March 21

How To Track Dark Social Sales Prospecting Opportunities

How do you track social selling and content marketing success in a world where 65% of all content sharing is invisible to your data analytics software? What does sales prospecting success look like? What social selling KPIs do you track and report? Here is a simple solution.

Dark Social Is Growing

The chart from GetSocial clearly shows that since 2017 more and more content is being shared privately via messenger apps and email than on social media platforms. That’s not a huge surprise if you think about it. If I find something that is truly helpful to a friend or coworker, I’m far more likely to email it to them than share it via social media.

But, this creates a real challenge for those of you using social engagement as a primary lead generation content marketing success scorecard. You need to find additional KPI’s you can use to track the success of your social selling and sales prospecting programs.

Click or Conversion

The simple fact here, and this is nothing new, you need to stop chasing the click and start focusing on the conversion. Digital Natives have always loved pushing the trackable nature of digital sales & marketing tools vs traditional sales and advertising outreach.

What they don’t realize is that those traditional approaches always had trackable metrics. We old-timers called them sales. And now, just as it was back then, sales are truly the only metric that matters.

Sure it’s great to know exactly how you got that sale… but in an increasingly invisible world, you can’t let the tracking tail wag the sales dog. That’s the biggest achilles heel of inbound marketing. In the inbound marketing world it’s all about driving sales prospects to your website so you can get them to download something and begin tracking their every move on your website.

Don’t get me wrong… I LOVE that world. And I do my level best to get as many sales prospects to reach my website as possible. BUT, I don’t obsess over it. And I don’t let the inability to track sales prospects reading my content on someone else’s website, keep me from publishing as much as humanly possible on those sites.

Propinquity is the Solution

Sales & Marketing executives today have to stop thinking like restaurants and start thinking like taco trucks. Let me explain.

Restaurants build or rent a building, set up shop, then spend lots of time, money and effort creating awareness of their restaurant and enticing you to come eat there.

Taco trucks take a completely different approach. They simply figure out where the prospective customers are hanging out (Propinquity Points). Then they go park their taco truck on the curb in front of the customers and sell them food.

In a world where you can’t necessarily track the content consumption and sharing activity, Propinquity based marketing helps you at least stack the deck in your favor by ensuring your content is in front of the RIGHT people. And if you consistently put your content in front of the sales prospects, the right people that should want to do business with you, then you can rest assured the content is getting consumed and shared with qualified sales prospects, even if you can’t track it.

Leverage 2nd Click Content

But for those of you who simply cannot accept the invisible sales prospect… here’s a simple solution – Second Click Content.

2nd Click Content is the key to bringing some level of trackability to dark content sharing. By strategically inserting anchor links in the content you publish at your Propinquity Points, you create trackable data that will help you understand where your leads are coming from and which Propinquity Points are doing the best job for you.

To do this effectively, you need to make sure the anchor text points to a concept that is central to understanding your post’s message. That will ensure an editor doesn’t strip out the link, because they’ll understand that a reader that truly wants to understand the entire concept of your post will need that extra layer of information, the information contained in your 2nd Click content.

Then be sure to use URL attribution tags to help you see where folks visiting your 2nd Click Content page are coming from originally. This won’t necessarily tell you how the person initially found the content (did they see it published on a Propinquity Point, find it via a socially shared link or maybe someone emailed the article to them) but it will tell you which Propinquity Point content is converting to trackable website visits.

Need some help developing your sale lead generation or content marketing programs? Drop us a line below. We’d love to help you out.

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About the author

Tom is 30 year veteran of the sales & marketing industry with a penchant for stiff drinks, good debates and showing others how to combine the power of digital platforms and technology with the science of persuasion to turn conversations into customers.

He is the founder of Converse Digital, a former contributing writer for Advertising Age, and author of The Invisible Sale regarded by readers as a "must-read for any marketing and sales team."

The Invisible Sale has been described as: showing the reader how to rip down the communication barrier between sales and marketing teams in an easy-to-digest look at how both teams can work together to attract, measure, and close prospects in today's online landscape.

In the book, Tom breaks down his entire business development process, honed over a decade of practice, to create the ultimate field guide for anyone tasked with creating an effective business development program for themselves, their agency, or company.

And for those seeking to learn more about the art and science of persuasion, modern digitally oriented prospecting, effective lead nurturing without becoming a nuisance and closing more business deals, Tom has authored hundreds of articles available via his Painless Prospecting Newsletter Archives.

He is also a highly sought after sales & marketing keynote speaker who has graced stages in 52 cities, 27 states, and 7 countries spread across 4 continents.

He primarily speaking on topics of sales, business development, social selling, social media and the power of consumer experiences shared via social media as the ultimate form of advertising.

Tom's probably best known for his incredibly successful, groundbreaking social media campaign to rebrand Mardi Gras from "girls gone wild" to "family friendly fun" using nothing other than social media. That work led him to create his signature tourism marketing keynote -- The Soundtrack of our Life: Leveraging Visitor Experiences To Drive Visitation.

Too learn more about Tom's most requested talks, or check his availability, visit his professional speaker page.

You can also follow him on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.


Tags

B2b Lead Generation, B2b Sales, B2b Sales Prospecting, b2b social selling, content marketing, content marketing strategy, digital strategy, Lead Generation, painless prospecting, sales prospecting, social media, social selling, social selling agency, social selling keynote, social selling training, social selling workshop, social selling workshops, Tom Martin


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