7 Ways to Use Social Media to GenerateDemand for Your Business

With $5.4 billion spent on social media marketing inthe U.S. alone in 2016, it’s clear that social media isbeing cemented in B2B marketing organizations.

Yet, according to recent research, over 40 % of B2Bmarketers say that measuring ROI is their numberone challenge (Demand Metric 2016 Social MediaMarketing Survey).

Over 30% say that tying social to business goals is achallenge

Do any of these social media challengessound familiar to you?

1. Attract the right audience

2. Acquiring new leads in a cost-effective way

Your work hard to post engaging content, but is itdriving traffic to your website? Is traffic turninginto new leads?

Are you running ads on social media networks butfinding that the cost per lead is too high and leadquality is too low?

Why are we still dealing with thesechallenges in 2017?

Many B2B marketers today are still using a playbookdeveloped by B2C companies.

B2C companies can take a broadcast approach to postingon social media. If you're selling Coca-Cola, your targetaudience is everyone.

But if you are software or services to other companies, yourtarget universe of companies and prospects is much smaller.

If you're targeting a niche audience, it doesn't make sense to just broadcast your message on social media.

The good news is that you can use socialmedia to generate new leads, without having to pay the social media networksa lot of dough.

Here are 7 ways to use social mediato generate demand for yourbusiness (beyond posting content).

1. Identify your target audience

B2B marketing starts with audience

Who is your target audience? What is their buyer persona? What are their biggest pain points? What do they talk about online as they doresearch?

You can use social media activities toidentify your target audience andpotential buyers just as they areentering a buying cycle.

On platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, you can findyour target audience through social media keywordsbased on things they talked about, such as

-Industry events or conferences they attend-Influencers they follow -Hot topics / challenges pertinent to their industry -New technologies in they may use

Your audience also provides biographical data (i.e. jobtitles) and their location through social netorks.

Example

Your buyers are inundated with marketing messagesand sales outreach emails every day. The key togetting their attention is communicate with them ontheir own terms.

Social media provides a less crowded,one-to-one engagement channel withyour potential buyers.

Private messaging features Twitter DM, LinkedIn In-Mail and Facebook Messenger provide new channels tocommunicate with buyers.

2. Engage

Social media activities provide indicators of buyerinterest.

They can be scored in the same way as emailengagements or website visits.

3. Lead Scoring

For example, someone who clicked on a social post iscomparable to someone who clicked on an ad or anemail link.

Someone who retweets your post is someone who’sendorsed your content.

Someone who follows your brand handle is choosing tosubscribe to your content and should be equivalent to ablog or newsletter subscriber.

Someone who replies to your direct message has takenthe time to engage, and can be considered equivalent toan email reply.

4. Nurture leads with relevantcontent in real-time

Lead nurturing helps guide prospects through yourmarketing funnel.

But traditional lead nurturing has some seriouslimitations....

A lot of leads in your databasedon’t open your emails or visit yourwebsite.

Without additional insights on what they're interestedin, your lead nurture emails are just built on guesses.

Lead nurture emails:

Our nurture emails:

Treats each lead the sameAssumes every lead is on the same buying timelineAssomes each lead wants the same information Built on intuition and takes a long time to optimize

But when you add social mediaactivities to your database...You cover a lot more leads

You can start to build emails that:

React to each lead as an individual

Send leads content when they are showing the mostinterest in a topic

You'll also be able to see the performance of youremails immediately and iterate more rapidly onmessaging.

Example Send a blog post to a top-of-the-funnel lead who justtweeted at @CMIcontent

5. Re-Engage with Cold Leads

There are good fit leads in your database who haven'tengaged with any of your campaigns in months,maybe they never engaged with anything since theywere added to your database.

If you know what they're doing on social media , youhave the chance to re-engage them.

See how we closed this cold lead based on socialmedia activities alone: http://bit.ly/2kvdWkt

6.Accelerate Warm LeadsThrough the Funnel

If you invest in sponsoring conferences and tradeshows,you can use conference hashtag to target, engage andclose your qualified leads.

Prior to the event, you can monitor the event hashtagand engage with attendees who are tweeting thathashtag. If these attendees are already leads in yourdatabase, you could send emails to invite them toschedule a product demo at your booth, or register foryour speaking session or after party.

Example

After the event, you could prioritize your outreach tothose who are most engaged from the event (based ontheir social media activities), and have your sales repssend them personalized emails based on the content oftheir tweets to increase connect rates.

Another benefit of social media is that you don’tactually have to sponsor an event to generate leads.These strategies can be used even without a boothpresence.

Harnessing a Social DemandGeneration System

With a social demand generation system in place, youcould set up automated programs to discover, engageand qualify new leads through social media.

Because this system integrates with marketingautomation and CRM systems, you’ll be able togenerate new contacts or leads to put into yourdatabase.

A social demand generation system also provides akey source of data insights – social media activity – onthe leads in your marketing automation system.

With this data, you can create more targeted nurtureprograms, lead acceleration programs and get a moreaccurate look into the interest level of your leads.

Want to learn more?

Why Social Demand Generation is a MustHave in Your ToolKit (e-book)

http://bit.ly/2kdNevY

See how you can turn social media into anROI positive channel

(webinar): http://bit.ly/2ly9q58