We launched the award-winning call tracking platform 12 months ago. It has been awesome. And along the way we’ve learned a lot.
Lessons learned.
A lot of lessons learned.
Here are the 4 most surprising marketing lessons we’ve learned since our launch They’re surprising, because, well, we weren’t expecting to learn these things.
If we judged events and tradeshows in the same way we judge other paid marketing efforts, we would never go to another tradeshow or event again. Ever. Again.
Why?
Because the metrics don’t add up. CPL for an event or tradeshow is generally well over $100. That’s for a lead, not a new customer. We would never continue PPC, email marketing, direct mail, mobile or any other marketing tactic if the CPL were that high. We demand much, much lower CPLs for those channels.
During the last year we’ve focused on a social media strategy of engagement. We’ve worried less about posting stuff (though we’ve done that too) and instead, have focused on reaching out to prospects directly via social media. It has worked well.
This strategy was not one we were anticipating. We have been very surprised at it’s effectiveness.
This taught us that social media strategy much involve much more than simply posting content. Social media strategy is about engaging with the customer and with the prospect. Send messages on LinkedIn, reach out to people on Twitter, communicate with companies on their Facebook walls.
It works.
In the last three months specifically we’ve focused heavily on an inbound marketing strategy that is yielding results. You’ve probably heard by now that we wrote 150 blogs in 50 days and saw incredible results. Traffic increased. Organic traffic increased. Traffic to the blog increased. You get the idea.
This traffic resulted in FREE leads. These are people who come to our site to read our blogs and then end up downloading a White Paper about call tracking or requesting a demo of Convirza.
Inbound marketing takes work. It takes more effort than outbound marketing. Traditional campaign-based outbound marketing works basically the same way as the federal government: just throw money at it and hope.
Inbound is different. Inbound marketing takes substantial and consistent effort. There has to be fresh content on your site, on your blog, on your social channels, in your email campaigns, and most importantly, there has to be fresh content for Google to consume. Google has to trust your content and validate it.
This takes time, effort, and expertise.
One of the biggest successes we had in the last 12 month was our webinar series. These webinars have generated nearly 10,000 leads for us. You can view these incredible marketing expert webinars. We record them all.
Anyway…early in the webinar process we tried to cut corners and use a very basic screensharing tool (a tool that works great for quick meetings and Convirza demos) as a webinar tool. It didn’t work.
The webinar was a total disaster. I won’t explain it in detail, except to say that at one point all attendees could audibly hear roosters crowing in the background.
Not. Good.
If you’re going to do a webinar, make sure you use a good tool from the get-go. That’s just a little FYI from me to you 🙂
