http://socialmedia.alterian.com/ Have you heard about recent Lead Gen success stories in social media? Do you know the smart tactics companies are applying to increase sales and find qualified leads? Discover the social media strategies of companies like Dell, Jetblue, and American Express that can improve your own lead generation activities. Increase leads for your sales team by listening to the social web, identifying brand champions and potential leads, and employing social savvy when you engage with potential customers. This slideshow will show you how to: * Listen: A review of platforms to monitor social media * Benchmark: Determine what is being said, and who is saying it * Identify: Find your fans, brand advocates and champions * Engage: Using social media to respond and interact * Measure: How to best seed your content to track it via your listening platform
TRANSCRIPT
Social Media Strategies to Improve Lead Generation
6th April, 2010
Presented By Jim ReynoldsBusiness Development – Social Media Alterian
So you’ve been following all of this buzz in social media, you may even be monitoring your brand, your customers and your personal reputation. But what’s next? Many large organizations have realized that there is a huge opportunity that sits in front of them with social media, the opportunity to generate business by engaging your audience and responding to questions. Here are some key examples of the ways this is being done today. Dell currently runs active social media monitoring campaigns. When you say Dell or I’d like to buy a dell, or I’m interested in buying a dell you are now being listened to. A team member will then respond within 72 hours (my personal experience) and start the sales pitch/. JetBlue has added well over 1 million twitter followers in the last year. Why? Promotions. They will run on going contests for free travel vouchers when you’re a follower. Recently to celebrate their 10th anniversary they did a NYC only event via twitter to give away tickets. American Express has just run a twitter promotion to win tickets to the handful of upcoming Conan O’Brien shows. In January that had less than 2500 followers on twitter, they now have over 25,000. A new captive audience who is ready to hear about upcoming promotions, deals and ways to interact.
As you have or have not sat through any of our sales demonstrations or heard us speak previously it all starts with listening. I will be highlighting a few key free resources to get started with listening. Once you’ve identified the who, what, when, where and why dive into the metrics, you will need to create a benchmark so you can effectively measure you success, failures or losses. The greatest thing about social media is that nearly every company is new to it so you can make mistakes. The identification of what your audience is saying, wants and needs is key to any effective social media campaign. Here is my favorite step. Building the actual Campaign. May organizations will initially want to jump right in, but just like traditional marketing (email, direct, web) build a campaign, define a call to action, design a microsite rather than just throwing idea’s out there. Measure. The free tools that I will highlight will definitely get you started but at some point you may need to look at larger tools like what alterian has to offer. Repeat. Once something works or doesn’t work continue to refine your messenging and your campaign.
Google Alerts give you the ability to receive alerts about your brand/topic via email or RSS. This is extremely simple monitoring but is a great place to get started.
Google Blog search is just like google but it focuses on their coverage of blogs. This is their first set into “real time monitoring” and again is a great tool to start to understand what is initially being said about your brand.
Determine how people talk about your company & competitors
How do they mention your brand when they talk about you online
What keywords do they use
Where do they say it
Who are they?
Presenter
Presentation Notes
The benchmark will be a sample case study of how to identify the metrics that apply directly to your brands. This was done in SM2 but can be replicated in nearly any SMM application. What if you were a low cost airline wanting to enter the fold, and start a social media campaign. Where would you start?
We now can determine some interesting benchmarks and averages about our company (Data set is “easyjet” – european focused low cost airline) Since the first of the year we have had 23k conversations around our brand We have averaged 258 mentions a day with a peek of 781 and a low of 85 (Why?)
Where are they talking about you? When defining a campaign you’ll definitely need to understand where you audience is and what languages your campaign may need to cover
• Eliminated cold calling• Multiple demo and pricing requests per day• Increased sales staff• Established brand visibility
After 6 months: Increased by 269%
• Freemiums converting without entering sales funnel
• Techrigy acquired by Alterian
At 1 year: Increased by 840%• expanding Twitter engagement
across the enterprise
The ROI of social media lead generation
Presenter
Presentation Notes
A real world example we will look at some of our data from our days as a start up named Techrigy. We didn’t have a In addition to campaign based lead generation. You can generate leads directly from engagement live in social media by responding to tweets, participating in message boards/forums and commenting on blogs. Social media can be used much like cold calling. But with the added advantage of talking directly to the Decision Maker, influencer or researcher in charge of the project. From our experience we found using social media to be much more effective and yield higher closing rates that cold calling and then eventually eliminated all cold calling for introductory lead generation.
Now that you have an active campaign, we have an audience and we are listening to our brand and competitors. Let’s look at this in action. For this case we were monitoring multiple competitors and monitoring for these keywords in SM2 as well as in TweetDeck. The first example is a prospect who looked at a competitive tool (Radian6) who has a need for Dutch Language support. Our team just right in!
• Listen – Build out keywords to actively monitor for
• Engage– Be remember-able
• Follow your sales process– Enter data into your lead tracking tool– Continue to communicate– Track Metrics
• Outbound touches• Demo’s / information sent• Closing Rate
Presenter
Presentation Notes
No how to you replicate what we’ve done. Build out a listening profile & be sure to monitor your competitors Engage with people, and be sure to have a personality while doing it. Also identify how you plan on staffing this. In may cases it will be staffed by marketing and sales. Just because your using social media, don’t forget your internal sales processes. Gather as much information as possible from the potential lead, and continue to communicate with the prospect. Just because they don’t buy today it doesn’t mean they wont buy tomorrow.
