As social media continues to mature, and as the economy continues to falter, interest is growing rapidly among businesses in how to leverage social media for lead generation. For the month of January, MotiveLab is going to focus on lead generation issues on this blog, and explore some of the challenges, techniques and technologies that successful marketers are using to create demand and drive qualified leads into the pipeline.
As a kick-off post, let's look at some of the most basic aspects of understanding lead generation in the context of social media.
The Three C's: Content, Conversation and Community
I'm sure you already know this by know, but it still bears repeating: social media signifies a shift in marketing that is no longer driven by your carefully crafted and broadcast message. It's about content, conversation and community. It's not about blasting messages relentlessly through a series of channels to gather your 1.5% response. It's about listening to the conversation taking place in your market community and engaging. Your market is now a networked community of customers, and technology has amplified the conversation to the point where people see more value in learning about your product from others like themselves than from your marketing campaigns. That means instead of blasting the market with pick-up lines, you need to listen to, engage and catalyze your customer community. If you do it well, your market will spread your message for you.
Find Your Hot Spots
The best place to begin is by finding out where your customer community is already gathering to talk about your market, and who is influencing the conversation. You can begin the process online by using some of the many new tools focused on searching through social content. You can search for real time conversations on Twitter. You can search for keyword concepts related to your market on some of the many social bookmarking sites and indexes, like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or AllTop . You can search for news items related to your market that were highly rated by Web users at Reddit, Digg or Sphere. And when you're ready to start seriously tracking the flow of conversation and the impact of key influencers, you can leverage Google Alerts, or one of the growing number of social media monitoring tools like Radian6 and Techrigy, or the system we use, SocialRep.
Listen Before You Launch
The point of all these tools is to find and track the influential hotspots where market conversations are percolating. Once you know who's driving the conversation and where, you can start to participate more effectively by listening first. What are people talking about? What issues are driving the discussion? If you have something meaningful to say, then jump in. But get engaged as an interested participant, not as a product shill. Imagine yourself being at a dinner party with friends. How would you feel about a salesman butting into your conversation to promote a product, or defend his brand against something you said, and then walking away to butt into the next group?
Design Your Campaign to Fit Your Community
Once your team is engaged with one or more of your market communities, lead-generation programs can be a lot more focused. You'll have a much better sense of which community hot spots are attracting traffic and driving conversations. A lead-gen campaign for a bike company at Facebook, for example, might focus on leveraging a big personality like Lance Armstrong to attract friends and drive links. A campaign at Mountain Bike Review Forum, with 60,000 dedicated cyclists, would be more product-focused, maybe organizing a demo ride. The program you put together should be designed to fit the community, and you'll only know how to do that well if you're engaged.
With any lead-generation campaign that engages an existing community, it's also important to connect with the facilitators of that community before you do any serious program. You should understand and respect any policies they might have about commercial campaigns on their networks. Some communities will have additional opportunities for sponsorship, or co-branded content, which might help you create a more effective campaign. If you're just interested in testing the waters to see how a community-particularly a large community-might pull in a broader campaign, you can often buy banner ads or adword campaigns that focus on particular sites so you can test the interest in program concepts.
Offer Opportunities for More Conversation
Finally, there's always the potential to use community development as a lead-generation program, rather than tapping into an existing community.
Starbucks, for example, has launched a number of word-of-mouth campaigns, including their "Let's Meet At Starbucks: Invite a Friend" campaign, while Dell has pushed a lot of product through dedicated product profiles on Twitter, used to announce hot deals. Initiatives like this make the campaign offer a socializing opportunity, and the possibilities are endless, for both retail and B2B companies.
Once you are oriented to your market community, campaign execution will look surprisingly familiar. It's still important as ever to have a compelling offer, a clear message and to test everything you can to continually improve effectiveness. The difference today is that you need to be much more transparent, honest and accountable in the ways you engage your market.
Prospects aren't just individual "targets" to pick off like sitting ducks.
They're members of a community where word travels fast.
