Help Grow B2B Demand Generation Using Social Media

“Your best strategy is to reverse engineer your social media marketing plan to your business goals. You have finite time to reach the right prospects, so make sure you’re targeting the communities where your customers are most likely to engage.”

“As a B2B company, LinkedIn is a must. If you find that you want more social activity, give the others a try.”

“Be sure that you are tracking your results so that you can identify if you are getting the best return for the time that you are investing.” – Daniel Vaczi

See on Scoop.it – Social Media B2B Marketing

Ken Jondahl‘s insight:

I like Daniel’s advice to start with LinkedIn. Her 2nd choice of Facebook surprises me, pushing twitter to 3rd place in the B2B social choices.

She discusses how social media can help bridge the gab between Marketing conversations and the needs of decision makers during the buy-sell cycle. It would have been great to have some real live examples of “how to do this” with B2B products and services.

The various capabilities are covered around the various B2B uses on the social platforms from LinkedIn to Pinterest in the 6th spot. How you will use these in your company are not covered in this article.

For further ideas around LinkedIn, here are a few more articles.

Improve company pages: http://sco.lt/5N2QtN

Prospecting via LinkedIn: http://sco.lt/6eZG2j

Targeting Decision Makers: http://sco.lt/5YFaWv

Regardless which B2B social platforms are chosen to support your marketing efforts. Start small, test, and revise. Social tools are abundant and inexpensive, the cost is in the time to manage. And don’t just follow the “social herd”, go where your customers hang out and discuss issues around similiar products and services to those you promote.

A general audience survey can be helpful in providing guidance and discovering your audience on social media channels.

“To paraphrase a line from the funny Tim Washer, all B2B prospects and customers are people, so their general internet usage is something to consider.”

“Let’s look at some of the survey results with a bit of thought around each stat and how it applies to a B2B audience.” – Jeffrey L. Cohen

“Read full article on: socialmediab2b.com

See on Scoop.it – Social Media B2B Marketing

Ken Jondahl‘s insight:

The reason I’ve scooped this page is to offer caution to this approach. Granted you can find huge %’s of people in numerous on line social sites.

Yet this is a top down approach and can easily lead to dead ends.

Try a bottoms up approach to confirm any top down observations.

1st – Are any of your existing “good” customers represented on any particular social sites.

2nd – Are they active in a business way on any of the social sites.

3rd – Is there a new type of customer profile you are after. If so, check off #1 and #2 for a generic profile by specific industry, market, and job titles.

NOTE: There are times it makes sense to go after a younger crowd for long term branding awareness and social marketing is an approach. However, this only works for very specific markets and/or product lines. Such as going after all college students because your products sweet spot is Grad students.