B2B Social Media - it’s all about the leads and here’s how to measure them

I recently decided it was time to expand my social media expertise. I tried the usual approach of webinars and seminars. A lot of the information was the same stuff I had heard before. It was all about the importance of social media and techniques for generating and measuring engagement. Engagement is great, but to really get my clients excited about social media, I need to generate leads and sales.

I reached out to some other local professionals managing social media for businesses in Denver. Again, I asked the million-dollar question, “How do you link social media to sales?” Nothing but silence. I was starting to get frustrated.

Undeterred, I kept looking and the answer to social media sales finally came to me from an unexpected but obvious place – a very unsocial media known as television. I have always been fascinated by television, particularly the evolution of television advertising and programming. The surprising thing is that the early days of television and the early days of social media have a lot in common.  When it was first invented, no one was sure how to create or monetize content for the boob tube either. Content creation costs were low, and brands discovered it was possible to create their own advertising audience by producing original content in the form of programming. See where I’m going with this?

The same thing is happening with social media. Brands create their own content to attract audiences to their social media sites. Just like in the early days of TV, there is an opportunity for brands to create their own advertising audiences by producing great proprietary content in the form of educational and insightful eBooks, white papers, and videos. Then, market your own products and services to the audience you create.

Here’s how: Let’s say you’ve got a shiny new white paper you’re just aching to blast out to your eagerly awaiting audience. In addition to emailing the white paper, you can use a service like Bitly.com to create another tractable link to that same white paper via Twitter. Or include a unique link on Facebook. Now you can measure how many people filled out your form and downloaded your white paper from social media channels. Later, you can look back and see which sales originated as leads brought in through social media and get an ROI for social media sales conversions.

The biggest benefit of adding social media to your lead generation mix is that it gives you a way to generate an organic list of people interested in your brand. A lot of small businesses don’t have big email contact lists and generating an opt-in organic list can be difficult and expensive. On the other hand, the social media programs we run at MCG can generate over a thousand followers in a couple months. Those followers, friends and contacts are a great audience for your white papers, eBooks, infographics and other content marketing tactics. Professionals are overloaded with marketing emails. Getting out of the inbox and into social media gives you the opportunity to leap ahead of the crowd and start generating measurable leads and sales.