B2B Lead Blog

If you think Facebook is no place for B2B marketers, think again. And, consider the experience of Motorola Solutions.

“Facebook was one of the first places we started engaging on social media,” Belinda Hudmon, Senior Director, Global Digital Strategy and Operations, Motorola Solutions, said.

Why? Because that’s the site the company’s government customers were using.

“Our strategy has always been, ‘Go where the audience is,’” she explained. “Firefighters, policeman and other public-safety personnel were engaging on Facebook. They weren’t only talking about their personal lives, they were talking about their jobs.”

The company followed the conversations of its Facebook audience and developed a Motorola Solutions Facebook business page, which features links to relevant content – such as a whitepaper on next generation public safety – that served as a response to the ongoing conversation.

However, they didn’t create content specifically for Facebook.  Instead, Facebook worked as an extension of Motorola’s publishing arm, which consists of a global editorial team that manages 16 websites in 11 languages. Hudmon’s team introduces their content to their target audience on Facebook by addressing audience questions and concerns. She indicated it is beneficial when the team does the following:

• Use photos. Hudmon said images drive a 20% higher response.
• Ask questions related to the content and create conversation around it.

“We’ll pose a question that talks a little bit about what our point of view is, but the goal is really to get that dialogue started,” Hudmon explained.

• Promote the company’s Facebook presence. Hudmon noted the Facebook page sees the most traffic around events such as tradeshows and conferences. This is why the team ensures the page is integrated into all company online and offline channels. After all, if the marketplace doesn’t know it’s there, they won’t come.
• Don’t approach Facebook like an advertising channel.

“When you say, ‘Here is this new thing you should buy and here is the offer,’ that will really turn people off,” Hudmon said. “Instead, we position new services and products in thought-leadership content that discusses them in the context of industry issues.”

While Hudmon can’t reveal exactly how many leads her team receives from Facebook, she said it generates more sales, support and general inquiries about Motorola Solutions’ offerings than any other social media channel.

“We’re not measuring return on investment at this point, but we are starting to put mechanisms in place to do so” she said. “We just know this is where our audience is and we need to be there, too. It’s like the Internet a decade or so ago, we knew we had to have a presence and we had to make sure we were driving the most effectiveness from it, but we didn’t fully understand its value yet.”

In the future, Hudmon would like to test advertising on Facebook. She said Facebook collects much more personal data than most other social media sites. That makes it easier to target advertising based on what prospects like, their interests or their connections, in addition to demographics and geography.

“While we’ve always looked at Facebook as an engagement channel, it has granular-level marketplace information that is tough to find anywhere else,” Hudmon said. “We would like to start testing this as an advertising channel [by placing our information on news streams] to see if we can get the right mix of targeting and content that will attract more people to engage with us.”

Related Resources:

Gamification: How Siemens got 23,000 engineers to learn about its brand

B2B Social Media Marketing: Focus on leads, not likes

Lessons from a B2B Summit Coach: 5 steps to cut through the noise, turn off the hype and create a B2B social media program that works

Social Media Marketing: Which type of content is appropriate for different platforms?

Social Media

Five years ago, Dell had little presence on social media. That changed when the computer company realized 4,000 conversations about the brand were happening online every single day and the company was not present.

Since then, Dell has invested millions of dollars’ worth of time and resources to join those conversations. In fact, one in 12 of Dell’s more than 105,000 employees have attended its Social Media & Community University, which encompasses up to 12 hours of training on how to best represent Dell online.

In addition, Social Outreach Services, a team representing 14 languages, actively monitors and participates in social media.

A lot has changed since 2006 and these changes have paid off handsomely for Dell – especially for its B2B business, says Richard Margetic, Director of Global Social Media, Dell.

“Social media has made more of an impact, significantly on B2B than B2C,” he said.

“For us, B2B is about relationships, and social media is all about relationships,” he added.

While Margetic cannot share specific numbers, he says B2B social media initiatives drive “a significant chunk of their B2B business.”

Here’s where he can provide specifics:

Every week, Dell’s Social Outreach Services team addresses approximately 3,000 issues. All but 3% of those issues come to some kind of resolution, and 40 to 50% – about 1,200 – of the people who initiated them end up speaking positively about Dell online.

Conceivably, by participating in social media, Dell transforms approximately 62,000 brand detractors into fans every year.

Margetic said your business can achieve similar results – just start paying attention to what is being said online about your business and industry.  By doing so, in addition to having a chance to recruit some brand converts, you’ll acquire what you need to develop a core marketing strategy:

• You’ll identify who is talking about you – the influencers.
• You’ll find out what they’re talking about and how they’re saying it. This will give you the key words, messaging points and pain points from which you can build marketing materials.
• You’ll find out what social media platforms they’re using and, consequently, identify where to focus your marketing budget.

Here are the free tools Margetic advised using immediately to hear the social media conversations impacting your business:

Google Alerts: Whenever your company or your industry is mentioned online, Google will notify you. You can have these delivered daily, weekly or as they happen.

Twitter search: Type in your company name, keywords or industry to find out what people are saying in real time.

“You’ll quickly get insight into who your marketplace influencers are,” Margetic explained.

LinkedIn: Type your business name, industry or keyword into the search box to identify where you are being mentioned on LinkedIn. You can look at your first- and second-level connections and beyond to hear what they have to say about any topic you want, and filter conversations by geography, company size, industry and more.

