Social Lead Generation and Revenue Tracking

You've integrated your social profiles, mapped out a strategy and scheduled your social posts. What is the next step? Social Media has become an integral but competitive space within digital marketing where differentiation through content is your key to success. Content driven engagements are proactive making social media a powerful channel for lead engagement and revenue generation. Social engagements are personal as they allow you to connect with your prospects and customers directly. 

Social Media is widely accessible. It provides an additional marketing channel to generate and promote fresh content to an audience digitally connected. Generating revenue through Social Media provides opportunities not found with more traditional marketing mediums like email. Social posts are immediate, and each post sent has the ability to reach far beyond the scope of a single email. Driving traffic to your social profiles will increase your fan base with interested prospects, current customers and past customers looking to reengage with your business. The immediacy and broad outreach of Social Media makes each social post an opportunity for sales revenue.

Every social engagement is tracked within Social Connect 2.0. Did someone mention your business on Twitter? Or maybe they engaged in a Facebook conversation. Social interactions are powerful, but it's the result of these interactions that counts for gauging the effectiveness of you social marketing strategy. Did your engagement lead to a form conversion? Or maybe a new account was created on your website as a result of your Facebook conversation. Connecting your leads social engagements to future interactions with your business provides transparency, defining key indicators that led to a converted opportunity. A marketing automation platform is meant to streamline your marketing channels, and social activity should never be excluded from your automation strategy. 

Understanding The Connection

Before we dive into opportunity tracking with Social Connect 2.0, it's important to understand where these opportunities are created. Opportunity tracking with Social Connect 2.0 runs directly off of SugarCRM opportunities and you will need to be using SugarCRM to utilize this feature of Social Connect 2.0. Becuase we are using SugarCRM opportunities, this means the records associated with these opportunities must be SugarCRM records housed in either the leads, contacts, targets or accounts. (See SymSync)

Method 1- Initiating the Connection Though Profile Link

Connecting social interactions to SugarCRM opportunities happens in one of two ways with Social Connect 2.0. One essential function of Social Connect 2.0 is it's ability to connect your social fans with your marketing database. (See here) Have you had a conversation with a Facebook user that you know exists within your CRM database? Has a recent cold call earned you a follow on Twitter? If you've engaged with social fans that exist in your database, Social Connect 2.0 will allow you to merge your records INBOX25 profile with their social profile. Connecting your records INBOX25 record profile and their corresponding social profile will merge all tracked social activity onto your records INBOX25 Timeline Report. To learn how to link your profiles, travel here.

Below is an example of connecting a Social Profile (Facebook), to it's corresponding INBOX25 profile easily found through search. 

Making The Connection Through Profile Link

This profile link is the key indicator our platform uses to match social engagements with opportunities. When an opportunity is created for this record (James Verdi), Social Connect 2.0 will recognize this records social engagements and populate the "Opps" metric on your Social Connect 2.0 dashboard. This metric allows you to track all opportunities that have had any type of social engagement as to gauge social's effectiveness into qualifying a lead. 

Method 2-Initiating The Connection Through Forms

Social Media as a channel for lead generation should be a core goal within any social strategy. Increasing brand awareness while driving website traffic through social aims to generate revenue by converting prospects into records in your database. An effective strategy to promote prospect conversions is through forms. For those that have not read "Lead Gen With Social Connect 2.0", it is highly recommend viewing that article as it details out tracking form conversions through social engagements. This process is integral for tracking opportunities with Social Connect 2.0. (Note- Your forms will need to be mapped to a SugarCRM module in order for Opportunity Tracking to function.)

Making The Connection Through Forms

Form conversions driven through social interactions are a simple, yet powerful determinant to the effectiveness and quality of your social strategy. When Social Connect 2.0 detects a form conversion driven from a social engagement that process is tracked within the system as the key indicator for that records lead source. When an opportunity is generated for that record, Social Connect 2.0 will detect the social interactions in combination with the opportunity and display that metric on your social connect dashboard. 

In my below example we are seeing an INBOX25 Timeline Report for Albert Hall. Albert is a SugarCRM account that has been created from a social post driven form conversion. His lead source indicates "Twitter" and has an open opportunity indicated on his timeline report. As Albert was created from a social engagement, any opportunity associated with his profile will be indicated on your Social Connect 2.0 dashboard. 

The Final Stage 

Your Social Connect 2.0 dashboard will display all opportunities associated to accounts with a prior social engagement. Upon selecting your social opportunity metric, you will get a drilled down report of individual accounts within this bracket. 

Analyzing the quality of your opportunities through the lens of their social engagements will help determine how effective that engagement was into qualifying and closing the sale.