If You Were to Give Your B-to-B Social Media Activities a Grade, What Would it Be?

Come on now, let’s be honest here. You got into social media maybe because you thought it might help your business overall, but maybe you got into it because everyone else was doing it and you didn’t want to be left out.

No matter why you got into it, many B-to-B companies are getting a big F in social media and they can’t figure out why. Social media isn’t a silver bullet, it’s not a stand-alone tactic, it’s something that should be used in conjunction with your other marketing tools.

In order to use social media, you also need to understand how and why to communicate using this media. Traditional feature/benefit, “how great we are” copy won’t work in this arena. Your customers/contractors are looking at ways to solve their problem, not get a sales pitch. They are going to Google it…” How to troubleshoot a specific plumbing problem?” If you want any chance of getting in front of that person, you had better written content and have it tagged properly with the right key words if you want to have a chance of being on the first page of the search results.

I recently read an article by Kipp Bodnar, 10 Reasons Why B2B Companies are Failing with Social Media, that outlines some very important points. Here are some highlights:

  • Lack of content – The more valuable content you have up there, the better your chances of success.
  • Focus on lead generation – Not number of followers or clicks. Leads turn into sales and isn’t that our end game?
  • Get management to buy-in – To do social media right it takes time and talent, and if you can get support from the C suite, you’re paddling upstream.
  • Identify your target audience – If you can’t do this, then how will you be able to find out what their critical issues are?
  • Don’t be boring. Make your communications exciting – Give them “HOLY COW” content.
  • Improve your website – You could be doing everything right in social media, but if where you’re sending them sucks, then you’ve lost all the momentum and credibility you’ve worked so hard to establish.

Learn from your mistakes and go out there and kick some butts!

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How Are You Integrating Email and Social Media?

In today’s market, everyone seems to be focusing on social media as the thing to do. Both social and traditional tactics have a place in your marketing plan. Inbound and outbound marketing must work together to get the most bang for your buck today. Social media or email can’t be isolated tactics, but should be used together.

I recently read an article by Kipp Bodnar in Social Media B2B, 7 Awesome Email and B2B Social Media Integrations that I thought hit the nail right on the head. Here are some highlights:

  • Use social media links in your emails – pretty simple but you’d be surprised how many folks miss this opportunity.
  • Use social media to grow your email list – you have a better chance of getting a lead if you can convince them to sign up, for example, for your monthly newsletter.
  • Test email efforts on social – before sending out a communication to your list, test it on social to see what kind of reaction you’ll get.
  • Use social media for future email content – follow and listen to what the hot issues are on social and craft future messages around those issues.
  • Source leads correctly – use tracking URLs to better understand where your interest is coming from.

Those are some highlights; what are you doing to integrate social into your traditional marketing efforts?

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Building a B-to-B Social Media Lead Generation Program Targeting the Professional Tradesmen

B-to-B marketers, especially those in the manufacturing sector who are targeting the professional tradesmen, are slow to adapt to new things and social media is one of them. I’ve seen it in our business that clients (manufacturers) are aware of social media, but don’t know how to use it to get business. Yes, social isn’t about getting business (short-term), it’s about branding and thought leadership roles, but in the real world and especially in this economic climate, companies are also identifying new potential customers and taking them through the selling cycle to see if they can be converted to a sale. If B2B folks would have a better understanding of how to use social, then it would be easier for them to incorporate it into their other marketing efforts.

I recently read a post by Kipp Bodnar from Social Media B2B, 7 steps to building a B2B social media lead generation pipeline. Kipp outlines ways to identify and take leads through a system just like any other lead. Here are some highlights from his post:

  • Understanding online analytics – You need to understand what the data is so you know what to do with it. There are several tools available, both free and paid. Google Analytics is probably the most popular free one. But it’s important to have analytics across social platforms and a simple data collection tool like Bit.ly would work just fine for Twitter and the built-in Facebook Fan pages.
  • Develop a strategy – I’ve said over and over that content is king. So you need to develop a strategy to communicate the type of information your target audience wants and then overlap its content distribution platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogs and Forums.
  • Build a mechanism to gather leads – What good is it to generate leads if there is no place to identify next steps? What do they want—literature, demo, a salesman to follow-up?
  • Integrate leads into a CRM system – Leads don’t matter if you don’t get the right info to the right person. There are several out there and the one we use is called Ultimate Lead Systems. It can track leads by source, type of product or service they are interested in, and track any kind of correspondence you have. It also helps you monitor your sales forces activities as it relates to new business.
  • Set up a social sales follow-up program – You need to find where a potential lead is in the selling cycle and then nurture them down the sales funnel. I wrote a post, Where do your prospects fall in the sales cycle, that will shed more light on the different stages.

A social media lead generation program isn’t really different from a traditional one other than the issue of speed. Responses can be immediate and you need to be able to support them appropriately.

These, by no means, are all the steps. What are ways you’re dealing with this issue?

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