“This is a phenomenal tool, especially when you consider that more than 85% of the visits to LinkedIn have nothing to do with job hunting. Instead, people are sharing information and driving relationships,” Margetic said.

Pinterest: Find out if your content is being repinned by going to “http://pinterest.com/source/your company’s URL.” For example:  http://pinterest.com/source/marketingsherpa.com.

You can invest in a social media monitoring tool, as well. Dell has designed its own platform to monitor conversations, but Margetic noted there are plenty of other solutions for businesses wanting to do more than manually search social media sites. These platforms allow you to manage and search multiple sites simultaneously, and see results in real time.

Margetic believed monitoring social media should be considered a key lead generation activity.

“It’s just fundamentally sound business practice,” he insisted. “Paying attention to what is being said [about you and your industry] online will tell you which people are talking, what they’re saying and where they’re saying it, which will help focus your lead-generation efforts.

“If you’re not involved in these conversations, you need to reconsider your priorities,” Margetic concluded.

Related Resources:

Becoming a Social Business – Dell SlideShare

Lead Generation: 5 tips to generate leads faster on LinkedIn

Social Media Marketing: 6 tips for running a valuable LinkedIn group that attracts prospects

B2B Social Media Marketing: Focus on leads, not likes

Webinar Replay: How to Integrate Social Media/SEO to Drive More Leads and Increase Marketing ROI

30-Minute Marketer: How to Take an ROI-Based Approach to Social Marketing

Social Media

How easy it is for the mighty to fall. Especially on social media.

In early October, the B2B Lead Roundtable Group, this blog’s LinkedIn group, was recognized as one of the top LinkedIn groups for content marketing. Check it out for yourself here: “4 Hottest LinkedIn Groups for B2B content marketing.”

Here’s one of the primary reasons we received this distinction: Our vigilance in keeping self-promoters and spammers out of discussions.

“With your large population, I have no idea how you keep this group so clean,” admits John Nettles, the article’s author. “I found other groups, similar in size, had six times the amount of blog spam.”

I thought,  in light of the positive recognition, a “how-to” blog post about developing a LinkedIn group would be apropos. For research, I posted several questions to the group, including, “What issues turn you off when you join a LinkedIn group?”

Everyone answered “spammers and self-promoters” or some variation thereof.

So, imagine my surprise when I recently checked on the group to see discussion topic after discussion topic from spammers and self-promoters! Everything from “We can give you 1,000 executive names for $69!” to “Buy cute girl’s accessories!”

In fact, for every legitimate discussion post, there were probably about 15 spam posts. It was cringe-worthy.

It could have been worse, I suppose. There were no ads for mail-order brides.

So, what happened?

One of the group managers confessed that she accidentally changed the settings to allow all discussions to be posted without moderation. It only took a matter of hours for the group to be drowned in spam.

This underscores Rule #1 for hosting a LinkedIn group: If you want to offer value and not another useless spammer’s bulletin board, you must commit the resources to manage and moderate it. Otherwise, your lack of moderation could rapidly damage your image – if our slip is any indication.

“As a group owner, you must ensure that those you choose to manage or moderate your organization’s LinkedIn group will commit several hours a week, or more. Participation needs to be written into their contracts really, and become a new performance KPI,” advises Tom Skotidas, Founder of Skotidas, a B2B social media lead generation agency and the LinkedIn B2B Social Media Lead Generation Group.

Skotidas, along with Brooke Bower, a MECLABS senior research analyst who was charged with helping establish the B2B Lead Roundtable, share their insight on how to build a spammer-free LinkedIn group your prospects and influencers will be eager to participate in:

1.  Have a strategy,

Know what you want to sell, and to whom you want to sell it. Then, make sure that LinkedIn is an effective channel to do so.

“Everything starts with your products’ prospects; the strategy does not start with the LinkedIn group,” Skotidas says.

You can identify the prospects you are going to invite to the group by setting what Skotidas calls “prospect-mapping criteria.”

• Who is most likely to buy these products?
• What are their job titles?
• Are they decision makers or influencers?
• What kind of company do they work for?
• What industry is it?
• What is its size?

You can then run an Advanced Search on LinkedIn to find hundreds or thousands of prospects who match this audience.

2.  Accurately and concisely communicate your group’s purpose

If you don’t, you could very well damage your reputation. Consider the words of Sue Duris, President of M4 Communications, and a frequent contributor to the B2B Lead Roundtable:

“I don’t like the ‘bait and switch’ method (of promoting group members). You’d be surprised by the number of groups that do that. The summary will say one thing, but when I join, it can be totally unrelated.”

This is what Skotidas uses as his group name litmus test: If your existing clients see the group name and immediately display enthusiasm in joining, chances are it’s a winner. The best group names are not those containing the company’s brand, but instead are those named in a way that appears to solve your prospects’ core needs.

3.  Create a content calendar

Before launching, make sure you have enough content to post fresh information at least twice a week for a couple of months. This is not advertising or self-promotional content, but information that is fully aligned to the group theme and your members’ needs. You must offer members value even if they never buy from you, Bower notes.

According to Skotidas, the group’s content should always focus on giving real advice and information, without any expectation in return. This consistent social interaction and content sharing can  position your group managers as thought leaders, adds Skotidas. He says that in three to six months, with the right content, audience and positioning, it’s likely that your group managers will have built enough trust and positioning to reach out to group members and generate leads and meetings.

