Why Engagement Will Not Generate Leads (and what to do about it)

Posted by Jeff Molander on May 8, 2012 10:30:00 AM

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Jeff MolanderToday's guest blogger is Jeff Molander. Jeff is the authority on making social media sell, adjunct faculty at Loyola University business school, a social selling speaker and author of, Off the Hook Marketing: How to make social media sell.

Produce engaging content. For years now, there's been a steady drum beat coming from content marketing experts who say producing engaging content on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and other social media is the key to success. But in reality even the most engaging blogs, videos and other forms of online publication fail to produce leads and sales. At best, sales are often blindly attributed to content as part of a mass media branding success using fuzzy math.

The ugly truth is, for many of us, engaging customers creates profitless prosperity—impressive marketing statistics that don’t ultimately, directly help generate leads and sales. Engagement creates momentary value that is aloof from any kind of sales lead management process.

In the end, businesses who DO create leads and sales using social selling know something the rest of us don’t.

Why we're Failing to Sell with Engagement

Most of us fail to create sales engaging social media because we’re building content marketing on an outdated foundation. We’re clinging to mass media advertising ideas and values. Instead, we should be exploiting direct response marketing tactics. This is the secret sauce—the untold truth that top social sellers realize and act on. It’s how they are making social media sell for them every day.

“Marketers often come from two distinct backgrounds,” says best-selling author and IBM distinguished engineer Mike Moran.

“Brand marketers are the ones whose work you see on TV. They are all about branding, brand image, brand awareness—use whatever word you want—and their success has made Coca-Cola and many other consumer products into household names. Direct marketers are decidedly less sexy...constantly searching for the next idea that increases response. They are all about sales, and couldn’t care less about brand image as long as the cash register rings.”

Moran says engagement marketers with interest in driving sales have much to learn from the practice of direct response marketing.

How to Always Make the Sale

Why do so many of us pursue getting “Liked” on Facebook or followed on Twitter? Because of this single idea: getting lots of customers’ attention (reach) over and over (frequency) is enough to earn a sale…somehow, sometime. This is how advertising works.

Today’s best social sellers do not believe for a minute that exposure to engaging content will result in a sale. They have no trust that it will produce a lead. Rather, they believe in, and execute on, carefully mixing in calls-to-action. The content they create solves customers problems or vividly demonstrates (proves…think “infomercial”) compelling experiences relating to their service.

The best way to sell on Facebook is to solve customers’ problems (yes “for free”) in ways that earn trust and ultimately help them navigate their way toward your paid products and services. And by the way, I’m not saying attention doesn’t matter. It does. I’m simply saying it’s not enough. Stopping at earning customers fleeting attention is a sure-fire losing strategy online.

Flip the Paradigm!

Don’t get sucked into the profitless prosperity black hole! When I speak to audiences I encourage them to think (and act!) in terms of direct response marketing when engaging with social media and content marketing. Ron Perlstien says, “Frequency is the benefit of success, not the key to success.” In other words, you can increase frequency when you generate sales revenue!


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Topics: Lead Generation, B2B Marketing, Guest Blogs, Social Media


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