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. 

Reasons for Online Marketing

Here are a few reasons why, if you're not online marketing or you are questionning the value of online marketing, you NEED to be online, marketing.

a. Search marketing is about seizing opportunities. Every organization should maximize opportunities to engage potential members/ customers online that are actively searching for relevant services an organization provides by instituting a comprehensive search engine marketing strategy including paid search marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).

b. Marketing speed and agility are important competitive advantages, especially with today’s focus on costs. Online and search marketing allows for on-the-fly changes that save time and money.

c. Unlike magazines and publications that publish ads on their own schedule say once per month, search is on your customer’s schedule, real-time, engaged in the “now.”

d. Online marketing allows you to connect and engage with potential members when they’re receptive, when they’re ready to receive your orgs message.

e. With search engine marketing your org will have the ability to target an audience on a country level all the way to a 10 mile radius within a specific metro area.

f. Instantly generate and track leads for membership, products and services. Know precisely the path of how and when they found you.

g. Real-time reporting keeps your org on top of marketing results providing measures for accurate decision making and optimization.

h. Online marketing allows you to stay on top of costs because reporting and analysis are constant. You will always be in up-to-date on cost-per-new member, cost-per-customer, cost-per-lead, etc.

i. Unlike traditional push marketing channels, search marketing lets you pay only for consumer responses like click-throughs – keeping marketing expectations and budgets on track.

j. Major happenings in your field/industry occur all the time. Is your organization prepared online to capture these surges of awareness? Be prepared online and your org will surge with these happenings.

k. Search engine marketing does not get thrown in the trash, lost in a stack on a desk, filtered out by someone else. With search marketing your orgs message is only delivered when your target audience is ready to receive it.

4 Pillers of Online Marketing

I read two interesting articles this morning. The first was by Wayne Friedman who reported that online ads will exceed $100 Billion (yes, 11 zeros -- $100,000,000,000) by 2015 and North America alone will be 45% of that ($45 Billion) and that Latin America will "...continue to be the fastest-growing region..." The biggest specific markets, I think to no ones surprise, will be China and Russia. Most of this will be billed through paid search.

The second article, written by Thad Kahlow and posted on Marketing Daily, pointed out the four most important investment considerations when developing your online campaign. In summary,

1. Launch a Robust Search Engine Marketing Campaign


Start with paid search. Find a sophisticated PPC team (three or more) or an agency (with multi-discipline expertise) that will look at your data and -- with a high level of confidence and certainty -- be able to promise you more ... lots more.

If you are managing a campaign in-house right now with only a single dedicated resource, chances are there are inefficiencies, which can be fixed quickly to yield immediate cost savings. Ever hear of exact mirror matching? While PPC is generating search results and ROI, build an internal search team and invest time and human resources toward gaining organic rankings.

SEO is the single largest potential for gain -- I mean CMO-attention-grabbing ROI. It's no longer snake oil and, when done well, it can put up huge numbers: rankings (branding), traffic (market share), conversions (sales). The winners in the online space -- the real winners -- will win first with SEO.

2. Improve the User's Website Experience & Conversions

Give your users what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. Do that well and you will improve your brand equity as well as measure increased business results. Focus on the users first and business goals second ... sit back and count the cash. Well, it's not that easy, but when done well, it feeds a cycle of online success.

According to Nielsen, spending 10% of your development budget on usability should improve your conversion rate by 83%. In most cases, it's far cheaper to use 15% of your development budget than to more than double your advertising budget.

3. Get in the Social Media Game

Start small, be realistic, and understand your first goal should be to listen. Yes, listen. Not market, not push a new message, not convert -- listen. Only after you have listened to your audience (current and potential clients) can you properly engage and begin a real conversation.

Once you build credibility and open a true dialogue, you can begin to reap the benefits of social media -- motivating others, your "mavens" to do it for you. Yes, eventually after you have climbed the mighty hill of social media, you can sit back and guide the boulder downhill. Let your mavens and evangelists do the work for you.

4. Measure

Measure it. Measure it. Measure it. Find out what works, find out what doesn't, and make business decisions based on real data. Don't guess, don't hope, don't anything ... measure it and improve marketing and results.

Much of this we've read before and hopefully many are doing. What I think is really important is when you put both articles into context, how important it is for us all to make a concerted effort to bring cohesive membership awareness, acquisition, engagement, renewal and reinstatement tactics to our membership development efforts. If online is where the ad revenue is going, then that is a HUGE indicator of where people are going. And either we can be in front of that, taking advantage of the 'low hanging fruit,' or way behind scrambling for crumbs.