OF B2B BUYERSRELY ON SOCIALMEDIA TO ENGAGEWITH PEERS ABOUTBUYING DECISIONS

WRITTEN BY JING CONG ZHAO

Why Social DemandGeneration is a Must Havein Your Marketing Toolkit

75%

An IDC Study

What's Missing from Your Toolkit?

With $5.4 billion spent on social media marketing in the U.S. alone in 2016, it’sclear that social media is being cemented in B2B marketing organizations. Yet,according to recent research, over 40 % of B2B marketers say that measuringROI is their number one challenge (source: Demand Metric 2016 Social MediaMarketing Survey). Over 30% say that tying social to business goals is achallenge, and only 9% are able to quantify the impact of social on revenue.

Why is social media’s ROI so elusive, despite marketers’ increased focus on thisfunction and despite the proliferation of social marketing tools?

1. Attracting the right audience:You or your social media teamworks hard to post engaging,useful and relate-able contenton social media every single day.Yet, you’re not seeing the level ofengagement you had expected.Or instead, you’re driving a lot ofvisits to your website, but peoplearen’t converting on yourlanding pages.

3. It’s hard to scale socialadvertising. You’re alreadyrunning ads on the socialnetworks, but you’re not able toscale your effort cost-effectivelyto find new leads.

Look at the social media challenges below.Do these sound familiar to you?

2. You don’t know whethersocial media is bringing you anyleads. You know that your targetprospects are out there on socialmedia, but you can’t track thesesocial leads in your marketingfunnel because social mediaactivities aren’t integrated intoyour marketing automationsystem. Without the integration,you aren’t able to prove the ROIof social media to your seniormanagement.

4. Social media isn’t integratedwith the rest of your marketinginitiatives.

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Taking a Demand GenerationMindset to Social Media

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Why are these challenges so prevalent?

The number one reason for these challenges is that many B2B marketers todayare still using a social media playbook developed by B2C companies.

B2C companies were the first ones to take advantage of social media. They sawsocial as a channel to build their brand, by taking a broadcast approach andposting content with broad appeal. This approach works well for B2Ccompanies who care most about branding, but as a B2B marketer, yourorganization’s primary directive is to generate demand and provide qualifiedleads to a sales team.

Yet, most B2B organizations still look at social as a top of the funnel play. It’sthere for brand awareness, it’s a good way to get your messaging out there. It’sa place you have to be because our competitors are there. But if you start tolook at social media from a demand generation perspective, you’ll see a verydifferent picture.

Your demand generation team already has strategies and programs in place togenerate qualified leads for your sales team. Yet traditionally, B2B marketershave not thought about using social media for demand generation.

Taking a demand generation mindset to social media is the first mental shiftthat needs to happen to turn social media into an effective lead generationchannel. Take a moment to think through what your demand generation teamis doing.

B2B marketing starts with theaudience.

• Who’s in your target audience? • What’s their buyer persona?

• What are their biggest pain points?• How do they do research? • Who is influencing theirpurchasing process?

Chances are, you’re already using a variety of data sources to understand yourbuyer persona and their behavior.

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1. Targeting & Segmentation: Use Social Data to Identifyand Segment your Audience

Social media activity data is a vast source of real-time customerintelligence.B2B buyers reveal a lot about themselves on social networks as they sharecontent, ask questions, interact with brands, influencers, peers and react to theevents they attend.

By using conversational keywords (event hashtags, topical hashtags, mentionsof brands, mentions of influencers) and bio keywords (job title, company,location), you can really hone in on your target audience and find those whoare actively researching solutions in your space.

2. Taking a Multi-Channel Approach to Driving Conversions

B2B buying cycles are longer than B2C buying cycles. Buyers prefer to doresearch and to self-educate before talking to sales people. Your buyers areinundated with marketing messages every day. The key to getting theirattention is to be wherever they are and reach them on their own terms.

