from customer service or someone from sales. But I think that, like I said, that ultimately depends on the business, including links back to frequently asked questions might be really helpful but then sometimes it might even be more helpful just to answer there and then on the page.

Lilah: Yeah, because obviously..... I know that we’ll come onto this later..... but obviously we are talking about how do we drive that traffic through from social through to the website ......and I guess by driving people to, like you say, an FAQ page ..... whilst you don't want to depersonalise it.... you could answer the question and then have 'if you need any more information this is where to go to' and then track that visit through so that you can then see the value of that. Would that be right?

Pete: Yeah, 100%. So it's about picking the right opportunities to drive that traffic and, like you said, we'll come on to that a little bit later. But taking those opportunities to drive traffic where relevant are super important and not concentrating too much on the engagements and rather what you can do with those engagements.

Lilah: Yeah, OK. Let's move on to metrics and monitoring. So, I'm a lover of those numbers. So, what is it that you use to measure social media engagement?

Pete: So, I think it's important that we explain what we mean by engagement in terms of social media because we've thrown that around quite a lot, that word. But, in terms of a metric, what we're usually talking about there is things like 'likes', 'shares' and 'comments', not necessarily the engagement that we're giving back. But, having those numbers allows us to calculate our engagement rate and knowing our engagement rate allows us to sort of see the success for each post and platform off the back of that. Obviously, if we know how well our particular post is performing, how much engagement that post is getting, off the back of that we can then optimise for a particular post and it allows us to see what's resonating with an audience and what isn't. Perhaps it could be the fact that the audience interacts with posts better on Facebook over LinkedIn, for example.

Lilah: And so do you look at reach? I quite like the reach number. I know you can't get too excited about the reach of your messages but in terms of metrics, it's quite nice to know how far it's getting out there, right? Do you ever use reach or is that just a vanity metric that I like?

Pete: No, not at all. I think again, we'll come on to that a little bit later but reach engagement rate, impressions; they're all super important metrics, and I think the importance is to understand the difference between your ultimate goal and what a key performance indicator is. So these are KPIs rather than the end goal.

Lilah: Yes, so they’re a good indication but they're not going to pay your bills — they're not the monetization piece, is that right?

Pete: Yeah, completely. So they are there to give some sort of guidance as to what's working and what's not. But, it is a guidance and not the goal.

Lilah: OK, so if it's the guidance not the goal, how do you use that information to help you to get to the goal?

Pete: Yeah so as we mentioned, there are loads of metrics that you can and should use to measure your social media engagement rate — It's just one of many. But what engagement rate allows us to do is optimise posts, as I said, to see what's resonating with our audience and making sure that we can produce something every single time. Let's say that we share an ebook on social media and we get a high engagement rate of 0.05% and later on in the month, we share an infographic of the same subject and that gets 0.09% engagement rate. Using that, we can see that the infographic is performing far better than an e-book and perhaps for future posts we might want to focus on visually pleasing stats rather than a labour-intensive e-book, for example. But the caveat to that is, of course, the engagement rate and all the social media metrics that we've just mentioned. As I said, they are a guide and I think a lot of businesses make the mistake of obsessing over engagements, really going out there for 'likes' and 'shares' and they forget that there's more to social media. We'll go back to that point you made about traffic and sharing links that come back to your website. Referral traffic from social media can be a massive boost to your overall traffic volumes. If you're engaging with your audience in the right way, you'll be driving almost like pre-warmed traffic and if you're focusing too much on what happens on the actual platform itself and optimising for engagement only, you're not necessarily doing anything with that engagement and driving traffic to your site. It would be kind of like sending out an email campaign and optimising for 'opens', but nothing else.

