The purpose of my blog is to share learning and insight that our team accumulates through experience. This information tends to be in the form of quantitative or framework outcomes.
One of the ‘truisms’ in funnel optimization is that website visitors like to interact with something that immediately gives them an experience with the services offered. For software / saas companies this is accomplished with a sample - the demo login or download or video. (See this page on how Smartsheet has optimized this). In CPG its literally sampling.
For professional services, this experience is more elusive. How does one sample a professional service? Our hypothesis is interactive estimators. We in professional services have long used spreadsheets as part of our proposal process to capture the client’s business assumptions and document the potential benefit. What’s new is that these spreadsheets can be turned into highly interactive marketing tools for prospective clients to experience the inputs and outputs of using your services - e.g. “sample the value based on *my* company”.
To this end, i.c.stars has launched version 1 of our Social Media Marketing ROI calculator. You can set several assumptions about your market using the sliders, and the graph will immediately recalculate your cost-benefit of doing Social Media Marketing over time.
Try the Social Media Marketing ROI Calculator
We are also taking this newly acquired technical expertise to convert two of our clients estimating spreadsheets into calculators like this. As we learn more about how well this engages B2B audiences, we will report back our findings.
Where should we take v2.0 of the i.c.stars model? What additional inputs or outputs would you like to see?
