400% increase in landing page conversions with blogging + social networks

We tried something new to promote our latest webinar.  More social media.  Less email.  The results so far are pretty interesting.  These additional activities added approximately 90 minutes to the typical time used to promote events.  And replaced multiple email invites so overall the time spent was probably pretty close to the typical amount.  We found out that social media efforts drove up pre-registrations for our upcoming webinar!

We had about 10 days to promote this event.  Here was the plan in a nutshell:

• Create a registration landing page to capture visitors (outside of the actual meeting tool — Go to Webinar, our marketing automation tool is Pardot’s Prospect Insight)
• Send an email to our lists: interested in news and events or that topic
• Blog about the upcoming event, with the appropriate tags
• We already tweet our blog posts, so we will continue as normal (using Hootsuite to schedule tweets and the like)
• Post a link to our posts in relevant LinkedIn groups we are members of
• Schedule a couple extra tweets right before the event

Here are the stats to date.  I’ll post some final stats after the event.  But the ones so far are really encouraging.

1. Blog post stats:  the traffic was pretty similar to a normal post, but the click-through rate was much better than usual
2. 18% of blog page views were from direct from Twitter — this is pretty typical for us
3. 40% of the blog post views were from Linkedin discussions (this was the first time we used LinkedIn this way.  One link was removed from the news section, but no big deal)
4. Typical click through rate on posts is about 20%
5. The conversion rate for blog readers to registrations?  22%
6. The conversion rate of blog visitors > landing page visitors?  30%
7. Typical landing page conversion rate for us?  15%
8. The conversion rate for people who didn’t visit the blog, but went to the landing page was 17%
9. The overall conversion rate for the landing page was 31% (better)
10. People who clicked on the landing page from the blog registered 75% of the time
    
11. 59% of attendees came directly from reading our blog post

And if you ask me, that’s proof that social media leads to leads.  🙂

Take a look, 75% of the people who read the blog and visited the registration page registered for the event.

And 20% of the post readers registered for the event.  I wish I could convert 20% of my website visitors.  😉

Only time will tell how much revenue is created, but for b2b marketers getting qualified prospects is half the battle.

I really shouldn’t have posted these stats and tips, because now LinkedIn might get clobbered with webinar invites. Hopefully people will try to stay relevant.  Unlike this discussion I saw earlier this week:  a design company posted a link to their latest project.

Huh?  What does this actually have to do with the topic at hand? Wouldn’t it have been more targeted to post the pitch for design services on the Technology Marketers group?  My 2 cents.

OK back to social media.  I think this is proof it works.  What’s your take?  Do you have any social event marketing and lead generation strategies?