Utilizing Social Media to Accelerate Demand Generation

On Tuesday, June 26, I attended the DemandGen Report Conference. One of the most interesting presentations was from Heidi Melin – the new CMO of Eloqua. After only 2 weeks on the job, Heidi gave an interesting presentation on how to best leverage social media in B2B lead generation.

Here’s an excerpt:The first and primary tenant, as with all good marketing, is to think of: 1) how does social media fit; 2) what are you looking to accomplish; 3) how do you measure results. And aside from that, the best way is to plan around these revenue indicators:1) Expanding Reach: The easiest and fastest thing to do is to incorporate social media outlets into your marketing such as likes, tweets, etc. This allows you to expand your reach and your subscriber base. Pretty obvious. Depending on your industry, you may also include Pinterest, Tumblror Reddit.2) Target Influencers: Probably slightly less obvious is to mine your social media networks – leveraging single sign on forms and Eloqua’s social id meter to understand which of your prospects or buyers could be influencers and help you grow your network. You can also do this with Google+1 by using their reporting to understand who is more active in following your content. Furthermore, you can use Klout to also determine who is a better influencer.3) Increase Velocity. This item I was excited about as an idea on how you might reactive older house files. The concept here expanding on the social sign on is to append social media data to your database to increase velocity. By way of example, lets’ say you have a prospects company email address but they move on but stay in the same industry. If you understand or have access to LinkedIn you can continue to reach them. You can also share topical content in more than one medium. An example of successful implementation of this is DocuSign who increase their data and extended their reach.4) Better Marketing Value. The concept here is also very simple. It’s that in today’s world traditional marketing of pushing concepts to people to buy is not as relevant. People buy off of other’s recommendations. So you can leverage social media to provide better marketing value – answer problems that are out there and let you network do the marketing on your behalf.5) Making Sales Social: Eloqua’s Jill Rowley spoke on now leveraging marketing channels to create a relationship and solve a real problem, just as you would in a conversation. She cautioned that when you do so, you should not be thinking of making sales, but how do you add value and build future advocates. Find solutions to their problems then connect, engage and educate.In terms of measurement, Melin cited the Klout Score, traffic sources and improving data quality and ROI as key measures.For more resources, she suggested subscribing to Eloqua’s Grande guides (quick guides you can digest while drinking a cup of coffee), Eloqua’s Social Media Pro Book and subscribing to Eloqua’s Chart of the week(this one I’ve selected is on Social media).This is my first post. Tell me what you think and what topics you’re interested in hearing about related to marketing and management.