Lead Generation for B2B – 5

B2B, campaign, lead generation, Marketing, media

Not all social media platforms are created equal. So while I have been talking about using social media over the last 3 posts, you have to choose which of those is appropriate for you. You figure that also through testing.

Each social media platform has certain specialities. For example LinkedIn is very good with professional networks. On the other hand Facebook may have the largest set of general population. YouTube gives you the ability to hold long form videos with an algorithm which recommends videos (much like Netflix) , which means your content could be valuable for years to come. Most other platforms to my knowledge don’t have this kind of facility.

So based on the market you want to focus on, you figure out , which platform will have the best traffic for your requirements, that converts, and at what cost.

Selecting the wrong medium can make your campaigns fail.

There’s however another way of looking at this. How can you repurpose content for different media such that you can exploit the best features of all networks.

There was a time when Facebook was considered good for consumer facing businesses. It still is, I believe. But today you will also see a lot of B2B companies utilizing this media. So you will need to test different media, to see if your audience exists there.

Don’t think that if you’re a B2B company, you should only look at LinkedIn.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

P.S: If you are interested in getting a free copy of my “7 point checklist for B2B markets”, you can ask for it, by filling in your details below.

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Lead generation in B2B – 4

B2B, budget, campaign, lead generation, Marketing, niche, segmentation, single target market

While we are on using social media for testing the campaigns, for the last 2 posts, one more thing you need to keep in mind is geography.

Different social media platforms and other PPC search engine platforms like Google have different pricing mechanisms for local, national and international markets. If you will start your testing from a broad geography, then you could end up paying a much larger amount for doing your testing.

One major challenge with social media is that costs can go out of control very fast. This is where starting with a Single Target Market helps. You can choose a very small segment of the market and then niche it further to ensure that you can do changes quickly and then roll out on a national or international scale.

With PPC advertising on social media the second challenge for B2B marketers is to get official emails. As I have mentioned in my posts in this series, earlier, until you have the emails, of people, you don’t own the information. But when people, raise their hand or subscribe to whatever lead magnet you have chosen, they generally end up giving you their personal emails.

So while you have got the information about the person and you can start sending information to her, you won’t know her company details and her designation.

That’s where you will need to figure out a way for her to give you information. This will make it a multi step process. While there are a lot of coaches who talk about social media advertising, very few talk about B2B related successes because of this challenge.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Lead generation in B2B – 3

B2B, campaign, lead generation, Marketing, media

One advantage of using social media is that you have the ability to quickly test your campaigns, irrespective of your budget. If you have a large budget you can do parallel testing, if you have a smaller budget then you can test serially. On the other hand, with print media and events the adaptability is non existent. So if you make a mistake in the copy and a thousand mailers have been printed, you lose all the money.

I keep talking about testing everything. With social media it is easier to do tests. Most Social Media platforms also give a lot of Analytics to study your response and take better decisions.

Tests are after all, experiments. Like all experiments, you start with a hypothesis, and then verify the variables one by one.

I always prefer to start with the market, then the message and the medium. This is because I feel that the other two items are dependent on the market that we choose.

In case of B2B, one market could be defined by industry, it could be further refined by revenue size or specific location. Now with B2B the key challenge is getting to the actual person who would be responsible to take a decision on what you are selling .

So while you might be able to easily target, based on demographic data, using social media, getting to the right decision makers is considerable work. So you have to think in terms of, who else within that organization, could be impacted because of the problem.

As an example if you are selling packaging paper or wrapping paper. Now the first people who come to mind , because this ia a commodity item, are the people in procurement or factory. But if you were to also look at marketing, because the final packaged item goes to the customers and marketing may be hearing things about their present packaging from customers and could be the key driver for decisions to change the packaging.

B2B in those respects is a little tougher to crack.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Lead generation in B2B – 2

B2B, campaign, education, ideal customer, lead generation, Marketing, media, segmentation, single target market

While events were very expensive, and emails are free, companies would still be willing to spend the money on events, if getting the right audience was assured. Reason being, you get to interact with the prospects on a one-to-one basis. Due to which you can qualify better and you maybe able to close deals faster.

One medium which comes closest to doing a more targeted prospecting, I have found these days, is LinkedIn. Since you can choose the industry, the demographics etc. It can help you reach your ideal customer profile faster. In addition because it allows you to create different segments you can do testing quite fast to identify the best single target market to address.

I haven’t worked on Facebook for doing B2B prospecting, though I am told of a lot of B2B vendors are targeting their clients via Facebook.

With any social media platform, there’s one challenge that I warn my team or customers. You don’t own the information of the prospect. Which means anytime the social media changes its policies or algorithms, you can suffer.

When you have a visiting card of a person or an email id, until the person leaves that organization, you can communicate with her whenever you need to. You are not at the mercy of a third party. This is not completely true with social media, until the prospect share the information with you.

Therefore whenever you’re using a social media to generate leads, always find a way for the prospects to share their email via opt-ins. Once they raise their hand and allow you to share information with them, you get a chance to build a relationship.

Once you have the emails and physical addresses, you can continuously keep sharing valuable information with them and educate them about various things that you can help them with.

Marketing based on education helps build trust as well.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!