4.  Set the ground rules

The B2B Lead Roundtable Group’s rules are strict. Self-promotion, spam or topics unrelated to lead generation are removed. Managers approve discussions before they’re posted. New members are sent an email outlining the rules, and they’re kicked out when they break them.

“When the group was growing, I used to have a ‘three-strike’ policy and warn members when they were on thin ice,” says Bower. “Now, with more than 10,000 members, I’m not wasting time doing that.”

Bower says it takes about a half an hour a day to moderate discussions.

“If we’re not sure about a comment or discussion topic, we’ll err on the side of caution and delete it.”

Group members appreciate the vigilance.

“You guys do a great job. The ‘Discussion’ areas of nine out of 10 groups on LinkedIn are now infected with ridiculous self-aggrandizing bullpucky. Yours is kept remarkably free of it,” commented Michael Benidt, President, Golden Compass, Inc., in a discussion about group rules.

5.  Send invitations

Bower was taken aback by how quickly the B2B Roundtable grew. Within a year, it had 5,000 members. Here’s what she said helped:

• Sending two email invitations, three months apart, to in-house mailing lists and close associates
• Making sure group managers invite their LinkedIn connections, as appropriate
• Referencing the group on webinars and events related to lead generation
• Promoting the group through this blog, which is also a steady source of content

Skotidas recommends warning your group’s first members that the group is still new, so discussion may be slow going at first.

“The last thing you want is someone to join a group and think, ‘Wow, this is a ghost town. Why am I here?’” he says.

6.  Keep the discussion active

Skotidas judges the effectiveness of groups by the involvement of its members:

• There are genuine discussion threads “Look at the last 30 topics posted. If there are no discussion threads below them, the group is brain dead,” he says. “Members have mentally switched off.”

• No one person dominates the conversation

“At first, someone can seem like a champion of the group when they come in and post several articles and participate in every discussion. But if they become too frequent a contributor, fellow members might feel that the group has been hijacked and start to lose faith in the group owner,” warns Skotidas. “It’s like having someone dominate the conversation in the real world.”

He advises promoting discussion through personal contact.

“Send an email or make a phone call, ‘Hey, Nick, there’s a discussion going on I’d think you’d love; I know you’d completely impress your fellow members with your expertise in this particular topic,’” Skotidas says. “That kind of group management is key to driving engagement and contribution.”

So, is the effort worth it?

Both Bower and Skotidas insist it is.

“I am an active group owner, and always try to drive relevant discussion and engagement in my LinkedIn group. As a result, it has grown to nearly 3,000 members and has become a key source of leads for my agency,” says Skotidas. “I reach out to group members often. We meet, we discuss LinkedIn and social media, and we get to know each other in a real way. That face-to-face connection is very important, and it is reinforced as soon as we jump back into the group. That new relationship usually evolves into direct business or advocacy for my agency. And the opportunities only grow as new people join the group.”

Bower admits that while she can’t say precisely how many leads have been generated from the B2B Lead Roundtable, she says the group is an important marketing tool.

“It’s an efficient, effective platform for us to connect with our audience on a global level, and understand their pain points and provide a forum to discuss them,” she explains. “For us, it’s not so much a focus on generating leads as it is providing genuine value and sharing ideas.”

Related Resources:

How IntraLinks Used Social Media to Generate Twice as Many Sales-ready Leads as Any Other Channel

Lessons from a B2B Summit Coach: Five Steps to Cut through the Noise, Turn off the Hype and Create a B2B Social Media Program that Works

Social Media Pays Off Big for Over 1,000 Marketers Reporting 150% ROI or More

Is Social Media Really Living Up to Expectations?

Social Media

It’s time to generate revenue. Do you know where your social media is contributing?

Unless you can provide an unequivocal “yes” and the figures to prove it, keep reading.

Nichole Kelly, President of SME Digital, a digital marketing agency, and Chris Baggott, Chairman and Cofounder, Compendium, a content marketing software company, have helped hundreds of clients move from counting “likes” and “shares” to counting what executives care about: sales volume, revenue and cost. They reveal their top tips to help you do the same.

Focus on metrics beyond “likes” and “fans”

“Not that those are unimportant,” Baggott counters. “But they’re not the most important metrics – they’re this mythical ‘engagement’ that used to be called ‘brand awareness’ in the magazine and television advertising industry.”

Kelly advises to begin with cost.

“We know how much we’re spending on consultants or content development,” she explains. “So, in other areas of marketing, you measure cost per impression – how many people the message reached – which basically rolls up all of the retweets, comments, clicks and fans.”

From there, look at:

• How many people engaged
  “Honestly, it’s almost unfair to compare social media engagement to other channels,” Kelly confesses. “Unlike online advertising or PR, or even TV and radio, [there are] over 500 forms of engagement we’ve tracked through the social channel. [There are] far more opportunities to engage that don’t exist in any other channel.”

• How many people converted
  “But don’t expect them to convert as fast as other leads, because you’re catching them much earlier in the buying process,” warns Kelly. Here’s the good news: When they do finally convert, they do so at a much higher rate.

• How often those converted customers recommend you
  “If they’re likely to recommend you, they’re worth far more than your average customers,” she notes, and points to a whitepaper: “NetPromoter Economics: The Impact of Word of Mouth,” which reveals that customers who recommend you are worth 100% more than those who don’t.