Private messaging features like Twitter DM, LinkedIn In-Mail and FacebookMessenger provide new channels to communicate with buyers. This type ofprivate channel can be used just like email, enabling delivery of relevant andtimely content to your prospects and customers.

3. Lead Scoring

Chances are, your organization is already using a lead scoring model thatincorporates some behavioral data like email engagement, website visits, adclicks and downloads of your gated content. However, these channels onlytrack leads after they’ve entered your marketing system. Not having socialactivity data in your lead scoring model means that you’re missing a key pieceof demand generation data.

Social activities provide indicators of buyer interest.

Social media engagements can be scored in the same way as emailengagements or website engagements. For example:

An IDC study found that 3 out of 4 B2B buyers rely on socialmedia to engage with peers about buying decisions.

Whom your prospects talk to on social networks can also provide insights intotheir mindset. As a marketer, you could be lead scoring off based on followersof certain handles (i.e. influencers in your space, senior executives in yourcompany) and activities in LinkedIn groups along posts and clicks.

Influitive data asserts that word-of-mouth recommendationsfrom peers influence over 90% of all B2B buying decisions.

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Social media provides a one-to-one engagementchannel with your target audience.

Someone who clicked on a socialpost is comparable to someonewho clicked on an ad or an emaillink. Someone who retweets your post issomeone who’s endorsed yourcontent.

Someone who follows your brandhandle is choosing to subscribe toyour content and should beequivalent to a blog or newslettersubscriber. Someone who replies to your directmessage has taken the time toengage, and can be consideredequivalent to an email reply.

4. Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing helps guide prospects through your marketing funnel. Bytracking the social activity of leads in your marketing automation system (i.e.interactions with certain keywords, brands, events, influencers), you wouldknow in real time when someone is ready to engage with your brand, be ableto respond to them promptly, either directly on social media, via an email, orhave someone on your sales team reach out.

• Find prospects who are about to enter your buying cycle based onkeywords in their social media posts.

• In your outreach message, state why you’re reaching out upfront. Mentionthat you saw that they are interested in a particular topic and offer aresource – an article or e-book – aligned to their interest.

• Example: You saw a prospect who just shared an article from aninfluencer in your space. You had just hosted a webinar with this influencer.You can send the prospect the link to this webinar. Because the prospectalready endorses this influencer, he or she will appreciate getting therelated content from you.

T i p s o n u s i n g s o c i a l med i a a c t i v i t y i n s i g h t si n y o u r l e a d n u r t u r i n g p r o g r am s

Discovered

Engaged

Qualified

Converted

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5. Re-engaging Cold Leads

Social media also presents an opportunity to re-engage with cold leads or lostopportunities. For example, you could identify leads who have not visited yourwebsite in the last two weeks, have not opened your emails in the past 30 days,but have mentioned relevant keywords related to your product space in theirtweets in the past week. You could reach out to these leads on social and sendthem a resource to keep lines of communication open.

6. Pipeline Acceleration Through Events

Marketers have always invested in conferences, trade shows and industryevents. In-person events allow us to have in-depth conversations withprospects and close deals sooner. These days, every conference comes with itsown hashtag, used by hundreds of attendees as they discuss relevant topicsand react to what they hear on social media. As a business attending orsponsoring an event, the conference hashtag is key to targeting, engaging,and closing your qualified leads.

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Frustrated over whatto do about cold leadsin your database? Re-engage them throughother channels, likeTwitter or LinkedIn.

?!

#HarnessTheHashtag

Prior to event: As an event sponsor, you could monitor the eventhashtag and engage with attendees who are tweeting that hashtag. Ifthese attendees are already leads in your database, you could sendemails to invite them to schedule a product demo at your booth, orregister for your speaking session or after party.

After the event: You could prioritize your outreach to those who aremost engaged from the event (based on their social media activities),and have your sales reps send them personalized emails based on thecontent of their tweets to increase connect rates.

