Tracking News, Trends, and Best Practices

There’s been much debate over the role and impact of social media on lead generation. However, after all the pontification it looks like marketers themselves are taking the plunge.

According to a recent Unisfair study of Technology Marketers the top emerging channel is social media for lead generation, with 74% of respondents tagging it as a priority. Adding support to this trend, R2integrated’s survey of US marketing professionals revealed that 61% of respondents where implementing a social media strategy for the expressed purpose “to increase lead generation.”

But, the trend lines don’t stop there. eMarketer covers several more studies that show how small business lead generation soars with social media and B2B sales folks love Linkedin for prospecting.

I think (actually I know) that if you are in the lead generation business you need to clear a little time in your schedule to figure out how to integrate social media in your marketing plan.

There are a couple of interesting side notes to these numbers. First, these are surveys primarily of B2B marketing, which was believe to be slower at adopting social media as a serious marketing strategy. Second, these surveys put an intense focus on “lead generation” versus the more traditional and dominate brand marketing focus of B2B.

Let’s hypothesize on the Why? for the remainder of this article.

Lead Generation Needs Traffic

One of the biggest myths of lead generation is (to swipe from Field of Dreams): “Build it and they will come.” No, they won’t!

You need traffic. That means people and places telling people to visit your website or landing page. Social media does this very well. Social media makes it very easy to get people to take a brief action. Giving you the click you need.

These are friends, family, business relationships, and customers. The trust and interest is already in place. Getting them to respond is much easier.

Traffic Needs to Be Relevant

Web traffic is essential, but getting it can be pretty simple–assuming you don’t care who shows up. You can buy it, you can rent it, you can spam it. Big traffic is accessible, but lots of traffic is not necessarily equivalent to lots of sales.

Again, social media becomes an attractive marketing channel. The very nature of social media is affinity groups. Like minded people and groups connecting. It’s a self-selecting, self-segmenting phenomenon–a marketing dream. More so than any other marketing medium, social media generates relevant traffic.

Qualified Leads are Better for Sales

Sales at the end of the day is an inexact science. Even with prospects and leads it’s a process of exploration with the customer. What’s the specific need? Who’s influential? Can you rally the right champion(s)?

Are they even a qualified prospect?

Getting as close as possible to answering this last question with your lead generation methods is a big win. Your sales team will be incredibly more efficient; putting time on real opportunities, not sorting through contacts where there never was a deal to be had.

Social media is full of qualifying information. Profiles have information on companies, titles, experience and social streams have details about projects, preferences, wants, needs, and pain. Simply targeting or attracting a social media audience is like hand picking a sales pipeline of qualified leads–helping your lead generation efforts start with a qualified market.

Social Media: Traffic, Relevance, and Quality

If you look at the characteristics of social media it’s hard to believe anyone would not consider it in their lead generation strategy. Social media can deliver the three core elements of an effective lead generation program: traffic, relevance, quality.

Are you using social media in your lead generation program? Do you need help designing a strategy to leverage social media for lead generation?

Drop me a note on Twitter @billrice or via email.

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