Track your prospects’ activities throughout the marketing and sales funnels

“Marketing used to be like bowling, you run it down the channel and boom! You hit your target,” Baggott says. “Today, it’s more like a pinball machine. The customer is that little silver ball and it’s rolling all over the place – bang, bang, bang – and you have to be sure your message and opportunities to convert are everywhere that customer might show up.”

Share Links

But this makes tracking results significantly more complex. This is why Baggott advises that every social media post links back to a landing page. He believes blogs are ideal for this purpose if they provide relevant content – content that will help the customer whether they buy from you or not.  Combine relevant content and a strong call-to-action at the end of the blog post, and he insists you will see results.

“When we do this, we see conversion rates that exceed 20%,” he points out. “In contrast, the average website has a conversion rate of 1.6%.

“When you have a 20% clickthrough rate on your blog, you’re making a lot of people very, very happy, and that’s really easy to measure.”

Customize Links

Kelly advises using Custom URL Parameters through Google Analytics, a free service, to track how customers came to that landing page. As its name implies, it allows you to create a customized URL that tracks:

• Source – For instance, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Medium – Content type, such as a blog post, so you can measure what type of content is working best
• Campaign – e.g., the name of the post, so you know what information is attracting the most customers

Kelly combines this service with marketing automation software that allows her to record the path customers took to conversion.

“Social media is like the John Stockton of Marketing: It’s the almighty assist to the sale,” she explains. “We’re able to note that the person came to our website 10 times before actually converting, and the 10 things that brought them to our website.

“The sales cycle in most B2B companies is 90 days to two years, and you have to consider all of the marketing that goes on in between there. If you don’t understand every campaign or every program that someone responded to, you really don’t have an accurate cost per lead and cost per customer,” continues Kelly. “Many times, companies only measure that last point of interaction.”

“You have to measure the most important thing and that’s not likes, that’s leads,” adds Baggott. “After all, 90% of all marketing dollars today are being spent on acquisition. Know how to measure your social media effort so you know you’re spending them right.”

Want to learn more? Catch Baggott and Kelly at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando, August 27–30, find out the details here: MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012.

Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012

Webinar Replay: How to Integrate Social Media/SEO to Drive More Leads and Increase Marketing ROI

30 Minute Marketer: How to Take an ROI-Based Approach to Social Marketing

MarketingSherpa 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report

Social Media

Do you think social media is better for researching prospects than for attaining face-to-face meetings where deals are won and contracts are signed?

If so, think again, and pay attention to the experience of Gari Johnson, Vice President Australia & New Zealand, IntraLinks.

If you hear about a merger, acquisition or IPO in the news, chances are IntraLinks was involved. It provides secure software-as-a-service virtual data rooms that allow collaboration with sensitive information between global banks, law firms and thousands of the world’s major corporations.

In this high-tech world, social media has revealed itself to be a lead generation goldmine. In just four months, it has helped IntraLinks achieve:

• Deeper brand penetration into its marketplace
• A 50% connection rate with potential customers on LinkedIn
• Twice as many sales-ready leads as any other lead generation channel

All it needed was the right strategy.

Setting direction

In February, Johnson enlisted the help of a B2B social media lead generation agency, to develop a lead generation campaign on LinkedIn. Three steps kicked off the process:

1. The team clarified the IntraLinks value proposition, which focused on virtual data rooms and their ability to remove risk in time-critical, strategic transactions and enable secure collaboration between multiple parties.

2. The team identified “Social Sellers,” the IntraLinks sales specialists who would be responsible for connecting with potential customers through LinkedIn, and who would promote the company’s value proposition via their personal brands.

3. Finally, they identified senior corporate executives, investment bankers and lawyers in Australia who would be most interested in that value proposition. The Social Sellers used LinkedIn’s search functions to target prospects by:
   • Role
   • Company name
   • Industry
   • And other relevant targeting criteria

Once the list of prospects was created, IntraLinks Social Sellers began sending each of these prospects an invitation to connect.

“We were able to segment the marketplace in a very targeted way,” says Johnson. “The quality of prospects we were able to reach was superior in both marketing relevance and seniority compared to previous approaches, such as direct mail or telemarketing.”

Using this approach, the IntraLinks Social Sellers were able to connect with multiple people in the same organization, creating more opportunities to engage and influence.

Changing the paradigm

“Typically, you meet someone and only then connect on LinkedIn. We reversed the process, so our invitations to connect had to be personalized, relevant and focused on achieving the connection, not the sale,” says Johnson.

Johnson admits about half of the people they contacted did not respond to their invitations.

“But a 50% connection rate is still higher than anything we had imagined. B2B has always been a numbers game, so achieving that connection rate meant hundreds of valuable connections,” he points out.

Resist the urge to sell

In the spirit of good lead nurturing, it became all about the prospect once he or she was engaged, and not the sales team’s quotas.

This required a change in the sales professionals’ mindsets.

“It’s very tempting, once you find a prospect, to approach them and ask for that meeting, but that could be disastrous,” warns Tom Skotidas, founder of the agency IntraLinks used.

Instead, he advises companies to:

• Understand exactly who your prospects are, and what insights and information they need to do their jobs better
• Identify and package the content that satisfies these needs
• Identify the sales specialists within the organization who can distribute this content and engage with potential customers

“In essence, each Social Seller becomes a content distribution channel for Marketing, delivering key insights while also building their personal brand as subject matter experts and, by extension, their company brand,” Skotidas explains.