Another benefit of social media is that you don’t actually have tosponsor an event to generate leads. These strategies can be usedeven without a booth presence. One company, a leader in contractmanagement software, used a social demand generation system togenerate leads from conference hashtags and handles. They’ve seenenough success from social alone that they’ve been able to scale backtheir event sponsorship budget.

Pictured: Our EnterpriseAccount Executive ,

Damien, at the MarketoConference in 2016.Damien was able toschedule one-on-one

demos with people whoTweeted the conference

hashtag.

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Harnessing a Social DemandGeneration System With a social demand generation system in place, you could set up automatedprograms to discover, engage and qualify new leads through social media.Because this system integrates with marketing automation and CRM systems,you’ll be able to generate new contacts or leads to put into your database.

A social demand generation system also provides a key source of data insights –social media activity – on the leads in your marketing automation system. Withthis data, you can create more targeted nurture programs, lead accelerationprograms and get a more accurate look into the interest level of your leads.

1. Discover the right buyers on social networks

2. Create contextually-relevant lead nurture programs on

social media

3. Generate new contacts or leads and sync them into

your marketing automation system

4. Measure and optimize performance of your campaigns

5. See measurable ROI from your social media marketing

efforts

6. Monitor buying signals from your existing leads to

convert more leads into customers

W i t h a s o c i a l d em a n d g e n e r a t i o ns y s t em , y o u c a n :

... Let's dig deeper!8

1. Discover the Right Buyers on Social Networks

Your target audience is actively using social media. Close to 1.7 billion peoplehave active social media accounts. 46% of people look to social media whenmaking purchases. 63% use social media as a primary source of information.

B2B buyers reveal a lot about themselves through their social media activities.Socedo’s social demand generation system allows you to define your targetaudience through keywords - job titles, industry, location, event hashtags,topical hashtags, interactions with brands and influencers (follows, mentions,retweets).

Our system has indexed a significant portion of Twitter and we’ve built up alarge database of tweets skewed towards businesses. Once you enter yourcriteria, our system will run the search to identify matching content fromTwitter and LinkedIn, and immediately serve up prospects whose recenttweets and engagement patterns meet your target criteria.

2. Create Contextually-Relevant Lead Nurture Programson Social Media

Just like a marketing automation system, Socedo’s social demand generationsystem allows you to set up automated and contextually relevant workflows toengage, nurture and qualify leads directly on social media. Socedo provides aseries of light, medium and heavier touch points.

Once you’ve discovered your target audience, our system can automaticallyfollow these people on Twitter and add them to certain lists. For contacts whofollow you back, you can trigger a direct message 24 hours later and offer theminformative or entertaining content aligned to their buyer persona andinterest.

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"Marketing Director"

#Marketo

Follow @SocedoApp

Target Audience

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Real conversation from our Strategic Account Manager's Twitter:

Twitter direct messages are private and work the same way as an email. Witha direct message, just like email, you want to include a distinct call to action(i.e. download an e-book, sign up for a webinar). By driving your prospects to agated landing page where you offer a valuable piece of content, you cancapture their contact information into your marketing automation system.

How the Socedo Marketing Team UsesOur Own Product.

At Socedo, we generate about a third of our leads through our ownsystem. Because these leads already fit our buyer persona and haverecently shown interest in our brand (based on their social mediaactivities), we see much higher engagement from these leads

compared to leads from other sources. On average, we see email openrates in the 40% range and click through rates in the 4-6% range

from social leads.

3. Generate new contacts or leads & sync them into your marketingautomation system or CRM

Socedo can generate new contacts or leads in two different ways. You cansimply use Socedo as a traffic driver, by sending your targeted prospects directmessages that link to a gated landing page. People who fill out the form arethen added to your marketing automation system or CRM. Alternately, you canuse Socedo as a data enrichment solution and get contact information and thereal-time social activity of your target prospects.