Lilah: Yes. So, you want to use the metrics to help with your continuous improvement of your social media strategy. So, effectively using that insight to continually understand what the audience wants and kind of turn that 0.2% engagement to 0.5, to 1, to 1.5%, that sort of thing...... so you're continually evolving. But then you're wanting to make sure that you get something quantifiable out of it rather than just like you say, the vanity metrics. I guess in my mind, if you can just easily ...... if you reply to a comment on LinkedIn or on Facebook or something like that ..... as a footer, just put a link to your website on every single comment and instantly you're going to drive some traffic to your website. Instantly, that's quantifiable. and instantly a proportion of those people are going to actually look further at what you do. So, that's just one tiny little thing that could be done really easily. Is that right?

Pete: Yeah, definitely. So, I think you hit the nail on the head earlier in answering a question and saying, “if you want more information, you can find it here” because that link is then super relevant and you're actually using that engagement to your advantage and really, really bringing the right kind of people who are genuinely interested in whatever it is that you've just posted and bringing them over to your website where they can potentially be converted.

Lilah: Yes, and so thinking about that, what should a business be aiming for? So, if it's not necessarily using posts and 'likes' and 'shares' as a measure of engagement, what should a business actually be aiming for in terms of their, I guess, deliverable from social media?

Pete: Yeah, absolutely. So, there's no doubt that social media plays a crucial role in almost every marketing channel, every digital marketing channel, and even across the whole business, whether that's helping retain your existing customers or prospecting to new ones. It's really important to continue to serve your current customers and still enjoying, revelling in the engagement that you are getting from your followers. But, it's just important not to forget that there's a real opportunity to drive some really relevant traffic to your site and potential leads in there. So, I mentioned engagement rate, there are other super important metrics, as we've touched on already, reach, social share of voice, audience growth rate and that sort of thing. But all of these offer a lot of insight into the performance rather than the goal itself. So without these metrics, you'll probably fall short of something meaningful for your audience and they can highlight areas of under or over performance. But ultimately, you're there to drive sales and that's what a business should be aiming for..... measuring how much traffic is being driven to your site and ultimately, are they filling in forms and how much of that is converting to sales.

Lilah: And so on that, what sort of return should a business expect to see from social media? Is there a percentage? A benchmark that people can pitch themselves to see whether they're really winning or not doing so well? Is there an industry standard?

Pete: Yes, it's not quite an industry standard, it will depend on what industry you're in, what product you sell, the price point, and various other factors. But for B2B, you're probably looking at somewhere between 0.5 and 4%. Now, that probably sounds a bit low, so I'm going to say a few things in response to that. The first one is that obviously, I've already touched on the fact that social media plays an incredibly important role in supporting the rest of the business and it's much more difficult to measure its impact. So, don't let a low number immediately think, 'well, what's the point of social media?' ......... it's a really important one. So you're probably already doing a lot of the right things if you are tweaking your social media strategy slightly, it's already going to be a bonus on top of what you're already doing. So, that 0.5 to 4% is a bonus on what you're already doing. If we also have a look at the kind of numbers that we're talking about for social media, they could actually potentially be quite massive. If you think about an average conversion for a website is actually 1% or 2% and while websites receive a lot more traffic, 0.5 - 4% could actually potentially be higher than a website conversion. So, it's not to turn your nose up at it, really and finally, if you've got the right tools to measure, analyse and optimise, you can really squeeze the last bits of value out of that percentage and really make it worth your while.

Lilah: And, so, how can you track and measure your social success? If you could see a graph in terms of your performance going up and up, how can you do that?

Pete: So, I think with most social media management platforms, they'll give you plenty of useful metrics around posts and the success of posts and the platform itself, but from a platform perspective.......so that's our impressions, our reach, engagement rate, share of social, share of voice and that sort of thing. So, if we're talking about website analytics then something like Google Analytics will give you an overview of the traffic being referred from all of the major social platforms. This information is really helpful, it gives us an overview, as I said, of how your social strategy contributes to website traffic and an idea of how a platform's success actually translates to traffic. Although on its own, the information, it's very much an overview.......it doesn't boil down to a great deal of detail. So, I think that what we need to ask is, what does success look like? We need to look at what we're measuring and in my view, we should be measuring the traffic and the form fills, the leads that are coming through and so that would be more the side of Google Analytics and various other tools to see how that's actually translating from the social media platforms.

