Thursday, September 10, 2009

Eloqua and social networking

Social Networks Hype CycleImage by fredcavazza via Flickr

For those of you not familiar with Eloqua, it is a marketing automation platform. The software as a service allows you to track email campaigns, website visitors, lead nurturing and prospect profiling (among other things).

My company, Harvard Business Publishing, had a full time person working on Eloqua up until about 4 months ago. Since then I have been in charge of it. I have a basic understanding and really had just been using it for email campaigns. Lately, I have been trying to utilize more of the functionality to help drive leads.

One very interesting campaign I just launched involved placing links to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn on the landing page and encourage people to use those platforms to pass along information about the article we were giving away.The audience was probably not perfect for this experiment (high level C types), but the potential is very intriguing. Considering that many firms are seeing traffic from these sites explode I hope to take advantage of this trend for our website.

The one outstanding question is does our customer base utilize any of these services. I know a lot of our prospects are on LinkedIn yet I do not know how many are on Twitter. I expect few to be on Facebook, let alone use it for business. All of this goes back to a previous post I made about whether or not every business can use social media sites to driver traffic (Can any site use social media to drive traffic?). I think this will be a good experiment and possibly provide a glimmer of an answer to that question.

You can see the landing page here




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6 comments:

Steven Woods said...

Barrett,
it's an interesting challenge - depending on the social network (LinkedIn has a very different "vibe" than Facebook, for example) and your content, some will get shared, some will not. Often, it's a strategy of consistently creating great, sharable content, and slowly but steadily building a group of people who are interested that wins.

Over time, the link sharing will lead to good SEO results too, and that can be where your audience finds you, rather than the original social media venue such as Twitter.

Patrick J Woods said...

Barrett, my company also targets directors and members of the C-suite.

Over the past 2 months, we've had about 590 downloads of our reports and white papers (focusing mainly on strategic hiring and other HR issues) from our social media assets.

We've used Eloqua query strings to track what's happening where, and since we're not requiring form submission to access the deliverable, I've actually built a lead-gen form into the PDFs themselves.

It's taken us some time to build up the momentum, but it seems to be paying off.

Barrett Coakley said...

The good thing is we have an abundance of high quality content. We just need to be sure we deliver our campaigns in a consistent manner and not just a fire hose.
Patrick, I would love to hear more about what you are doing.

Unknown said...

Barrett,

What share rates have you seen by doing this? Our clients report between 5 and 10%. Largely depends on how compelling the content is and to a lesser degree, where the sharing links are placed. Influence on campaign reach and rate new people are coming into the database has been significant.

chris.frank@treehousei.com

Barrett Coakley said...

Chris,
No data so far. Just applied it to 2 campaigns. Need to do it more before I can see if it is a good fit for our audience.

Chad said...

Hi Barrett - any update on the success of the sharing links?