“Over time, prospects begin to see the Social Seller as an industry expert,” says Skotidas. “They begin to feel like this is a person they might want to meet someday and learn from. The process builds trust; instead of selling to prospects, the sales professional is adding incremental value on a consistent basis.”

Building that trust takes time. Skotidas says there is an incubation period before sales professionals can even think about taking the relationship to the next level.

“It was a little painful for us to figure out how to realign our sales professionals’ approach,” Johnson admits. “They are salespeople, let’s not pretend they’re not, and they are going to try to sell. It’s a matter of educating them – helping them focus on the longer-term outcomes and guiding them through the process to get there.”

Enlist the marketing division

Not surprisingly, Johnson’s chief challenge was providing the relevant content that sales professionals could use to drive conversations with their new LinkedIn connections. The team curated content like whitepapers, articles and industry reports.

“If you want a surefire methodology that brings Sales and Marketing together, this is it,” he laughs. “I’ve been in B2B marketing my whole life, and I’ve never seen Sales and Marketing depend on each other so much.”

Marketing sourced and packaged content to ensure it was legally compliant, brand-compliant and channel-compliant. Sales ensured it was relevant to the needs of their specific LinkedIn connections. After all, distributing the wrong content on social media could be embarrassing at best and disastrous at worst.
“Sales and Marketing really began to understand the value that each team was bringing to the process,” says Johnson. “Not only did social selling help us build trust between us and our prospects, it built trust between Sales and Marketing.”

The team was quick to point out two details about content development:

• It is not a once-and-done deal

“You can’t go out and look for a whole bunch of content and say, ‘Okay, let’s kick off the project,’” says Johnson. “It’s evolutionary; you have to pay attention to what your network is saying, what they are interested in, and provide content to address that. You have to be invested for the long haul and continuously refine what you’re sharing to be more in tune with their needs and interests.”

Fortunately, figuring out the most attractive content is as simple as observing which posts attract the most comments or likes.

“It’s a good way to identify the issues that are important to segments of your market,” Skotidas notes.

• It requires regular feeding and attention

“You have to provide relevant content regularly. This is what will give insights to your prospect and isn’t self-promoting. Companies produce plenty of the self-promotional stuff – that’s advertising, not content,” explains Skotidas. “I’m referring to content that benefits the industry and the prospects as they consume it. That’s the kind of content most B2B companies don’t produce often – maybe once a month or once a quarter.”

To keep your content stream flowing, Skotidas advises subscribing to newsletters, RSS feeds, YouTube channels, iTunes and Google Alerts.

“There are dozens of sources of content,” he says, “Use keywords to narrow the focus of what comes through the funnel.”

Interestingly enough, some of IntraLinks’ fresh LinkedIn connections ultimately turned out to be content sources. They responded with their own compelling articles and reports, and contributed to the campaign.

“It truly was a sharing of best practices,” says Johnson.

The Payoff: Real-world meetings

Once a minimum period of time and status updates had taken place, IntraLinks Social Sellers leveraged the trust they had built over time by getting in touch with their connections and requesting a meeting.

“We acknowledged our LinkedIn connection, and expressed our interest in meeting and discussing our value proposition,” says Johnson. “Our Social Sellers made it clear who they were, and that they wanted to share information and have a real-life conversation about best practices.”

Even when the person was not the decision maker, he would often direct the Social Sellers to others whom he considered a better fit for the discussion.

“They’d thank us and say, ‘I’m not the right guy, here’s the name and phone number of the best person you should be talking to,’” says Johnson. “So the LinkedIn community actually looked after us and pointed us in the right direction. I don’t mean to sound trite, but it was a very social experience.”

The results

In just over three months, the LinkedIn strategy has produced twice the number of face-to-face meetings of any other lead generation channel given the timeframes and number of contacts.

“Anyone who has lived and died by sales targets knows that in the end you have to generate that meeting with stakeholders and sign that contract,” says Skotidas. “With the right approach and engaged sales teams, social media allows you to take that conversation all the way there.”

Johnson admits the outcomes surprised him.

“We were willing to test this because we thought there was opportunity there,” says Johnson. “We went in assuming we would see some kind of positive result, but we certainly weren’t expecting to achieve so many meetings and to develop so many valuable touch points that have lead to active sales engagements.”

Sources:

IntraLinks

Skotidas– B2B social media lead generation agency used by IntraLinks

Related Resources:

B2B Lead Generation: 6 social media tactics from 7 experts

B2B Marketing: 7 mobile and social media tactics

B2B Social Marketing: 4 ways to build one-to-one relationships with social influencers

B2B Marketing: A discussion about integrating mobile, email and social

Social Media Marketing: 9 tactics for B2B social channel advertising

Lessons from a B2B Summit Coach: Five Steps to Cut through the Noise, Turn off the Hype and Create a B2B Social Media Program that Works

Social Media

In his most recent post, Dave Green pointed out how marketers invest most of their budget on trade shows even though it ranks fourth in effectiveness. He went on to explain how to get a better return on your trade-show investment through lead scoring.

Now I’m going to share nine tactics that will drive those lead scores – and your ROI – even higher:

Do thorough research. Find out which attendees fit your Universal Lead Definition. If you have access to the registration list, analyze it. Look up registrants on LinkedIn. Develop a list of targets you want to seek out during the event. Research the sponsors, too. They should all be on the event website. There may be ways to join forces with them to reach your audience.

