Friday, February 17, 2012

LinkedIn Screams Ahead as a Prospect Source for One Client

For a couple of years now I've been using online lead generation programs to effectively generate awareness for our clients, developing a prospect pool for membership and product sales when it was difficult to find these individuals through traditional means, and converting them to memberships.

Program Summary: If you are not aware of these programs, or have not attended one of my sessions on them, basically we create an offer (usually a FREE White Paper), use online media to promote or "push" the offer (Google PPC, LinkedIn, banner ads, etc.), and collect contact information (email address, name, postal address, etc.) when fulfilling the offer. Once captured, the now "prospect" is enrolled in a 3 to 5 step online conversion program that consists of emails and a final direct mail piece. If the prospect does not join, thier contact information is placed into the association's promotion file.

Here are the results after just one-week from such a program:

Campaigns                             Ad Clicks            Form Fills              Conversion Rate


White Paper DISPLAY             836                        12                          1.44%
White Paper SEARCH              123                         6                           4.88%
White Paper LinkedIn                234                      111                        47.44%

Total                                      1,199                      129                        10.81%

Needless to say, LinkedIn has performed remarkably well. In fact, when looking at the same information in terms of media spend, while the media spend for display and search was between $50 adn $95/prospect, it was only $6.60/prospect for LinkedIn.

Our client is extremely happy with these results to date.

Are you using online lead generation to help drive awareness of your association and help build your prospect file? If you are, please tell us how it's working for you?

Experts in Membership Marketing is published by Erik Schonher, Vice President, Marketing General Incorporated. If you have any questions concerning the content of this blog or MGI, please feel free to contact me directly
at (703) 706-0358. 

1 comment:

  1. Erik, thanks for sharing these details.

    I knew Linkedin worked well for B2B, but not that there was such great difference.

    Main reason of the success of Linkedin is that you can target much better the person and this is great for Associations who are looking for a very specific profile.

    In the case of Linkedin, did you target groups or professionals of a certain profile & industry?

    Probably both, which group do you feel works best?

    Did you also get much higher CTR at Linkedin than with Adwords?

    ReplyDelete