Use Social Media for Consideration in B2B Marketing
Written by Paul Dunay on June 25, 2008 – 5:54 pm -
B2B marketers with highly complex products and services have been given a gift in the last few years in the form of Social Media.
In my opinion, Social Media doesn’t easily equate to Lead Generation for the complex sale. For example a prospect reading a blog entry doesn’t mean they want to buy anything, but it does mean they have engaged with your brand. In fact the stats show that certain forms of Social Media even out perform more traditional ones when it comes to awareness and recall. For example, unaided awareness from podcasts were 68%, compared with 21% for streaming video and 10% for television. Now that’s great recall!
B2B marketers need to set aside collecting metrics like page views, clicks, conversion rates and start nurturing individual leads by using the gift of social media they were given. Social Media is great for consideration so why not use it that way? Don’t measure your teams on page views generated from a campaign. Measure them on how engaged they can get your leads with your content and turn them into sales.
Sales generated from your lead nurturing program are the only real measure of engagement with your campaigns!
Tags: B2B, Social Media
Posted in marketing 2.0, marketing strategy |
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July 3rd, 2008 at 11:46 am
Good post, Paul. In regards to your commment about metrics and measurement, most organizations engaging in community building efforts (whether for lead gen, brand enhancement, etc.) have so far failed to change the way they define and measure their KPIs. While it is possible to measure lead gen via social tactics (again, if implemented correctly from the beginning of the project, including baselining the relevant KPIs prior to activating the tactics), there is both a technical and business process change that needs to occur. Otherwise, companies will continue to bemoan the lack of measurability with social media. The gap isn’t in the media, it’s due to the fact that companies are still clinging to Web 1.0 approaches to measurement.