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