Lilah: OK. So, you've got your standard social media scheduling tools that can provide you with insight into your engagement and stuff like that. I'm not endorsing any software here, but like you've got your Hootsuite, you've got your Hubspot, you've got your Sprout Social and all sorts of others that can social media schedule and so that gives you some insight. You've also got your Media Toolkit that can give you more information about your general online reach and then you've obviously got your tools to look at.....'Right, what is that meaning to me in terms of driving traffic to my website?'........and therein you've got your Google analytics, obviously Lead Forensics falls into that camp. Am I kind of missing anything because obviously I'm trying to look at tools that are high-end expensive and also lower end. Hootsuite, for example, for social scheduling, is really cost-effective. So is there anything else that I've missed there that might be helpful for people?

Pete: In terms of an overview, there are a bundle of tools out there, each offering different things and I think ultimately you need to look at the rest of your tech stack to see what fits in with that. I think also how you intend to track individual social posts will play a part in which technology you decide to use as well.

Lilah: OK, good. And so then, we've just kind of touched on this, but in terms of tracking social posts through to your website, so specific posts through .......obviously we've mentioned that you can use Google Analytics. We talked a little bit about how Lead Forensics can help with that but can you track specific engagement on specific posts or a specific social campaign, for example.......rather than just holistic social media that visitors come from Facebook? Can you be more specific than that?

Pete: Yeah, of course and it's old, but gold, as they say...... and it's UTM tracking. Which is a really great way to attribute traffic to an individual post. So you've also got the added benefit when you're using UTM tracking that if someone fills out a form, you can attribute that directly again to an individual post, so even if they've landed on a piece of content from your social posts, they browse your site and end up on the pricing page and fill out a form there........ with UTM tracking, you can potentially see that lead has come directly from this particular post on LinkedIn or this one has come from Twitter. That way, you can really see what's successful in terms of traffic conversions and not just see what's successful from an engagement point of view.

Lilah: And is UTM traffic tracking difficult to set up? Is it easy, because it's one of those things that sounds really complicated, right? So is it laborious in terms of getting that set up for each and every post that you might schedule on your social media scheduler? How would you get started with the UTM tracking?

Pete: Yeah, so it looks and sounds really complicated when you first mention it and if you've ever seen a UTM link, a bare UTM link..... it can look really complicated with lots of equal signs and question marks and things like that. But there are so many tools out there and again we touched on a few tools a moment ago but something like Bitly, which has a free version as well. So that will shorten your link but also provides you the option of putting in UTM parameters in there and it's a case of just filling out a box. and if you don't want to shorten your links, it's also very easy to use a UTM builder, which can be created in Google Sheets. I think that we've got one on the Lead Forensics site, which we can perhaps share with the recording. So, it's actually really easy to set that up for each post.

Lilah: OK. So you can do a shortener, so like as you say, Bitly, TinyURL and that sort of thing that can all help you to kind of automatically set up your UTM tracking but you can also do that yourself within a Google Sheets document. So it's really easy to do it. it sounds complicated but it's not and then it will enable you to have much more granular insight into what on social media is driving your traffic to your website and what isn't......and so you can just do more of the stuff that is driving traffic and actually having a holistic benefit for your business that actually is meaningful rather than just vanity. Is that right?

Pete: Yeah, absolutely.

Lilah: OK and how can we maximise the return? Is there anything else that we can do to really drive up the return from social media posts?

Pete: Yeah, 100%. So, technology is definitely the best way to go in maximizing any of your social efforts and we can take this a lot further than the UTM tracking as well. So, as with any marketing channel, if you can measure it, you can improve it and optimise it. So, there are more analytics that you have available to you. Even if you don't focus on all of the data, all of the time, some of the data that technology can have an instant and long-term impact. We've already talked about conversion rate of social earlier and as long as you are driving relevant traffic.....and we're not being misleading in our posts...... all of that traffic that you're driving to the site should be super relevant to the business. So obviously, you've already touched on Lead Forensics, Lilah, by using Lead Forensics you can identify the individual businesses that are visiting your site and if you're using that in conjunction with UTM tracking, you can actually identify the individual businesses that are driven there by the specific post and specific platform as well. Then also be given the means of contacting those businesses and have a point of conversation really specific to the post that drove them to the site in the first place.

