Marketing with Mike Volpe

Lead generation, specifically quality leads, is the top challenge for B2B marketers.  It always has been, and it always will be.  Leads are like a drug, once your sales team has some, they want more - and they always ask for higher quality until you start handing them signed purchase orders.  So it didn't surprise me that this MarketingSherpa study showed that quality lead generation was the top challenge.  What surprised me was how much lead generation was ahead of the other categories... check it out: 69% of marketers said quality lead generation was the top challenge, and all the other categories were in the 30's.  Remarkable.  Notice too that just a large volume of lead generation is also on the list at 35%.

More marketing data...

I had the great opportunity to speak to a bunch of my marketing peers at the Marketing Sherpa B2B Demand Generation Summit in Boston today (#sherpaB2B09).  It was part of a panel discussion, and there were no slides, but my notes are below  Enjoy and share!

Background on Social Media for Lead Generation

• Why is social media marketing important?
• We have built a bubble around us to block out these outbound marketing messages
• Only through more inbound marketing approaches can you attract people who have built this bubble around them
• Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter are all 100% controlled by the user who decides if they want to start communicating with you - unlike email, phone and direct mail where anyone can contact you, and then you have to tell them to stop 2. What is a social media marketing campaign?
• At HubSpot, we have no social media marketing campaigns
• Using social media and inbound marketing is a way of life. We are always trying to have an ongoing dialog with our market

Example: Social Media Marketing for Lead Generation Case Study

At HubSpot, we did a webinar on "How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR" in March 2008 (this was way before Twitter had achieved mainstream popularity).

Step 1: Start by building assets

• Blog - 5,000 subscribers at the time (we have over 20,000 RSS and email subscribers today)
• LinkedIn Group - about 5,000 members at the time (there are over 40,000 members today)
• Twitter Company Account - About 1,000 followers of @HubSpot at the time (we have over 20,000 today)
• Facebook Fan Page - About 500 fans at the time (we have over 6,000 fans today)
  

Step 2: Use your marketing assets to promote your offer

• Wrote a blog article about Twitter marketing tips that also mentioned the webinar
• Emailed an appropriate segment of our opt-in house list about the webinar
• Posted the webinar as an event on Facebook and LinkedIn
• Added links on the webinar registration page to share with your friends on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook

Lead Generation Results for this Case Study

• Landing page conversion rate over 50%
• Over 4,000 people registered for the webinar (4,000 leads!)
• Triple the size of our largest previous webinar (we have since grown to as many as 8,000 people registering for a HubSpot webinar)
• Over 30% of the webinar registrants were not on our email list
• 1,200 completely new leads!
• Hundreds of qualified leads for the sales team, generating hundreds of opportunities representing over $500,000 in pipeline created
• SEO: The blog article and the archived webinar rank extremely well, even today - 18 months later
• First page of Google organic search for phrases like "Twitter Marketing" and "Twitter PR"
• #1 Google ranking for "Twitter for Marketing and PR", "Twitter for Marketing", "Twitter Webinar"
• Blog: One of top 10 most popular blog articles ever
• Over 20,000 people have read the article, leaving over 100 comments
• Over 1,500 people found that blog article about the webinar during last month, over 18 months later
• The archived webinar has been viewed over 16,000 times, over 1,000 of those in the last 30 days
• Total cost $3,000 - About $1,000 for webinar software, plus our time to create the content (probably a total of 40 hours at an estimated cost of $2000 at $50/hour)

Final Advice on Social Media Marketing for Lead Generation

• Think about social media marketing as part of a holistic inbound marketing strategy
• Social media marketing is not a campaign, it is a marketing lifestyle
• Blogging and publishing content is essential to social media success
• Archive your social content and optimize it for search engines to make it perform for months into the future
• Focus on building long term marketing assets

Webinar: Twitter for Marketing and PR

Let's say you are a B2B company that sells to marketers and small businesses and want to attract new prospects to your website, as well as spread your thought leadership message about inbound marketing.

What do you do?  Lots of things.  You blog, make videos, podcast, do webinars, write ebooks, be active in social media and just generally leverage inbound marketing.  As part of this, you can also try to create a viral video on YouTube.

Here is our latest attempt at making something remarkable and viral for YouTube.  And some thoughts of mine below about it.

1. A rap song is a good choice because the lyrics are usually easier to understand, so you can make your point more easily.  Rap songs are also easier to parody than normal songs, I think.
2. The song is popular, and old.  New songs might be a big hit, but the recall you get with an old song really works.  It also helps you get an older demographic (usually better for B2B), rather than just people in their early 20's.  This song was chosen after we realized it is now being played at weddings - meaning it is broadly popular.
3. Get a bit crazy.  The more uncomfortable you are during filming, the more likely it will be that your video is funny and remarkable and worth sharing.  Find the line, and then go over it.  I'm not sure we went far enough in this one.
4. Try a call to action.  You usually get very few click throughs from YouTube to your website.  You can drive more traffic by adding a call to action at the end of the video. But don't just put your logo or"visit my website".  Try somethign more subtle, we just encouraged people to Google "inbound marketing" (and we were darn sure we dominated the first page of results...)

Another blog article from my email outbox.  Here is most of my response to a question about how to measure social media marketing ROI at a B2B company.

1. Reach. (overall reach/database size)
• In the old days, you had a mail/email database. Now you have a number of channels where you can still send messages to people, but they might not be in your "database" but it is almost the same thing. We track monthly a total "reach" adding up a number of metrics, like:
• # blog subscribers
• # fans on Facebook
• # followers on Twitter
• # group members on LinkedIn
• # iTunes subscribers
• Others/etc.
• This is pretty easy to do manually once a month in a spreadsheet.
  
2. Buzz.
• This is sort of an advanced version of the "number of mentions" chart that PR people often use, except this one includes all blogs and online discussions. You want to track the number of times you are mentioned and same for your competition. If people are talking about you more and more, and especially in relationship to your competition, that is good.
• You can do this manually by tracking
• # pages in Google search results for a search on your company brand
• # people that find your website each month on your branded company/product terms
3. Sentiment.
• You try to figure out the number of people who are saying good and bad things about you and trend that over time. For a startup, you just follow conversations and guestimate it since the volume is so low.  For bigger companies, there are some software solutions that are OK, but still being perfected for this (Radian6, Techrigy, Andiamo Systems, Trackur, Crimson Hexagon). The market is immature in my opinion, but the concept is good to think about.