Once Socedo finds your target audience on Twitter, the system matches theirsocial media profile to other valuable data points including their companyname, industry, job title, corporate email address, phone number and more.You can export this data as a CSV file, or sync this data automatically into yourmarketing automation system or CRM. Unlike typical data enrichmentsolutions that provide periodic updates, Socedo provides contacts based onreal-time social media activity.

In addition to “snap-shot”, static data fields such as job title, company name,email address and phone number, our system continually uses real-time socialmedia content to discover prospects who have just expressed buying intent.

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4. Campaign Performance Measurement and Optimization

There are two main factors that impact email performance – audience andcontent.

The same email marketing rules apply when using a social demand generationsystem. With Socedo, you can test out different targeting criteria keywords tosee ones provide you the best audience for your industry or business segment.You can set up multiple campaigns, each with its own set of criteria, to reachdifferent audience segments.

Additionally, you can A/B test Twitter direct messages and see what messagingand CTA performs best for a particular audience.

5. See Measurable ROI from Social Media Marketing

In the past, our job as marketers was simply to generate more leads to handover to sales. Now, we are increasingly held accountable for the quality of leadswe generate and we’re expected to be able to measure the ROI of our programs.

Social media efforts are notoriously hard to measure. Socedo gives you visibilityhow your social campaigns are performing, and conversion rates at each stageof your marketing funnel. By integrating with Google Analytics, Salesforce,Marketo and Hubspot, we help you see how your campaigns translate to newleads, marketing qualified, leads, opportunities and revenue.

[Hubspot reports from a current Socedo customer]

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6. Monitor Buying Signals from your Existing Leads to Convert MoreLeads into Customers

Your marketing automation system is only as valuable as data you put into it.

Today, marketers get lead data from both first and third party sources. We allhave forms on our websites capturing contact information and fields we needto qualify leads. Most of us are also using data enrichment services, i.e.Social123, Clearbit, RingLead, Datanyze, to add additional fields to our database. Social media activities represent a source of real-time buyer interest. Socedocan match the leads in your database to their social media profiles, monitortheir real-time social media activities, and provide you an on-going record oftheir social media activities as well as a historical record.

With this kind of real-time data, you can craft more personalized emails, reachout to warm leads sooner and update your lead scoring model to pass morequalified leads to your sales team.

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Social Media and Social Data EnhancesAll Stages of the Buyer Journey

With a social demand generation system, you can use social media to enhancethree stages of the buyer journey. Here’s a quick summary:

1. AttractWith Socedo, you can test out different keywords to see which ones return themost qualified prospects. By using the automated engagement workflow inSocedo that starts by following people, you can quickly grow your Twitterfollowing and attract new prospects.

2. Convert Once you’ve identified your target audience through the right keywords, youcan use automated nurture on social media and one-on-one messaging todrive prospects to your website or gated landing pages to capture their contactinfo. You can also use social activity data in your lead scoring model so thatyou’re capturing early buyer interest before prospects even visit your website.Socedo brings new contacts, along with contextual data (i.e. recent matchingtweets) into your marketing automation system, making it easier for you tocreate multi-channel nurture programs.

For example, your marketing team or sales team can use your leads’ tweets tocraft personalized emails to follow up with each lead. You could upload theseleads into an advertising platform and serve them re-targeting ads. With theability to monitor the real-time social activity of your existing leads, you cannurture leads or re-engage with cold leads directly on social media, bypassingthe clutter of their in-box.

3. Close Social media can help you get more out of the marketing channel traditionallyused to close deals (conferences, trade shows and events). By tracking theconference hashtag and jumping into the conversation, you can target, engageand close qualified leads through conferences and events.

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Social Media and Social Data EnhancesAll Stages of the Buyer Journey

Social Demand Generation in Action

Here’s real world proof that social demand generation can work for you,whether you are a startup or a large enterprise.

