How do you get potential customers to travel down the rabbit hole leading to conversion? This remains a top-of-mind question for marketers as the digital media marketing landscape continues to evolve.

Best practices leading consumers on the path to conversion will be a major topic of discussion at this year’s upcoming LeadsCon New York conference that will be held at The New York Hilton Midtown August 24-26.

Where should a marketer begin? By far and away, it’s critical that you know who you are targeting and what need your product or service is answering to. With that intel, you then need to attract the attention of your potential customer to inspire him or her to take that journey with you.

Lead generation has the benefit of combining all of the tools of the marketing trade — social media, direct marketing, content marketing, PR, email marketing — to name a few. It also requires strategy and analysis, says Elena Terentyeva, senior content marketing manager at semrush, on the company's blog.

Social media allows marketers to speak directly to the consumer. But, as Terentyeva points out, marketers must understand social media is all about relationships. “If you want to sell products through your social media channels, you’ll get just a buyer-customer relationship, which implies short interactions,” she says.

Perhaps one of social media’s greatest attributes is that marketers can gain loyal customers who ultimately become brand advocates. The key here is to create a two-way dialogue involving them in meaningful conversations. Incorporating a chat tool is a sound strategy because of its immediacy, which is attractive to consumers. And don’t simply share your own content — by parceling out nonproprietary and interesting or valuable bits of information, you can build trust among your customer base.

Social media’s other gift is measurability. Tracking shouldn’t simply be perceived as “counting leads,” however. Marketers should take stock of all of the varying degrees of analytics. That means paying attention to the smaller data points, not just the big picture data. Like a good hunter, track every movement of your target customer. This will allow you to nurture your leads — and provide insight into where and potentially why someone may have dropped off. Google Analytics is an enormously helpful tool — free and reliable. This is how you can determine the actions taken by the consumers on your watch list.

Advises Terentyeva: “But don’t mix your metrics with those that have nothing to do with conversion.”

Checklist:

• Know your audience and understand their requirements.
• Always remember social media is about relationships.
• Use tools like chat app to be able to create a dialogue with more immediacy.
• Pay attention to the small data points to track every movement your customer or potential customer is making.
• Focus on the metrics that pertain solely to conversion.

And of course, always have your goal front and center. “There is no way to reach your goal if you don’t have one; but marketers sometimes overlook such an obvious idea,” says Terentyeva. “Don’t rely on luck, and don’t blame lack of information. Planning and measuring should become a routine.”

Click here to register for LeadsCon New York 2015.