Marketing Briefs

Integrate Social Media With Your B2B Lead Generation Strategies

The “new marketing” must continue to change to adapt to the “new buyer.” All purchasers today have more control than ever by their ability to access information on products and services, coupled with the ability to interact in real-time via social media networks with other users of your solution. For B2B marketers and their companies, engaging in the customer/prospect conversation via social media is an imperative.

Many B2B companies have sales cycles that are long and marketing strategies need to leverage social media opportunities to influence their prospects through a long buying process. Social media isn’t the only step or final step in the selection process for a B2B buyer, but it can help a company to better understand the full buying process from awareness to purchase. Since your current users have a strong influence on your brand, what they are saying on social media networks about your product or service has a direct impact on your marketing efforts to new customers. If you are not engaged in the conversation via social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others, then you can’t attempt to influence it by adding your points of view.

Social media also drives meaningful website traffic and a successful blog can get nearly as much traffic from social media as it does from search engines. Social media does drive lead conversion, with the potential to achieve impressive B2B conversion rates:

· Twitter   3-5%

· Facebook and Linked In   7-10%

· Blog   10-20%

To learn more about leveraging social media as part of your B2B lead generation strategies, I encourage you to view an @eloqua webinar on this topic I found very helpful. The webinar, “Social Media, Demand Generation and The Evolution of Marketing” is available at www.eloqua.com. This was co-sponsored by B2B Magazine and presenters included @SteveWoods the CTO of Eloqua, Mike Volpe @mvolpe the VP Marketing at HubSpot, and Craig Rosenberg @funnelholic the VP Products and Services at Tippit. Their presentation also covers the new "digital body language" of your customers and prospects. Check it out!

Keep Your B2B Company Conversation Going with Twitter

As B2B marketing teams crank up the socialmedia mix in their outreach to the key community groups for their company (clients, prospects, partners, industry, analysts, employees, suppliers, etc.), here are five ways to use Twitter in your B2B marketing:

Start the Conversation and Keep It Going: This is a great medium to carry on an interactive and real-time dialogue with the best sources of your company’s revenue, profits, knowledge of real-world ways to improve your service and product, etc. Your clients, prospects, partners and other key constituencies are a tremendous resource to tap for insights and ideas. You’ll need to develop a company policy that fits your culture related to who in your company can post and reply on behalf of the company. Small companies should consider diving in with each employee having a role on Twitter (perhaps segmented by type of audience group to determine who interacts with each audience). Larger companies, if you haven’t already, should dedicate a resource as at least part of their job to be the “social media czar.” If your marketing team has more than a few people, you could appoint multiple people, having a person assigned to each of your social media channels. The key point here is not to post on Twitter and then not keep it up – start the conversation and keep it going!

Real-Time Pulse of Your Community: As you have on-going conversations with members of your community, use the opportunity to ask questions. Think of this as your best way to conduct real-time surveys. Don’t have a list of a dozen questions and ask them in a row. Ask a question and let the dialogue and exchanges between users play out. When it starts to slow down, ask your next question. With the responses to your questions will come new ideas, some complaints (always, always, always follow-up!), and insights you’d never get from a traditional survey.

Nuture Your Community: Twitter gives you a golden opportunity to keep in touch with your community on a regular basis. How many companies large and small still send out quarterly newsletters or monthly e-mail updates? That would be like calling Mom and Dad once a month or a few times a year. Most of us would like to hear from our friends and family on a more frequent basis, even if it’s just to touch base. Think of your community of users, prospects, partners and others in the same way and have a meaningful piece of information to share with them via Twitter on at least a daily basis. (See #1 – Keep the conversation going!)

Grow Your Community: Twitter is a terrific way for B2B marketing teams to grow the community of a company’s users, prospects, partners and industry contacts. Twitter is the most real-time and interactive way for you to do this today. Check out this helpful article on building a community of Twitter followers for your company. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4277/How-to-Build-a-Community-of-Twitter-Followers-for-Your-Company.aspx

Content Matters: Last but not least for today’s blog entry, don’t forget that content matters. Just because Twitter posts are a short 140 characters, it doesn’t make what you’re saying any less important. The need to maintain relevancy and interest for your audience remains the same regardless of the short format.

Develop Your B2B Social Media Strategy

Marketing departments at all size companies are in the midst of figuring out if they should use or how best to use social media – sites like Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Twitter. Many of the CEOs and other company execs I’ve spoken with freely admit they are “behind the eight ball” when it comes to executing a social media strategy. And for many their social media “strategy” is simply having a staff member set up a company page on Facebook, establish an account on Twitter, and carve out a company presence on LinkedIn, which isn’t really a strategy. (Re LinkedIn, many companies already have a LinkedIn account, through their HR department, which they use as a way to recruit or check-up on candidates, but the account is not being used for marketing or communications or customer service efforts. This is a mistake.)

 

I believe a good part of the hesitation by many companies to dive into the social media pool is a fear of drowning, or losing control of the conversation, combined with not understanding that they needn’t dive in head first but can test the waters, dipping a toe in and then slowly wading in all the way, i.e., developing and implementing a comprehensive social media strategy over time.

 

The first step is to just create a social media strategy, which simply involves deciding which social media site or sites to use, how, and when. Without a clear strategy – knowing up front what it is you want or hope to accomplish, who the target audience is, and how best to reach that audience – companies run the risk of missing out, on potential new customers, opportunities, and revenue streams.

 

So where to begin? Start by picking the platform/social media site where you think you’ll find your customers and prospects. LinkedIn, for example, is targeted at business professionals. Facebook is geared more toward consumers who aren’t necessarily looking for a product or service but value recommendations from friends. While Twitter, a microblogging site, attracts a mix of professionals and consumers and is a great PR and promotion tool.

 

Then set up an account on the site or sites you feel will provide the most benefit. Not sure which site is right for your company or don’t have the resources or time to invest in or on three sites? Then pick one social media site as your primary site. However, it’s worth the time and effort to set up accounts on the other two social media sites, too, and link them to your primary site. (Each of the “big three” social media players make it easy to push content from their site to other sites and vice versa.). This way as you add content and experiment with your primary social media site, you can push (or have the content automatically pushed for you) to the other two.

 

Once you have established a presence on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and/or Twitter, invite your customers and prospects to join you, either via the invite tool on that site, by providing links on your company website to your social media accounts, and/or via email (or a combination of the above). When you are comfortable using your primary social media site, you can expand your horizons and start spending more time and energy on other sites.

 

The important thing to remember is that social media is a tool to drive conversations with your customers, prospects, and other relevant audiences. And a successful social media strategy is one that will help you better connect with your customers and understand what it is they are looking for, so you can deliver the products, services, and/or solutions they are seeking and ultimately garner new customers and sales.

 

Don’t wait. Now’s the time to develop your social media strategy and join the conversation!

Welcome to Marketing Briefs!

My name is Michael Collins, and I want to welcome you to my blog, Marketing Briefs.

 

I am an innovative, hands-on marketing leader who knows how to motivate people, build brand awareness, and generate sales. Over the course of my career, I have developed and executed award-winning marketing campaigns for a variety of companies, all of which have resulted in profitable revenue growth. Now I want to share what I’ve learned – my tips and strategies – with you.

 

Over the course of the coming months I’ll be writing about and sharing marketing ideas that can help businesses of all sizes, from small and mid-size organizations to Global 2000 companies, build better brand awareness and brand loyalty while generating sales. I’ll also be commenting on marketing trends and discussing innovative marketing campaigns that catch my eye.

 

Have your own marketing ideas and/or strategies you’d like to share? Leave me a comment!