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b2b marketing magazine

Social Media - The Lead Generation Game?

January 17, 2010

in Social Media, b2b marketing

The following post is taken from my monthly collumn over at B2B Marketing

B2B lead generation in its traditional form consists of many outbound marketing activities; for example ads, telemarketing, email marketing, and pay-per-click. All of these are broadcast in their very nature. However, some of these activities are now increasingly becoming ignored by prospects who favour one-to-one communications. This shift in behaviour effects not just the success of lead generation but your future marketing budgets.

Savvy marketers now regard social media as an important channel of the marketing mix whereby conversations and content referred to as ‘inbound’ marketing can attract, engage and nurture leads.

Cost effective
The value of social media used for lead generation in comparison to outbound marketing activities is a lot more cost-effective. What this means for small and medium sized businesses is that they can now compete with larger corporations because they can leverage social media to their advantage through effective engagement and creative content at lower costs. For larger corporations the risk is that, if they do not adopt or engage in social media, they will lose a slice of the prospect pie.

When looking to generate leads through social media, the first step is to get heard by cutting through the noise. This is where your social media brand outposts such as Twitter, blogs and LinkedIn communities are important as they are the launch pad for creating interesting conversations and engaging content.

Both the conversations and content you are producing can be promoted through seeding, sharing and optimisation throughout social media. This allows your content to be found through social search and increases your chances of prospects engaging with content and spreading it further throughout their own social networks.

Traditional processes still work
Marketers should look to revise traditional lead gen processes such as scouring newspapers and trade publications for new business opportunities by using social media tools. For example, you can now use RSS readers to pool RSS feeds from trade publications as well as from competitors. The RSS readers enable you to keep up to date with industry announcements and potential opportunities that you can add to your prospect database and follow up.

At the same time it is essential that you have a listening strategy in place whereby you can monitor conversations taking place within blogs, forums and most importantly Twitter so that you do not miss out on opportunities. Expanding upon your listening strategy further, effective monitoring of conversations will provide you with the intelligence enabling you to engage in discussions within Yahoo Answers, Facebook groups and LinkedIn Q&As.

You should look to develop networking opportunities using social media, for example you can search for prospects within Twitter. Once you have added them to a list, you can create bespoke content for specific leads in order to create conversations and optimise this content to spread further through your other brand outposts and social networks to increase the potential of reaching more prospects.

Make sure that you balance all content with conversations so that the dialogue is not one way to ensure you are not reverting back to the traditional broadcast marketing methods.

Securing future social media budgets
Once your conversations and content are discovered, the goal is to funnel visitors/traffic toward target destinations such as a bespoke landing page whereby the user can enter in details via data capture and become a prospect. Social media activity inevitably costs money in terms of both time and resources, therefore in order to secure a budget for future social media spend you need to generate as many leads as possible that will eventually result in sales.

Some of the best tactics used to generate leads are value-added, for example creating blog posts offering advice on how to carry out business processes that compliment a company’s products and services thus increasing subscribers and increasing ratio of leads. It is important to remember that the quality of leads is controlled by the quality of the content and targeting.

As with all marketing activity, and social media is no exception, it needs to be measured in order to determine success and increase business intelligence. Use multivariate testing within your communications, analyse the data to track visitors, leads and customers across every channel that you are using within social media. This information will help inform where future budgets are best invested and what content works.

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Social media - Protecting your brand against negative buzz

May 24, 2009

in Reputation Management, Social Media, b2b marketing

“A third of the population has reviewed something online and any one of those reviews can be read by millions of people,” according to Andy Sernovitz of Fast Company. This is the power of social media: user-generated comments and conversation that can build or destroy a brand. Ignoring a conversation in social media and not responding effectively could impact your company’s bottom line.

Scenario: Your client tweets about a bad customer service experience, immediately alerting his or her social graph (all their connections within social media) to the issue; or if they blog, they document the bad experience and publish the post. Through the multiplier effect this information is spread on the web often unedited and/or commented by new authors. These headlines appear on sites such as Digg or Technorati and are indexed by Google. The news is fanned by Twitter and citizen journalists, resulting in a full-blown reputation crisis within a few hours – are you prepared?

The above example is extreme, but if the cost is simply to monitor the conversation with a few search engines, social networks, forums, blogs and respond to negative buzz when/where appropriate then it would make sense to do so. The cost benefits of monitoring social media far outweigh the damage to your brand if you choose not to.

Start by listening to social media
You need to track down the entire buzz around your brand within social media to get an idea of what the negativity landscape looks like. Free tools such as whostalkin.com or socialmention.com can help you to identify the conversations around your brand. Simply list relevant keywords to search – for example brand, product, model number or CEO name. The tools will then return results and categorise them by channels i.e. blogs, forums, networks, news and video. If your company is global with a huge web presence, it is best to use a social media agency to produce an audit – manually searching the voicescape is very labour intensive. Do not forget that Google alerts are a great way of monitoring the conversation based on brand mentions.

Join the conversation
If you discover negative or factually incorrect buzz, it is important to react quickly so the information is not spread further via blogs or micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.

Simply by responding to the post/comment or contacting the detractor directly shows that your brand is open to dialogue and portrays that your business is listening and values the customer. Do not be defensive as it will encourage further negativity – instead explain your position and invite feedback.

Transparent communications
Social media within any marketing context is all about being open and honest. If something goes wrong – such as your server crashes, or the development and delivery of a product is delayed – then tell your customers. Let your customers know how you are rectifying a situation. Failure to communicate will open your brand up to the mercy of social media.

Social media strategy
If you have a company blog, you can respond with a formal blog post making sure that its title features keywords that match the negative posts or content. This will help to add positive search engine results, pushing down negative posts indexed by search engines.

Also, counteract anonymous and negative comments by highlighting testimonials from some of your best customers. In support of the blog post you can use your Twitter account to raise awareness of your response. Depending on the scale of the negative reaction you can respond via video or audio in the form of webcasts and podcasts. If you have an online community, you can host the conversation on your own website, confining the negativity to one area and allowing you to respond immediately.

Make it a habit
Remember marketing 101: a recipient of good customer service will tell five others on average. Yet a recipient of bad service will tell ten people and many more – maybe even hundreds if they are a blogger or active on social networks. It may not prevent a crisis from occurring, but the earlier you learn of dissatisfaction the faster you can react.

Key to managing and maintaining your reputation within social media is to be part of the conversation and for your brand to have a voice that is respected. This comes only through investing time in engaging with customers through social media, building relationships and in turn developing trust.

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