1)     Direct mail (snail mail)

2)     Billboard (traditional outdoor)

3)     Twitter messages about the promotion

Which one was the most successful? Any guesses?

Drum roll….

The direct mail campaign, which cost $15,000, brought in 200 new customers. The billboard ad, which cost $7500 netted 300 new customers. And, the Twitter campaign, whose costs were undisclosed (I can only assume that this would relate to Vaynerchuk’s hourly rate or some deconstruction of his speaking fees), brought in 1,800 new customers.

This is pretty impressive. Most companies could easily justify a Twitter approach, especially if their employees managing the campaign work for a reasonable hourly rate. Even at $200 an hour, an employee logging a couple hours a day scheduling targeted tweets on something like  www.tweetlater.com would pay off. When it comes to reaching people, the numbers are tilted in favor of Twitter. There are some caveats, however (see below).

Consider this: Twitter itself is a target audience of sorts. Gary Vay*ner*chuk’s audience is very tech savvy and connected via social media platforms, tools and social networking sites. If you’re not familiar with GaryVee, I’d suggest doing some googling to figure out who he is. He’s a major force in the “new marketing” biz.. as well as the wine industry.

So, someone like Vaynerchuk can get a lot more mileage out of something like Twitter. His audience is expecting to see him there.. eagerly anticipating his every tweet. A lot of companies don’t have this luxury.

That said, a campaign to build an audience on Twitter couldn’t be a bad thing, right?

Once your audience has some gravity and size, you can pull off promotional campaigns like Vaynerchuk’s. What’s the ideal size and quality of this audience? I don’t know. I’d like to see some research on this. It’s the one thing that’s often overlooked in social media discussion circles.

What are your thoughts? 10,000 followers? Two-thirds of which are involved with the product, brand, solution or issue? (please comment below and share this link via the ShareThis icon)

Ok – so link tracking.. or more specifically, Urchin Tracker scripts for Google Analytics. First the why: As an online business, you want to figure out exactly where your traffic is coming from and which links on your pages are getting clicked. You can do these kinds of things with regular Web pages and Google Analytics. This is especially useful in situations where you educate customers and prospects about your particular products and industry then drive them to your product listings.

There are several ways to analyze traffic. This post covers just a couple (and links to an article that shows you exactly how). Google Analytics is very robust and does more than what’s covered here. With GA, you can set up goal pages, track conversion success, and figure out exactly what’s working on your sites.

Let’s say you want to figure out who’s clicking on what links in your site. Google Analytics works if you set up pages within your site as conversion goals/targets. However, if the links are external, you can’t place the Urchin Tracker code into someone else’s page. If that’s something you’d like to track (which is often the case), then take a look at the following link for the solution. This is from Sulli’s Google Analytics Tips and Tricks by SkiSulli. He shows you the right script to place into your pages and recommends some ways to set it up. As you’ll see, he also shows you how to make this work for email or “mailto:” links. If you want to figure out how many people are clicking on your email address link (and when, how fast, etc), then this is a great solution.

You can then track all of this activity automatically from within Google Analytics. As you get a better sense for what’s driving traffic to your listings, you can then tweak your pages to get better conversion rates and more business to your product purchase Web pages and sites.