Make social work for demand generation

It’s one thing to create a Facebook page or buy ads on Twitter. But smart marketers know lead generation requires more than scheduling tweets and joining LinkedIn groups.

Demand generation, after all, is about translating your social trust equity and thought leadership cache into genuine interest in your products or services. Social media can be an effective way to accomplish that goal. But you can’t expect to just plug into a couple of apps and see success. You need a roadmap.

The following steps provide a practical framework for using social channels to drive demand.

Start with awareness

Before you can engage potential buyers, you need to grab their attention. Fortunately, social media provides cost effective ways to extend the reach of your marketing; but cutting through all the noise requires skill.

First, find out what your target customers are talking about on the social web, who the key influencers are, and where these conversations are taking place. There’s little value in having a huge presence on a social channel if your market isn’t tuned in.

Similarly, there’s no point in speaking up if you don’t have something to say. Buyers are discovering content through social, not just search. Produce the kind of content that your key audience will want to share, paying particular attention to the style and formats that are more likely to get passed around. Adding components like streaming Twitter lists, YouTube videos and Facebook comments to your landing pages and microsites can add social stickiness to your content.

Engage your leads

Once you’ve taken stock of what your buyers are saying and where they’re saying it, your next step is to engage. There are several ways to do this, ranging from the simple to the sophisticated.

Consider joining Twitter chats or LinkedIn groups centered on the topics impacting your industry. Place your content on platforms like Facebook and Google+. But do it in a way that starts a conversation rather than just broadcasting a message. For instance, ask a thoughtful question instead of shouting, ‘Look at this!’

Make it easy to share your marketing by embedding social sharing tools so your prospects and customers can serve as brand ambassadors, helping introduce your messages to new contacts. The connection between your marketing – such as landing pages, microsites and articles – and the buyer’s social network should be seamless.

It’s important to not only attract leads, but to uniquely engage the people who influence their buying decisions. Tools like Klout and PeerIndex can help you discover the key influencers in your space, or the people your leads have identified as trusted sources. The endorsement from these influencers can result in faster conversions.

Enrich your data

If you’re successfully converting leads from the social web, you’ll want to take advantage of the rich data social networks provide. Social provides a unique combination of both stated preferences and explicit behavior. That combo is like gold for sales and prospecting.

You can then capture additional data by analysing which social channels are driving traffic to your existing marketing assets (i.e. website, landing pages, etc.), and then continue capturing the additional actions those leads take from there.

And tools like social sign-on are catching on. In fact, 21 per cent of best-in-class companies are using it, according to Aberdeen Group.

Not only does social sign-on make it much faster for visitors to complete a form registration, it also gives you permission-based access to social data you can append to your database. This data is particularly helpful for segmentation and lead scoring – and your sales rep will thank you for supplying valuable information before they call on a hot lead. 

Measure, again and again

To repeat success – and build on it – you need to measure over and over. This is the single most important reason to tie social efforts to a central marketing platform. This way you can measure what social channels are driving traffic to individual pages, which campaigns drove the most conversions and where you’ll want to focus your efforts going forward.

Over time, you’ll be able to see how social campaigns stack up against traditional marketing campaigns. New tools and platforms make it possible to close the loop on socially shared campaigns and signed deals. With social data, you can concentrate your time, money and energy on the channels and tactics that are producing real demand.

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