Leverage social media before, during and after the event. Connect with attendees and build your profile before the event through your blog and updates on Twitter and LinkedIn. Tweet relevant content during the event. Invite customer feedback afterward. There’s so much more than can be addressed in this post, so I advise looking online for more great ideas.

Creatively partner with event organizers. If you’re holding an educational or social event, brainstorm with them to see how they can help you attract more and better attendees. This could be everything from sending pre-event emails to including information in registration packages. Negotiate support before signing contracts to minimize costs and maximize opportunity.

Get involved with the event. Don’t just be a statue at a booth. Try to attend a few sessions, switch off with your team members to sit with attendees at lunch and engage on a personal level. It will help you build relationships and you will be able to strike up more relevant conversations if you just sat through the same keynote. Best of all, the conference will be more fun and you’ll learn a lot more.

Provide value, not trinkets. People attend events to gain knowledge and share it with their teams. Time is always tight as they try to take care of work back at the office while absorbing as much information as they can. That’s why you must always think about what’s in it for them to engage with your brand. Provide what they really can use: resources to drive their business to the next level – whether that’s a strategic piece of content, a tool or an opportunity to network with their peers.

Focus only on those who have expressed genuine interest. Trade shows often reward people if they visit as many booths as possible. At too many events, I’ve witnessed sales professionals requiring attendees to sit through a 10-minute presentation to “prove” they’ve visited the booth, when the attendees clearly don’t care about their product.

Are they interested? Take note. At minimum, jot your name and notes about their issues on their business card, and assign one person to collect and enter information into your database for follow up. Include the solution they’re interested in, the issue they’re trying to resolve, other contacts they’ve had with your organization, and any qualitative intel that will help the person following up – such as “launching a new website in Q2” or “unhappy with solution X.”

Promptly and professionally follow up. Before the event even begins, be ready to follow up. Prepare a brief, customizable email template to send out immediately afterward. It can come directly from the sales professional who spoke with the prospect, or it could reference the conversation and any key information you were able to capture. If the prospect doesn’t respond, follow up with a thoughtfully scripted phone call where you position yourself as a resource they can turn to when they are ready to talk. Don’t stalk and don’t be pushy, but do be responsive and close the loop. And be absolutely sure that only one person is doing the follow up. (This is why it’s critical to work from a single database.)

Track and measure the results. After the follow-up emails have been sent and calls have been made, note how many are still in your marketing and sales funnels, and how many deals closed. Monitor this throughout the year to determine whether the trade show is worth investing in the next time.

Do you have additional ideas on how to make the most of your tradeshow investments? I’d love to hear about them. Share them in the comments below.

Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, ROI Measurement, Sales Leads, Social Media

I can’t stress this enough: when it comes to marketing, if we’re not constantly learning, we’re going to find ourselves left behind faster than ever.

Some people say I’m an expert in B2B lead generation because I wrote a book on it, but you know what? I am astonished by what I didn’t know then compared to what I know today. This past year has been especially illuminating thanks to the brilliance of smart marketers who are expanding and perfecting the lead-generation concepts I wrote about years ago.

This year’s B2B Lead Roundtable webinars are testament to that.

In February, Paul Teshima, SVP of Product Management at Eloqua, set the tone for the webinar year. He defined the tenets of the new world of marketing in Revenue Performance Management. “We’ve seen a problem now where, even though marketing is doing a great job of generating leads, sales still cannot handle the volume and they slip away,” explains Paul. “Some of the leading companies today are really focusing on this idea of managing and bringing marketing sales together, in a more effective way, now that they’ve solved some of the tactical problems.”

Paul explains how here: The Future of Marketing: The Evolution from Demand Generation to Revenue Performance Management

In March, Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate Vice President of Global Marketing at ECI Telecom, detailed how she executed an ultra-successful content strategy campaign and how that transformed their entire marketing strategy.

“We had to put ourselves in line with our buyers’ journey so we knew how to engage them at the right level,” she points out. “We had to provide value to our prospects, who have never heard of us before, and position ourselves as a company that understands their marketplace and their business issues – a partner as well as an expert.” Learn more here: How ECI Developed an Entire Content Marketing Program from Concept to Completion and the Surprising Results

In April, John Johnston, eBusiness Marketing Manager for Volvo North America, outlined how he streamlined, integrated and automated lead generation for a marketing program for 20 different heavy construction segments for dealers in 125 countries.

“We took online marketing activities, leveraged their analytics and optimized – measure, take action and repeat. It’s a continuous loop that makes the database and the lead-generation process better and better.”

Watch the webinar to find out how John’s efforts are providing customers and prospects the precise information they need to make a smart purchasing decision, and dealers a much more detailed, useful picture of who they’re selling to. And much of this is happening in real time. Learn more here: How CRM Revolutionized Marketing and Lead Generation at Volvo North America

In May, Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations for MECLABS Leads Group, and I expounded on the powerful combination of excellent data and the human touch to make the best use of sales time and resources.

According to MarketingSherpa, 80% of marketing leads are lost or discarded because even though someone may have provided basic contact information, they may not be ready to talk to a salesperson. Teleprospecting bridges the gap.