Lilah: And so we use pipeline marketing a lot here, whereby we consider every single stage of the journey......from that person very first seeing a post on LinkedIn or on Facebook or whatever and then deciding to follow and that sort of thing. We look at the conversions at every single stage and so I guess in terms of maximising the return then, if you can map out that journey and your current conversions at every stage....... So how many posts do I send out? What's my current conversion on those? You know, how many followers do I have? What's my current month-on-month uplift? You know, all that sort of stuff.......and then you put in, almost like lots of little things to improve every stage of that journey then holistically all of those things are going to have a big impact and that can really help to maximise the return from social media. It's not just going to be one big thing that will make a fundamental difference, it's almost mapping that journey and looking at what conversions we get at every stage and thinking... 'Right, OK, if my conversion is 1%, well, how can I get that to 1.5 percent? and then how do I get that to 2%?' Then looking at the next stage in the journey, 'OK, how much traffic is coming to my website from Facebook? Well, OK, how can I push that up ever so slightly?' 'What's my current engagement rate? Well, how can I push that up ever so slightly?'......and basically if every single stage in the journey increases by just marginal gains, that will make a difference is, is that right, Pete? Have you got anything else to add to that?

Pete: No, I'm really glad you mentioned that because obviously we mentioned the metrics that you're likely to get from a social media management platform. Then we talked about Google Analytics, then UTM tracking and Lead Forensics and they're all tools that will help you at different stages of that funnel. I also mentioned about having a look at all of this data and seeing where your underperformances are and where your performances are. So, I think it's a really, really valid point that it's about gathering all of this data and like I said, even if you don't use all the data all the time, using those tools to get those incremental gains.

Lilah: And are there any other tools that we've mentioned, as we've mentioned a few now? So we've mentioned Google Analytics, obviously, we've mentioned Lead Forensics. We've mentioned Bitly. We've mentioned TinyURL. We've mentioned Sprout Social. We've mentioned HubSpot. We've mentioned Hootsuite, I think I mentioned earlier on as well, is there anything else....oh, I think I mentioned Media Toolkit as well...... is there anything else that you think is fundamental in terms of being able to effectively track that social media so that then you can give their social media strategy a boost and then kind of monetize the return?

Pete: Yes, so I think it would probably just be a recap of what you said, really. Something like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Sendable, there are loads of social media management platforms that can offer those metrics and it'll be about finding which one fits with your existing tech stack, really. Google Analytics is the most common but there are other analytics software available. The basic web analytics and keeping track of the overview of which platforms are driving the most referrals, you can also measure which individual posts are driving traffic and then using Lead Forensics, like you said, to monetize that. So not just waiting for form fills but actively engaging with that traffic, with your audience, when they're showing real intent and getting to them before they shop around and really maximising that 0.5 to 4%, really getting to the top end of that potential conversion.

Lilah: And you don't necessarily need to have any of those tools to be able to do UTM tracking. So, you don't actually need to have a social scheduling tool to be able to benefit from UTM tracking. You don't need to have website tracking technology. You don't need to use Bitly or TinyURL. You can just do that yourself with a quick tutorial on how to set up UTM tracking within, like you say, Google Sheets or something like that. It's simple to do and you don't actually need to invest in anything. Is that correct?

Pete: Yep, completely correct. Yeah, I think again, that's a really important point as well. A lot of the social channels will actually provide some form of analytics for you based on the performance and engagement of posts. So, you can get that kind of data from there. You don't need to pay for anything to get UTM set up. Bitly has a free version or you can use Google Sheets, as you mentioned. In order to get this setup, you can test it for free.

