In all the ‘geek speak’ surrounding online PR and social media, it’s easy to forget that its ultimate goal is to help clients sell more products or services. Just like traditional PR. So, any PR firm trying to convince a client that ‘going viral’, doubling their Twitter fan base or having a huge number of ‘friends or ‘likes’ is an end in itself is missing the point.
One of the key areas where digital, in general, and social media, in particular, can have an influence on an organisation’s sales success is using a qualitative approach to build business reputation and ultimately deliver more leads on the back of this. Even Google now acknowledges that such reputations depend on more than just numbers, using ‘social signals’ such as positive reviews (the online equivalent of word-of-mouth), quality links and relevant content that’s being talked about and shared online, as part of its page-ranking algorithms.
Why is reputation still so important? Because the way we make buying decisions is becoming more complex as we increasingly ‘think with Google’. For example, Pew Research found that in the US, over last year’s Christmas holiday season, 52 per cent of their survey used their mobile phones in store, with 38 per cent calling friends for advice on possible purchases and 24 per cent looking up online product reviews.
Even in a B2B environment, research shows that the use of online sources to find information about prospective purchases has risen from 71 per cent in 2011 to 88 per cent today with people only engaging with a supplier 54 per cent into the buying process. It seems that online reputation is, after all, ultimately linked to sales.
All these statistics show how symbiotic every aspect of the buying process has become – which means that a PR firm that sees social media as an ‘added extra’ for clients or, on the other hand, a purely digital agency that focuses on SEO-optimisation and analytics, won’t be enough to provide PR that results in lead generation and sales.
A well-rounded, blended and co-ordinated PR strategy, where communications channels and engagement tactics are mapped according to stakeholders and are aligned to business objectives, is a far more powerful approach.
In practical terms, this can be achieved via a combination of social media channel exploitation; monitoring; data-mining; content creation and distribution designed to build the reputation of the client as a thought leader in their field; and participation in conversations aimed at encouraging target audiences to take the actions that engage and qualify them as real sales leads. Once engaged and qualified, via information provided by the prospect during the process, the intelligence is passed to the organisation’s sales function to contact and convert these prospects into real revenue opportunities.
This makes digital communications and social media real game changers for our industry. Think about it for a moment - if an organisation knows its average deal size (let’s say £250,000) and it knows its average prospect to conversion rate (let’s say one in five qualified leads convert) we know, on average, that five qualified leads will deliver £250,000 of revenue, 10 qualified leads will deliver £500,000 of revenue, 20 will deliver £1M, 40 will deliver £2M and so on…
It’s a compelling example that focuses the mind on the real value that social media can deliver to businesses. In a sense, it is all about the numbers. Only those numbers aren’t about counts of twitter followers, friends, likes or even SEO scores. Instead, they are ultimately the far more critical figures around lead generation, revenues and sales.
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