Make sure you’re setting a strong foundation for your campaigns with an accurate list. Brandon revealed the outcomes of a breakthrough experiment that tested how higher cost/high quality lead data affected the cost per lead. The results were astounding – the difference between the best- and worst-performing lists was $581 per lead. Learn more here: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads and How One Company Slashed Their Cost Per Lead by More than Half

In June, Sergio Balegno, Director of Research, MarketingSherpa/MECLABS Primary Research Group, shared why inbound marketing – a strategy where the prospects find you as opposed to you finding them – is critical, and how integrating social media and SEO drives it.

“Companies with integrated social media and SEO achieve 60% better conversion rates…Search rankings are driven by relevance, relevance enhances an organization’s credibility, and this credibility helps to drive conversion rates,” says Sergio. “It’s an essential ingredient to a B2B marketing program.”

To prove it, Sergio shared five steps that helped an email marketer pull in 70% more leads and doubled revenue in one year. Learn more here: How to Integrate Social Media and SEO to Drive More Leads and Increase Marketing ROI

In July, Dave Elkington, Chairman and CEO of InsideSales.com, revealed how companies are leaking significant revenue in their sales and marketing funnels – knowledge gained through analyzing two billion communications with 80 million customer profiles. He outlined astonishing facts like 43% of companies don’t even respond to inbound leads! But for those that know how to respond, the opportunities to make the sale grow exponentially – 78% of sales goes to companies that respond first, not to the company with the best or cheapest product.

It’s no wonder that Dave points out that venture capital firms want companies in their portfolios to have inside sales departments. “They’ll recruit, train and transplant inside sales teams into their portfolio companies,” he says. For more data that will show you how to speed leads into your sales pipeline, go here: Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions

Find out how:

• Clarifying value proposition helped one company decrease cost-per-acquisition by 66% and multiplied monthly profit four times over
• Re-engaging clients helped one company attain grow its business by 64%
• To quickly and easily choose the best lists
• To time lead-generation activities to attain the highest possible return on investment of resources
• Closed-loop feedback makes sales professionals worship their marketing department

Find out much more here: Finish 2011 Strong: Six Funnel Focal Points to Maximize Time, Resources and Revenues Part 1 and Part 2

It all came full circle in October, when Jen Doyle, MarketingSherpa Senior Research Manager and Lead Author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, discussed what more than 1,745 marketing organizations had to say about their lead generation efforts in 2011.

“It’s increasingly challenging for marketers to achieve success, and challenges are growing in pertinence year after year,” she explains. “Perceived effectiveness of tactics is declining severely. It’s getting more difficult to achieve the same results from the same marketing activities.”

She points out, however, that may be due to the fact that marketers still aren’t optimizing their funnels:

• 68% haven’t identified their sales or marketing funnels.
• 61% send leads directly to sales.
• 79% haven’t established lead scoring.
• 65% haven’t nurtured leads.

Learn how to make 2012 a better year here: 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report: How Marketers are Transforming Mounting Pressures, Challenges into Revenues.

We are in the process of planning our 2012 webinar year. What would you like to know more about? What information would help you generate more leads? How can we help you stay on top of lead-generation innovations? Leave a comment below.

B2B Telemarketing, Content Marketing, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Thought Leadership

How many emails have you sent prospects and customers this week? How many opened them? How many acted on them?

If you’re like most marketers, the answer too often is, “Not enough.”

It’s a hard fact: people are being inundated with so many sales pitches via email that it’s harder than ever to get prospects to not delete your email, no less take action. It’s no wonder that when marketers are obsessively focused on what’s in it for their prospects to open an email, remarkable things happen – like several million new subscribers.

That’s precisely what Citrix attained through a campaign to grow their subscriber base. Typically, when organizations want to grow their email lists, they do things like coming up with a gimmick, giveaway or contest to convince people to sign up. Instead, Citrix decided to leverage their lists to attain new subscribers. They emailed content their existing subscribers valued so much that they eagerly shared it with their colleagues and Citrix made it easy for them to do so. The subscribers’ colleagues appreciated the emails so much that they decided to subscribe too.

The result: an overall email list increase of several million contacts (35%), “which has greatly increased our media spend efficiency. We are generating demand without having to directly pay for the usual media channels like banner ads, Adwords, etc.” explains Baxter Denney, Manager, Database Marketing at CitrixOnline.

It also resulted in receiving the 2012 Email Marketing Awards’ B2B Best in Show. To read the details of how the Citrix email campaign conclusively proved the value of sharing vs. selling download the free MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2012 Special Report. It features more than 100 pages of the industry’s smartest, most-effective innovations, as well as campaign descriptions, sample emails, extensive results metrics and judges’ analyses.

And if you want to learn even more about the most innovative and effective ways marketers are using email to drive more opportunity and revenue, consider attending the next Email Marketing Summit, Feb. 7 – 10, at Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. To review an agenda go here: 2012 Email Marketing Summit. Receive an extra $500 off registration by entering promotion code 192-ST-1004.

Email Marketing, Social Media

If you’re struggling with managing social media programs in the B2B marketplace, Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe  (pictured at below) has some news for you: Most of your peers are too.

Why is she so certain? As a research manager for MECLABS Conversion Group, Zuzia spent two full days at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit in San Francisco providing one-on-one coaching to some of the nation’s leading B2B marketers. (Read more about who attended here.)  
Here’s what she has to say about her experience.

