During a CustomerManagementIQ.com podcast discussion in which she called social media marketing "annoying and destructive," Montana Miller argued that companies should restore their focus to the corporate website, which remains a valuable lead-generation tool.
Miller’s conclusion is backed, at least on the B2B side, by a new DemandBase study, which ranks social media as the weakest major lead generation tool for businesses.
According to the study, which drew its conclusions from a sample of B2B marketing and IT professionals, only 3% view social media as a top source of leads for the business. With such miniscule support, social media ranks well behind personal connections (41%), the corporate website (23%), email (14%) and advertising (7%) as a preferred source of lead generation.
The findings are telling with regards to online media, as they reveal that social, the medium on which many marketers are banking their future strategies and committing much of their time, is not yet proving worthwhile. Marketers and social media enthusiasts want the platform to continually gain traction with C-level decision-makers, and though it is indeed becoming an increasingly-accepted corporate investment, it is not universally delivering a return.
Moreover, one of the online world’s most neglected, "unsexy" platforms remains its most powerful lead generation tool. Despite a whopping 80% of those surveyed contending that their companies are not maximizing the lead generation capabilities of the corporate website, when it comes to performance, it presently plays a much bigger role than social media.
Even email and online advertising, which many call "archaic" and "obsolete" when held adjacent to social media, manage to add more value in the category that counts—lead generation.
The study does not, however, write off social’s role in the lead generation process.
Though social media has clearly not shown enough to become the preferred lead generation tool for marketers and IT professionals, it does provide opportunities to address the shortcomings of more-powerful tools, like the corporate website.
In explaining why they felt the corporate website was significantly failing to meet its lead generation people, those surveyed by Demand Base identified factors like "tracking on users" and "building a sense of community amongst your customers" as significant challenges. While social networks cannot necessarily function as mass-scale web tracking utilities, they can provide businesses with immense insight into existing and potential customers.
As far as a "sense of community" goes, is there any tool more valuable than social media?
Insofar as social directly addresses many of the identification, understanding and interaction barriers of platforms like corporate websites, social seems to be doing everything that B2B professionals want as it relates to customer acquisition. Why, then, is it so low on the preference totem pole for these professionals?
The answer comes from the obvious distinction between a corporate website and a corporate social media account: credibility.
As the DemandBase study notes, an unequivocal factor in the corporate website’s high lead generation ranking is the fact that "nearly all leads hit the corporate website at some point during the selling cycle, regardless of their origin." This means that no matter how effective advertising and social media are at attracting eyeballs, most will not emerge as truly-valuable leads or imminent customers until they’ve assessed the formal information typically-housed on a website.
For as valuable as the personalized company-to-company or company-to-customer interactions might be on social, they are apparently not enough to instill complete confidence in the purchasing decision. Corporate social presences often do not give complete information on the services and goods. They often do not dictate the entirety of the company’s missions, objectives and customer commitments.
Instead, they sugarcoat the information. The social interactions customers have with businesses might be more "human," but they are also glossier and less-definitive. They, themselves, assume more of a "market outreach" role that is complementary to the overall sales strategy. As long as that remains the case, social will struggle to justify positioning as a "central" online lead generation tool.
Sure, some can argue that as long as social media is sending potential customers to the corporate website, it is effective. But the aforementioned survey results do not really allow for that argument. Since social media surveyed at such a low-value compared to the corporate website, one of two things must be true: either the leads it is sending are too infrequent and not enough qualified enough or the leads it sends will simply not be deep into their decision processes until they interact with the corporate website.
Many social media skeptics are clued into the need for more "commerce" options on social media—once the interest is created and the relationships are built, a more direct call-to-action needs to be installed.
The new study adds the element of "credibility" to the question. Social media, in its common, present state, is apparently too shallow in its portrayal of the company and its product to create meaningful leads. It must commit itself to becoming more of a one-stop-shop—a resource that not only has the information to make a customer "like" the company, but the information to make the customer trust the company.