I asked the following question on Linkedin, and thought I would share the answer I received from Joshua Dreller Director, Media Technology & Analytics at Fuor Digital.
In what way’s have you influenced conversations online? Using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube Etc.
The best way to influence conversions is to optimize the funnel between the online audience and the converting action. What I mean is to be very smart on how you put together each piece of the puzzle between you and the consumer.
For example…the purchase path:
- Branding/Awareness – getting users exposed to your unique value proposition before they even see your ads…that way, when they are exposed to your media, they take action. Tactics include: branded advertising, press releases, articles, thought leadership, social networking
- Traffic – getting users to your site. Tactics include – online advertising (Search, Display, Emails), SEO (search engine optimization, i.e. getting your site pages up high in the rankings), social media, viral media (i.e. youtube videos, etc)
- Influencing site users to convert. Tactics include – highly relevant landing pages (relevant to the users as well as reinforcing whatever message/ad brought them into the site), great offers (free shipping for online retail is huge), easy to use website that lists benefits to the user, strong call to action, time sensitive deals, etc
As well, if a user gets to you site, make sure at the very least you get their email address somehow. You’ve spent a lot of time/money getting users to your website so make sure it pays off. Offer some sort of incentive (download, white paper, coupon, newsletter, freebie, etc) that gets them interested in you and want to share their email address. It doesn’t even have to be a physical thing, it could just be a “membership” that will pay off later. Then, you can start marketing to them via your email campaigns…in-house email campaigns are historically the highest ROI (low cost, high reward) marketing channel online.