After my time in San Francisco, I am further convinced
social media is one of the most
challenging channels for B2B marketers to manage. It’s so unpredictable, yet there’s so much pressure surrounding it – everyone feels like they need to be on every social media channel or else. And there’s so many people claiming to be social media experts,  but don’t just blindly follow their advice. You see, I don’t believe anyone can be a true social media guru because there are constantly new ideas, platforms and  methodologies.

In fact, you could make a full-time job out of monitoring the hundreds of social media blogs and attain hundreds of different opinions on what you should be doing with your social media program. It’s no wonder marketers feel overwhelmed. 

So what’s a B2B marketer to do?

•  Know your audience. Where are they gathering online to learn about your product or services? Do they have favorite publications or platforms they turn to for industry information? For instance, an engineer may have a Facebook profile, but is he really on there to learn about the newest technology?

Fact is, you can never know your audience well enough. This was driven home to me when I had the privilege of spending more than an hour in a coaching session with the head of marketing for a European bank. He revealed to me the details of what should have been a highly successful social media campaign targeting a Scandinavian country. His bank invited fans of a super-popular European sport to submit a video depicting their passion for it to the bank’s Facebook page. Winners received prizes like a week’s stay at a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi, meeting a star athlete, cash awards and free gear. They blasted online and national TV advertising everywhere throughout the country. They even had 150,000 page views. But alas, only a handful of people people submitted a video.

He was flummoxed. “What could I have done to make it a success?” he asked me.

There really was nothing he could have done, except understand that his audience was more private than other cultures. Apparently, no matter how passionate they are about a sport, his audience clearly wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of displaying that passion to their entire nation.

• Know what your competitors are doing. Analyze and monitor their social media. Learn from their mistakes and successes. Watch what’s being said, and where, about your company, product or service.
   
• Begin with a blog. Why be on social media if you don’t have anything to say? A blog is the means to provide meaningful information your audience will care about and a vehicle to distribute it to other social media platforms. You don’t need to write all of your own content. You can repurpose relevant content you’ve already created – this could be whitepapers, articles, and news releases. Use one of your public relations professionals or a freelance journalist to interview experts within your organization and write a blog post on their behalf. Use guest bloggers or provide content from a third-party source that’s respected in your field.  
   
• Consistency is critical. Make social media the responsibility of one or two people in the organization to maintain a uniform voice and image across your platforms. However, be sure to encourage as many people as possible within your organization to engage, post comments, promote your posts and spread your message.
   
• Because social media is so unpredictable, test and test some more. Is your audience paying attention and what are they paying attention to? Social media was created so people could engage and interact online, so it’s easy to ask and respond to questions, post polls, and conduct surveys. Don’t miss out on this unprecedented opportunity to identify what your audiences wants to see, read and receive.  

Again, developing, managing and monitoring social media is the bane of too many B2B marketers’ professional lives. It doesn’t have to be.  Don’t be overwhelmed by the newest advice from a social media guru.  Be strategic and selective.

What challenges have you faced launching B2B social media campaigns? How did you handle them? We’d love to know. And, if you want to learn more about how to make social media drive real opportunity for your organization, I strongly recommend you subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Blog which reports the latest from real-world marketers on what works – and what doesn’t – in social media, email marketing, content strategy and more.

Content Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Weblogs

If you want leads to convert into sales faster, be sure to check out the webinar replay below. Sergio Balegno, Director of Research, MarketingSherpa/MECLABS Primary Research Group, explains how the strategic integration of SEO and social marketing is helping B2B marketers remarkably accelerate lead capture and conversion.

Through feedback from thousands of in-the-trenches B2B marketers, including hundreds of CMOs, Sergio reveals:

• Why social media is critical to improving your search rankings, engaging prospects and making them eager to buy.
• What inbound marketing is and isn’t, and why social media and SEO integration is key to a successful inbound-marketing strategy.
• What to do – and what not to do – when developing a social marketing strategy.
• How to measure the value of your social media investment in a way that impresses skeptics in the C-suite.
• A step-by-step explanation of how one B2B company’s inbound marketing strategy drove 70 percent more leads and doubled revenue per account in merely one year.

View the replay below, and if you want more details about how marketers are successfully leveraging and measuring social marketing, be sure to check out MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report.

View and download slides via SlideShare.

Here’s a summary with timestamps to help you pinpoint key takeaways:

4:41 – Companies with integrated search media and SEO achieve 60 percent better conversion rates. Sergio explains that when prospects find information that’s relevant to them during a search they feel more engaged with the organization presenting it, which drives conversion.

5:52 – Social media and SEO integration is a B2B-marketing essential. Prospects aren’t only searching the web for information; they’re searching for videos, blogs and real-time discussion. Search engine algorithms are tied to this younger, more relevant content.

7:33 – Sergio defines inbound marketing for the 11 percent of organizations who don’t know what it is. Inbound marketing is a strategy where prospects find you; they come knocking on your door, as opposed to you looking for them. This is executed through earned media like Google searches and content sharing, as opposed to paid advertising on social sites like LinkedIn.

8:45 – Case study of how Delivra, an email-marketing services provide, developed an inbound strategy that pulled in 70 percent more leads and doubled revenue in one year. Sergio outlines the five steps that helped Delivra overcome the problem of a limited outbound marketing budget combined with “list fatigue” that happens when lists are used over and over again.
Read more…

ROI Measurement, Social Media, Webinar Replay