Leveraging Social Media For B2B Demand Generation
Social media marketing should be approached in two ways: as an additional channel to engage your existing target market and customers, and as a way to reach potential prospects that prefer to communicate and consume content through social applications. But organizations that approach social media as merely another channel to get leads will be quickly disappointed. Based on the best practices we’ve gathered from organizations leveraging social media is that while it can be used for demand creation, this assumes a high level of experience using social applications from a customer engagement and awareness perspective.
Social media in concert with more traditional tactics can play an effective role throughout the demand creation waterfall, not just at the top of the funnel to drive responses. For example, selecting key concepts typically distributed in whitepapers and using them as the basis of a podcast series that targets later buying cycle stages can provide subject matter expertise that can be subscribed and linked to. And let's not ignore the internal use of social media for sales enablement.
Social media marketing has evolved to the point where it should be part of every B2B marketers toolkit, but too often marketers want to run before they can walk. Without taking the time and resources to develop a social media presence and build up a network that has any interest in what you have to say, your links and postings to content and events will be ignored.
For more insights into the ways that best-practice B2B organizations are driving demand with social media, including the presentation a sample social media marketing program, please join our webcast on this topic on December 16 at 11:30 am EST.
Click here to register for this webcast.