January 20, 2009
How to Use Social Media for Lead Generation
I’ve been blogging for over five years. When I started, there wasn’t a business case on the ROI of blogging, nor was there a lot written on B2B lead generation. I started blogging because I wanted to share with everyone what I thought were useful B2B lead generation ideas, tips, and resources – material that I was already freely giving to my clients.
I have to say, my expectations were pretty low. I thought maybe I’d attract a few new clients, but I didn’t know it would generate so many leads, or develop into a book deal with a major publisher – who came to me, by the way. Blogging became a way to help build my company’s reputation, and your reputation helps people make conclusions about your brand.
Still not convinced that you should delve into social media? Maybe you think there’s no way to measure social media’s success. Here’s a case study that MarketingSherpa released earlier this month that follows one company through its social media adventure. In the end, the team’s analysis showed a dramatic correlation between the use of social media channels and the growth of the company’s Web traffic and leads. They showed a 155% increase in unique Web visitors and they also generated more links on non-brand search terms that helped boost their search engine results positions.
MarketingSherpa Members can view the case study at length. Here’s a look at the 5 steps they took:
1. Created a blog to start and join online conversations
Blogging and conversating brings in that human touch that I am forever
pushing. It can seem like a daunting project, but this company set up
an online monitoring system that helped them finetune their blog. They
scanned the Web, the blogosphere, online fourms, and communities to
find conversations relevant to their industry and their technical
audience. An RSS feed gave the team something to review each morning. They used several scanning tools including TweetScan for Twitter posts, Google Alerts for industry terms, and Boardtracker.com to monitor technology forums and message boards.
When the scanning tools found a relevant conversation, such as a blog post, a team member would join that conversation and point readers to content on the same topic at the company website. The team also used their blog to write stories on subjects that had the potential to go viral. Those stories generated links from other industry blogs and articles in major trade publications.
2. Established a Twitter account
The company used the account to supplement their blog. As I’ve written before, using social media tools like Twitter for lead generation, I have found Twitter to be helpful in this way.The company in the Case Study used tweets to post notices of new blogs and webinars, trivia questions, and informal focus group questions. An example: They conducted a poll of Twitter followers about potential names for the company newsletter.
3. Created a LinkedIn group
The group also started a Facebook account, but found that the LinkedIn
group began attracting members with the right professional backgrounds.
The team established the group as a forum to discuss issues not related
to the company or its products but issues related to network test
equipment and security. Group members took the lead in starting
conversations themselves, but the company acted as host, joining
discussions when they had something to add in order to keep members
engaged.
4. Modified press release strategy for blogger coverage
The team revamped its press release strategy to encourage more online coverage for the company. This is what they did:
- Released at least one new press release each week, and kept them short with links to sections of the company’s website.
- Shifted release time from 8 a.m. EST to late morning/early afternoon to accommodate West Coast bloggers.
- Published press releases using a service called PitchEngine, and posted to social media channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
5. Promoted social media channels on company website and in email signatures
Under a “join us” headline, link visitors to your Facebook or LinkedIn groups. Employees’ email signatures should include links to all accounts as well.
6. Measured growth of social media and Web traffic
The company made sure to track metrics to determine the growth of their various social media channels, such as unique blog page views, Twitter followers, and LinkedIn members. They also tracked a series of marketing metrics such as unique website visitors, traffic generated by SEO, leads, leads by source (inbound Web, email, trade shows, seminars, etc.), and marketing-influenced pipeline activity, by source. They compared metrics to look for correlations between activity in social media outlets and an increase in leads and sales pipeline activity.
Maybe you have some tips or other reading material suggestions for marketers who are interested in using social media to jumpstart their lead generation process. I’d love for you to pass those along.
January 19, 2009
Survey Says… Marketers Focus on Content in 2009
When opportunities start drying up, businesses focus their marketing efforts on creating valuable content. This was recently affirmed in a new study by Junta42. And, it turns out white papers are still an important marketing tool.
