B2B lead generation: Did someone say “content?”
By Kirsti Scott
Last night’s SVAMA panel explored how marketers can use social media for business-to-business lead generation. The answer in a nutshell: create remarkable online content and lead prospects to that content through Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Panelists included Brian Halligan, CEO HubSpot, and author of Inbound Marketing; Mike Linton, formerly the CMO at eBay and at Best Buy, now writing for Forbes.com; and Zack Urlocker, from MySQL, now part of Sun Microsystems/Oracle. The panel was moderated by Lilia Shirman, author of 42 Rules for Growing Enterprise Revenue, and MD of The Shirman Group.
Brian kicked off the discussion by contending that a winning marketing professional today is half marketer and half content creator. A marketer today should create content, optimize it for search and social media, promote the content on social networks, and analyze the results to concentrate on what generates the best results. His caveat is that the content needs to be “remarkable” so that it gets spread from the original recipients to others, extending your reach to new prospects.
Zach was able to get a huge increase in leads in his group at Sun through a series of refinements, including the creation of informational content (white papers, case studies, etc.) and an optional registration form for each piece of content. His team optimizes everything they do around lead generation, noting that each page on a website or blog should have a call to action—otherwise, why have that page?
Mike‘s experience with the B2C market has given him some different insights on the creation of content. Sometimes, the best content you can create is an online dialogue and relationship with your potential and current customers. And, sometimes the customers make the most valuable content. In some markets, the best way to do lead generation is just to keep the conversations going in your community.
All three panelists agreed that you should find out where your customers are and then make sure you interact with them there. Brian suggested that instead of hunting through the jungle of the internet, find the watering holes and hunt for leads there. The watering holes could be forums, wikis, Facebook Fan pages, LinkedIn Groups, blogs, and Twitter.
Once you find your targets, lure them to the remarkable content you’ve created on your website and blog, and capture their contact info for your sales team.
Tags: B2B marketing, facebook, lead generation, linkedin, social media, twitter
October 23rd, 2009 at 3:43 pm
[...] SVAMA event about how B2B marketers can leverage social media to generate leads. Check out the summary by Kirsty Scott of SD [...]
October 23rd, 2009 at 3:44 pm
[...] SVAMA event about how B2B marketers can leverage social media to generate leads. Check out the summary by Kirsty Scott of SD [...]
November 25th, 2009 at 11:42 am
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September 15th, 2010 at 11:51 pm
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