Direct Revenue From Social Media Marketing

CNN reports that an $11,000 indie movie ‘Paranormal Activity’ grossed $7.1M this past weekend and landed in the top 5 with a limited distribution across 200 theaters. They did it through word of mouth marketing efforts heavily leveraging YouTube and Twitter.

By: Trendistic

What is most interesting about this is that the call to action was not a coupon or offer. Buzz drove attendance. In addition, as the first attenders watched the film, buzz peaked and carried through to quick conversion.

Now, I also tried to get data on YouTube trends but was only able to grab total visitations, which as of this morning were 1.9M. However, search stats on Google showed a similar trend as Twitter so I’ll make a leap assumption that YouTube views were probably following a similar curve.

The reason I’m honing in on this so much is that awareness marketing has really taken a back seat as lead generation and direct revenue models have become the rage. We look at social media marketing and can’t accurately measure the grey area of word of mouth to revenue generation. So, we adapt social media to fit our tried and true direct marketing efforts – i.e., using Twitter to mail out coupon codes. The reality is that social media does have a place in our revenue generation mix close the point of sale.  It just takes us into a realm outside our comfort zone.

As you consider social media in your marketing mix, consider tests that introduce word of mouth marketing efforts close to the point of sale. You may learn the trick to leveraging SMM in your specific revenue generation mix.