Lilah: OK. Good. So if you're going to start looking at monitoring that pipeline to ensure your success, UTM tracking is absolutely something that will help you with that and it doesn't need to cost anything which is a bonus for everybody, especially if you're going to trial something new. Having said that, I do want to also offer everybody on this call a trial of Lead Forensics. Again, there's no fee, no catch, no commitment. We just want to let you trial Lead Forensics on your website so that you can see what social media traffic you do have coming to your website, which businesses are visiting your website off of the back of your enhanced social media activity, which I'm sure you will do after this chat today. No catch, no commitment. You can see which businesses are visiting your website in real-time and responding to not just your social media efforts but also any other campaign-based marketing, SEO, PPC, all that sort of thing. You can use the data captured in your trial to fuel your marketing automation campaigns and also pass them to your sales team to see whether you can actually drive any revenue into your business as a result. It's our way of giving you the chance to take a look at Lead Forensics for free and also obviously thank you for your time and thank you for joining us today. So, we are going to pop up a little poll. If you do want to take a trial of Lead Forensics, let us know. What we'll do is we'll just leave it up for a couple of minutes before we or a couple of seconds even before we wrap up. If you do decide that you would like to take a trial of Lead Forensics, then we'll be in touch with you, probably in the next 24 hours to get that set up. It'll just be a small piece of code that is popped onto your website and then we can start tracking your website visitors straight away. If you don't wish to take a trial of Lead Forensics or you’re a current customer, well, that's brilliant if your current customer....... but if you don't wish to take a trial, then that is no problem at all. So just moving on there...... We also have some other webinars coming up. So I'm just going to do another quick poll if that's OK, just to see if you'd like to join us for future webinars. So let us know if you would like to join us another time. Obviously, if you don't wish to join us then just hit the ‘no’ button, hit 'yes' and what that will do is it will automatically register for our next marketing webinar, which is coming up towards the back end of February. So we'll just confirm that date with you closer to the time. So, let us know if you'd like to join us for a further webinar and then I think what we'll do is just wrap up and wish everyone a good day. So in summary, what are your key takeaways? You know, if, if, if people kind of leave this session just with one or two things in their mind, what should that be?

Pete: Yeah, so I think it's to remember to offer value to your followers. So, make sure that you share content that's really relevant, that's going to help them. As I said before, it might not be super exciting content or might not seem like super exciting content when you compare that to B2C but it doesn't necessarily have to be. just make sure it's educational, relevant and your audience will see value in it. To see engagement as a KPI and not the goal. Don't get caught up with the engagement rate and getting 'likes' and 'shares' if they're not relevant. They're really helpful, but they're not all going to drive traffic if you're just concentrating on engagement. Measure, monitor, grow and convert. So, as Lilah touched on earlier, making sure that you're tracking as much as you can and analysing where your over performances are and where your underperformance are — trying to rectify that underperformances and trying to replicate those over performances. Use technology wherever you can, there's plenty of free technology out there. Obviously, we've touched on Lead Forensics for converting the traffic, Google Analytics for measuring the success and the social media management tools for measuring the platform KPIs as well. But, make sure you use that technology to get the most out of your social and the traffic

Lilah: Super! .....and UTM tracking, right? If there's one thing you take away is just to find out a little bit more about how you can leverage UTM tracking within your social media marketing. So, I guess that leaves it to me to say, firstly, thank you for your insight today, Pete. It's been really interesting and I've really enjoyed talking to you, so thank you for that. Apologies if we didn't get around to answering any of your questions, we will follow up with you afterwards. You can, if you want, reach myself or Pete, more importantly, on LinkedIn, should you have any questions that you want to pose directly. We're both.... I'm going to say, fairly easy to find...... I know I am given my name. Pete, I think you're quite easy to find, too?

Pete: Likewise, given my name.

Lilah: So, you should be able to find us on LinkedIn if you have any other questions and will be more than happy to help. Otherwise, I hope you'll join us again for another conversation and we'll wish you a good day or a good evening, depending upon where you are. Thank you so much for joining us. Bye-bye.