DreamGrow Social Media

Businesses spending 60% less per lead in social media

In february, HubSpot released a report about the state of inbound marketing in 2010. The report was based on a survey of 231 professionals, who were familiar with their company’s marketing strategy. With direct mail, telemarketing and trade shows, outbound marketing has gradually lost its effectiveness (and importance!) in the marketing strategies of companies of all sizes. So has inbound marketing been any better? You bet.

Some key findings from the report:

1. Inbound Marketing Channels Continue to Deliver Dramatically Lower Cost Per Lead Than Outbound Channels Do Businesses spending 50% or more of their marketing budget on inbound marketing activities spent 60% less per lead, than businesses spending 50% or more of their marketing on outbound channels. Inbound marketing channels are clearly maintaining their low-cost advantage.
2. Social Media and Blogs Are the Most Rapidly Expanding Category In The Overall Marketing Budget Social media and blogs are becoming marketing powerhouses. They are the fastest growing category in lead generation budgets and they continue to be ranked as the lowest cost lead-generation channel.
3. Businesses Are Generating Real Customers With Social Media and Blogs Are potential customers really reading twitter? Does Facebook do anything more than build brand awareness? The answer is “Yes!”. Over 40% of respondents who used social media channels like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, acquired a customer through each of those channels. Social media is not just for brand awareness – it can be used to directly generate leads that translate into customers.

The difference in Cost Per Lead between inbound and outbound marketing:

The difference between the Cost Per Lead of inbound/outbound marketing has been clearly understood by marketers aswell. When compared to the average 2009 Lead Generation Budget, the 2010 budgets for inbound marketing have been increasing, while the overall budgets for outbound channels have been steadily decreasing (down 5% in one year). Businesses rate every inbound lead generation channel as being more important than any outbound channel. This trend will clearly be continued in years to come and agencies offering only outbound marketing services have been steadily losing their clientele.

The trend to focus more in inbound marketing rather than outbound, is especially seen in smaller companies. With not much to spend on TV advertising, they have no choice but to turn more of their attention to social media, Facebook being the most popular from the group.

Customer acquisition through blogs is directly related to frequency of blog posts

Although it has been a common knowledge for a while, the survey gives statistical evidence that the more you blog, the better are your chances of attracting that necessary customer. We have also seen the same trend among our own clients. If they have taken blogging seriously and devoted some time for it, then it has paid off. An interesting finding from the survey is, that almost all companies blogging multiple times a day, have acquired clients through their blog. But daily blogging isn’t your only way of attracting customers. Over 50% of companies blogging only once a week have still acquired customers through their blogs. Not bad for an hour a week. And what the data tells us, the frequency of blogging once a week is also the most common approach among companies.

Traditional outbound marketing techniques have been clearly losing their effectiveness. People are spending increasingly more of their time in social networks, so these are the places to go to. Shouting out and hoping people will hear you, is not working anymore. What works is initiating a real conversation with your client and hearing what they have to say. Whether you do that through giving out good advice or something else, is yours to decide.

Download the full report here

Dreamgrow has turned 2.0!

Time to open up the bottles! While discussing the date this company was started, we accidentally discovered that the birthday is… today! Which is quite a cool coincidence. Dreamgrow has now officially, but unnoticeably turned 2 years old (or young), going on third. Our third year has started with a really good base for growing – Our Estonian website is getting increasingly more popular, reaching it’s biggest numbers in january 2010.

Our blog has a small celebration aswell – 6 months from the start of our rise in popularity. Today, this blog is doubling it’s visitor count every month! How have we achieved that? Well, basically we walk the talk, using the same methods we talk about in this blog.

• Give people value – you need to give them a reason to come back
• Go social – be visible on as many social networks as you can, starting from Facebook. Talk to your readers and take your blog to where they spend their time – one of them being social networks.
• If your’e an expert on something, put your knowledge together as a package – Turn your knowledge into an ebook, slide-share, or even a video. Then go and share it for free. If it sticks out from the crowd, you will get results.

Have an extraordinary year!

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Image credit Claudia Meyer and Priit modified it a bit.

If You Need Influential Consumers And Word-of-Mouth Go To Online Forums

True fans are the people who really like you and won’t miss the opportunity to tell others about you. A recent study from PostRelease reveals that a place to look for brand advocates could be online forums.

Online forums are one of the first tools of social media. Early web-based forums date back as far as 1996. Our experience from running online forums the core users are very opinionated and very loyal. Usually a community develops around forums with regular users.

The new study shows that their influence reaches online and off. The users of online forums post reviews, share links, organize offline meetups and proactively recommend a purchase more often than regular internet users. About one fifth of Americans contribute to forums.

Some of the results from the survey:

• 79.2 percent of forum contributors help a friend or family member make a decision about a product purchase – compared with 47.6 percent of non-contributors and 53.8 percent overall
• 65 percent of forum contributors share advice (offline and in person) based on information that they’ve read online – compared with 35 percent of non-contributors and 40.8 percent overall.
• 66 percent of forum contributors post online ratings/reviews of products/services, compared with 16.8 percent of non-contributors and 26.4 percent overall.
• 57.7 percent of forum contributors proactively recommend that someone make a particular purchase – compared with 16.9 percent of non-contributors and 24.9 percent overall.
• 43.6 percent of forum contributors share links to articles about new products or with reviews of products – compared with 12 percent of non-contributors and 18.2 percent overall.
• 35.6 percent of forum contributors attend an offline event or meet up where people with similar interests or who share the same hobby connect – compared with 13.8 percent of non-contributors and 18 percent overall.
• 20.6 percent of forum contributors publish a blog – compared with 2.1 percent of non-contributors and 5.7 percent overall.
• 18.8 percent of forum contributors take an active role in organizing an offline event or meetup for a group that met originally online – compared with 2.4 percent of non-contributors and 5.6 percent overall.

So it seems a really good idea to find the forums relevant to your business and identify the key players in those forums. Here are some free tools that will get you started.

Boardreader
BoardReader can be used to find and information on the forums and message boards. Boardreader uses proprietary software that allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously.

BoardTracker
A search engine in the ‘traditional’ sense. All the information in our database is from forum threads only, all extraneous text on a page is excluded by default which allows use to return even more relevant results without the ’spam’. Corporate users can arm their sales and marketing staff with BoardTracker accounts to give them essential business intelligence.

For other free social media monitoring tools visit our post: 46 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools.

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Image credit Peter Suneson