The study conducted last month found the following:
“Even in tough economic times, money is still flowing into content marketing initiatives… More than half (56%) of marketing- and publishing-decision makers plan to increase their content marketing spending for 2009 (31% increase significantly, 25% increase slightly). Only 13% plan on decreasing their content marketing spending (9% decrease slightly, 4% decrease significantly)”
Here’s the breakdown of the top content types marketers will invest in this year:
- Social media (other than blogs) (68%)
- Enewsletters/email (60%)
- Blogs (56%)
- Case studies (55%),
- Online video (51%)
- White papers (46%)
- Microsites (43%)
I asked study author Joe Pulizzi what he thought about why white papers were going to be used by so many marketers in 2009.
“When buyers see or hear ‘white paper’ they get the impression that it will contain valuable, relevant and compelling information and not ’sales speak.’That’s what all decision makers want today - information that will help them do their jobs better in some way. White papers continue to be an excellent way businesses can reach their customers and prospects with a targeted, relevant message.
Even though more and more communications tactics are available to buyers - they still love white papers. Marketers are keenly aware of this, which is why they continue to focus their time with these bite-sized content packages. Smart organizations are packaging and integrating white papers into their sales cycle, which make them even more powerful than just one-off conversion pieces.”
Do these study results match your plans for 2009?
Managing Upward – Tips on Handling a Demanding Boss
“My boss is driving me nuts” vented Richard, a director at a large software company and client of ours. “He’s constantly changing his mind on what my team’s priorities should be.” I personally heard three such executives in December exasperated that they were being asked to get more done with less while also being asked to handle frequent changes in direction and priority. Here are three recommendations I passed along to them. More are coming in additional parts to this blog entry. I’d love to hear your inputs as well.
Commit to goals and deliverables not priorities
The economy is causing many executives to drive their teams harder to produce results. With competitors aggressively chasing after fewer bucks there’s more pressure than ever for the businesses to change sales/marketing approaches and even to tune product strategy. That leaves department heads with the impossible task of having to deliver on prior commitments while accommodating requests from above on new initiatives. The only way out is to talk goals and deliverables not priorities. Here’s an example:
| Priority | Goals and Deliverables |
|---|---|
| More leads for sales | 1,500 prospect inquiries by March 1, 2009; 500 qualified leads with a lead score of at least 70 points by April 1, 2009. |
| Launch new product XYZ | Launch criteria met February 1, 2009; $3M incremental revenue within one quarter of launching product XYZ |
| Update the website | Complete launch of new design, messaging, and content for the 10 most critical pages by March 1, 2009; achieve 20k page views per month on updated pages |
What if you only got agreement on the priorities and not the specific goals and deliverables? It would be very easy for the boss to change priorities or add new priorities because there’s not an obvious tie to the business in terms of outcomes. So instead, what if the Marketing VP were to “contract” to the goals and deliverables” above?
Naturally the Marketing VP can’t control all the elements in these deliverables but it will help tremendously if you could align peer VPs along concrete goals and deliverables. It’s in your interest to align your peers because your success will depend on it and your boss will value that far more highly than reacting to priorities du jour.
Talk tradeoffs not task lists
So going back to Richard’s predicament on handling changing priorities, a short list of deliverables helped him handle new requests by describing the impact on prior commitments. He asked his boss “So would you say that launching product XYZ by February 1 is worth slipping the website project by a month?” His boss didn’t like the parental technique of laying down options but understood better the implication of his requests. Richard now has a “plan of record” with concrete deliverables laid out for the next year. Anytime a significant new request comes along, he can now have a rational discussion on trade-offs to the current plan. He's in a much better position to negotiate a win/win.
Communicate results not activities
My friend, Walt Thinfin, CIO of Visioneer, said that he is like Richard in many ways because his boss, the CEO, will place new demands on him while expecting results from prior commitments. He’s practically being asked weekly what he’s done for the business lately. Walt’s solution is communicating results often. No one is ever remembered for having executed their priority list. Rather, executives are seen as heroes for having achieved specific goals and deliverables. Go back to the table above and ask yourself which ones would have a bigger affect on a performance review, bonus plan, or even just recognition among the executives? The key then is to keep your boss apprised of bi-weekly on progress on these goals and deliverables.
Please submit your comments and thoughts on how to handle a tough boss. Your peers will really appreciate your inputs.