Ah, summer. You tempt me with the smells of BBQ, the sounds of kids playing in the pool and the sights of slides in a conference room! With summer conference season in full swing, many of us are leaving the confines of our cubicles and listening to and networking with a variety of thinkers and speakers on the social media trail.
With all of this thinking and talking, it can be easy to forget about doing. So, here is the summer conference season challenge. What is the one thing you are going to start doing, right now, based on what you learned from a conference you attended?
Here are a couple of ideas from the Social Media Summit, a Ragan Conference held at Cisco Headquarters:
- Establish a baseline of traffic coming to your website from social media: This is easier than it sounds. Start by making sure that all relevant social media URLs are classified in your website’s analytics tool. This means not only top level domains but all sub-domains. If you are in a large organization, make sure these URLs are classified not only in the global suite but also in the local suites that your business units use. Fewer than half of attendees during an ROI presentation at the summit said they’d already done this.
- Ask your customers about how social media does, or does not, impact their purchase process: You typically know the last step your customers took before they purchased, which, if online, is usually search. But, almost no one pops out of bed each day, types in a search query and then makes a purchase. That’s why it’s called a process. So, ask your customers about their process. What influences their purchase process of your product or service? Is it a primary influence, one of many or not at all? Yes, this is self-reported behavior, but the data gives you a lot of insight into how social media plays a role in sales. For reference, no one in the audience had asked their customers this question.
What’s inspired you recently from a conference you attended that you’ve put into action? What have you learned once you did?