Social Media Marketing Vs. Telemarketing

Social media is still a relatively young marketing tool whose full capabilities are still in the process of being discovered. Singapore business to business company owners often shy away from social media use in b2b lead generation, mainly because of the difficulty of measuring its ROI. But while some business managers are having problems with measuring ROI for Singapore business sales leads generated through social media marketing, others are arguing that the real difficulty lies in the lack of a standardized metric system on which to measure the success or failure of a social media lead generation campaign.

Because of this, there are Singapore companies who instead prefer to use telemarketing services to find business leads. The direct approach of a telemarketing call center to connect with business leads in a calling list offers immediate results, compared to online marketing channels such as social media marketing or even the more tested email marketing. The metrics of telemarketing are much more matter-of-fact, professional telemarketers immediately know if their is a chance of ROI when a business lead agrees to listen, and the percentage increases once the business lead approves of an appointment. In contrast to using social media marketing for lead generation, a sales agent may be successfully engaging business leads through discussions online, but most of the time these business leads simply wish to make their point known, and would immediately shy away at the faintest hint of a sales effort. Though the chance to convert these business leads is not necessarily lost in the initial pitch, the conversion process using only social media usually takes a long time to complete.

Which then should be the best marketing channel to use for business lead generation? Though telemarketing services appear to be more beneficial, the best strategy should be a complement of the two. Use online content marketing strategies to attract business leads and introduce yourself in the initial phase; once you have acquired information for your telemarketing list, use a more direct approach such as telemarketing to take advantage of the hot leads; the rest should be contacted again through email marketing or a social media update, using data verification services to ensure that the contact information remain up to date; once they become sales ready, use a direct marketing approach once again. The sales process should be repeated as such, and the metric should always be the amount of business sales leads converted.