MuleSoft makes it easy to connect the world’s applications, data and devices.MuleSoft has a digital marketing team that’s always testing new ways togenerate a greater quantify of leads. Although Twitter Ads had been a leadinglead generation channel for MuleSoft, the sales organization was not satisfiedwith the quantify of leads being produced. In an effort to generate more leads,the digital marketing team found themselves in stiff competition with otherTwitter advertisers which yielded diminishing returns.

When Nima Asrar Haghighi - MulesSoft’s Director of Digital Marketing &Analytics - heard about Socedo, he decided try out this new approach toleverage Twitter as a lead generation channel. The marketing team likedSocedo’s targeting capability, its novel way of using direct messages and itsintegration with Marketo, which allowed them to provide richer prospect datato their sales team.

After seeing success with their first account, MuleSoft immediately added 9additional campaigns to target prospects in various verticals and interestgroup. After using Socedo for six months, MuleSoft increased lead volume fromTwitter by 10%, and have achieved a 21% reduction in cost per lead.

“Socedo has proven to be a worthwhile investmentfor MuleSoft. Not only have we experienced a 21%reduction in our cost per lead through Twitter, the

targeting from LinkedIn works well and thematching is accurate,”

Shohil Kothari, Digital Marketing Manager,MuleSoft 15

Dynamic Signal, an Employee Advocacy Platform company, used Socedo tocreate a lead generation hack that doubled the amount of opportunitiesgenerated in comparison to their traditional event follow-up strategies.Stephanie knew that the best prospects at events are the ones that engage inconversations with their sales and marketing teams at the events. With thisinsight, she implemented a new process that took the logic of event marketingand moved it to social media:

• She followed the hashtag for every event the marketing team attended, andused the hashtag to target and engage prospects in conversations aimed atsteering them to Dynamic Signal’s booth or to an-person meeting withemployees at the event.• She entered each conference hashtag into Socedo, along with othermarketing qualified characteristics like job titles or location. Socedoimmediately discovered prospects who are commenting about the event,opening the door for engagement.• Her team approved tweets from Socedo from profiles that met their salesteam’s criteria. Socedo automatically populated their CRM with the prospect’sname, title, company, email, LinkedIn profile, Twitter profile, company size,revenue, location, and tweet details. • After the event, instead of launching a generic email drip campaign to theentire attendee list, the marketing team decided to target those tweets pushedby Socedo first to give the sales team an opportunity for a personalized followup.

With this approach, the marketing team doubled the amount of opportunitiesgenerated in comparison to traditional post-event outreach. The sales teamhas even initiated their own efforts to follow hashtags for any event in theindustry, allowing them to locate opportunities where Marketing isn’tsponsoring or attending.

As a result, they no longer have to be at every event to pull in opportunities,dramatically reducing the team’s efforts and marketing budget.

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Microsoft’s Social Selling Team uses Socedo to gain insights about their existingleads. Socedo integrates with Microsoft’s marketing automation system –Marketo – and enriches lead records with real-time social media activitiesrelevant to Microsoft’s business (i.e. interactions with Microsoft Twitter handles,competitors, industry hot topics). Socedo’s real-time insights has allowed thisteam to:

• Understand which of their existing leads are actively engaging, or havepreviously engaged with their Twitter handles and what they’re saying• Identify warm leads in real-time so that the social media team can qualifyleads direct on social• Lead score organic social engagements• See the role that social media plays in their prospects’ buying journey

"Socedo opens up a new channel for us to engagewith our leads. With the social data they provide, we

can now finally see the role social plays in ourprospects’ buying journey,”

Phil Amato, Digital and Social Media Manager atMicrosoft.

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At the end of the day, you want to make sure that all of your marketingchannels, including social media, are bringing your sales team qualifiedleads and opportunities. Social networks and social activity data providesnew ways for you to discover, engage with, and nurture your prospects tobring new customers to your company.

Conclusion

About SocedoSocedo has created a social demand generation system that helpsB2B marketers discover, engage and qualify leads through socialmedia to increase revenue at scale.

Find your target audience on social media with a 7-day free trial.

Or, contact us to request a demo.

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