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!
Comments