Survey: Is Collecting or Engaging More Crucial?

As marketers, we produce content on a weekly (or even daily) basis geared towards our targets markets, encouraging our prospects to seek out and read our content. On one side of the coin, we’re hoping that they will engage and comment on our content so that we can start a (permission-based) conversation with them. On the other side, we also want them to fill out landing page forms to receive whitepapers or case studies, so that we can collect more data on who they are, what company they work for, and what types of content they are interested in receiving. Either way, we are initiating a point of contact with our prospects in the hopes of nurturing that relationship over time to turn it into a conversion.

Engaging and conversing with prospects online can be very beneficial, and it can start an “organic” relationship. The prospect can choose whether or not to engage with your brand, and even though you are actively promoting and providing content, it’s creating an opportunity for them to reach out on their own terms. Nurturing these prospects can be harder and take longer, but it allows them to connect with us in their own way on their own time.

But we also want to be able to capture “soft” leads so that we can track prospect’s movements when they visit our site or engage with our brand in another way. This is why we create landing pages with forms so that we can capture more information about our prospects and start reaching out to them with our nurturing campaigns. We have a clear idea of how interested they are, as well as what content is attracting them.

So, this begs the question: which is more important, collecting data or engaging customers? What do you think? Of course, both are important from a marketing perspective, but which one of these activities helps your business get to the conversion?

Choose one of the options in the online survey below, powered by our technology sponsor,Formstack . They cater to small businesses with an online form builder, landing pages, and email campaigns, which all include analytics and seamless integration with existing software such as Mailchimp, PayPal, Google docs, and more.

Tell us what you think and we’ll write about the results in 2 weeks! Feel free to share your comments below.