Is your small business looking for proven B2B social media marketing tactics that generate leads and sales?   Read on!  You may like this business-to-business marketing case study.  IBM shares their experiences with social media roles for subject matter experts, sales reps, and results metrics. Clark Fredricksen at eMarketer uncovers valuable social media best practices from Ed Linde II, who is in charge of Internet presence at IBM.

According to Linde, IBM’s social media efforts have uncovered millions of dollars in sales.

I think the aha fact shared here is the four classic metrics IBM uses to track social media leads: number of leads created, lead value, win revenue and win rate.  These basic metrics sound a lot like traditional marketing measurements to me.

B2B Social Media Marketing Excerpts, Tips from IBM interview:

Who in the business should participate in social media?
Experts are best to lead social media marketing in the B2B space.  Not sales reps. Use your subject-matter experts with established authority on key topics.  They have credibility in their area to help buyers that are looking for more information in order to make informed decisions on equipment purchases.

Note:  According to IndustrialInterface, a BtoB startup using social media marketing to grow, it’s all about sharing on social media—not talking about your products and services. Brian Jones, co-founder at IndustrialInterface.com says, “Internet users can smell marketing speak a mile away…Social media marketing is all about people sharing with other people.”

Sales Reps (Do) Blog
Sales reps use individual blogs to deepen relationships with their own customers.   Many IBM sales reps have blogs with RSS feeds that are connected to LinkedIn and Twitter.  Sales reps’ customers can follow them and have an individual relationship.

How to Listen for Leads
The Listening for Leads program consists of IBM employees that are volunteer “seekers” who monitor particular social media sites.  They listen to online conversations and determine whether there’s a potential sales opportunity.  “Seeking” is not a full time job.

”Seekers” visit government agency sites where RFPs (request for proposals) are posted, and there are discussions about proposals. In the tech space, they frequent blogs or discussion boards about the new Intel chip for servers.

“Seekers” listen for clues (leads) that someone is in a buying mode:

• “I’m about to issue a RFP. Does anyone have a sample RFP that I can use?
• “I’m looking to replace my old server”
• “Does anyone have any recommendations on what kind of storage device will work in this in type of situation?”

Then “seekers” try to get these leads to a telephone rep that qualifies and validates the lead then passes it to a sales rep.

Events are Tweeted
IBM uses Twitter to inform customers about Webinars, podcasts, virtual trade shows or physical trade shows and to advertise some promotions. Individual reps keep their customers updated about interesting news and events via their own Twitter accounts.

Right Keywords are Key

Key to B2B social media success: knowing what the right keywords are so that you can search the various blogs and other sites where people are talking about your products.  Using Google tools that filter the conversations that are happening within blogs or on Twitter will help you locate the best websites.

In my next post, I’ll suggest next steps for business-to-business owners and marketers looking to use the IBM approach.

Have any thoughts on the IBM social media successes?  Share them below in comments.

Photo: iStock

You can read more of the IBM interview here.

Related posts you might enjoy:

How to Use Social Media to Get People Listening

5 Social Media Tips from IndustrialInterface.com

If your small business is looking for ways to increase the number of web visitors—as most of us are—here are seven content marketing ideas.  The secret to being found online is a web site updated with an ongoing supply of fresh, relevant content when your prospects are searching for solutions.

Before you can Tweet your way to successful marketing and sales, you’ll want to publish lots of valuable content.   Content that sets you apart from your competitors.

Content Marketing Tactics:

1. Create original, relevant content that attracts your prospects. Invest time in asking your customers and prospects about their information needs. What kinds of answers/how-to’s/tips are they having trouble finding online?   What are their favorite information sites when problem solving?  Do they use online forums?  Blogs?  Trade publication sites? When do they use print sources? More content ideas here.
2. Generate content that stands out. Go way beyond FAQs.  Your competitors publish frequently asked questions. Break the mold.  Be creative.  As Seth Godin suggests: “Go to the edges…Start where the last person left off.”  Look for innovative content formats that are not common in your industry.  Short videos?  Coolest case study of the month? Top 10 questions people forget to ask when buying a solution.
3. Publish fresh content on your web site as often as you can. Searchers and search engines love fresh content.  Don’t wait for a new product release.  A press release doesn’t usually equal fresh content.  Unless it includes a customer success story using your products/services.
4. Monitor your Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts closely. Track appearances of keywords relevant to your offerings. Check out the web site where your industry content is published.
5. Monitor your competitors’ content to keep up with current topics. Set up Google Alerts for competitor company names, products.  When the Alerts arrive, review the sites where your competitors are getting their content published.  Find the holes in competitor content.  Fill them with better content.  What’s missing?  What info can be presented better?
6. Publish a company blog.  If you don’t already maintain a corporate blog, it’s time to start because blogs are easier to update than (most) web sites.   By posting relevant content a few times a week, you will be more findable by the search engines and prospects.  I posted more about business blogging here.
7. Stay on top of the latest issues/trends talked about online by your prospects/customers. Check in often with the key social networking sites that your prospects use.  If you do not have time to do this—find someone that can.  Stay in front of your market’s info-needs curve by producing timely content about new issues that your prospects are facing.

A recent Forbes survey here of the online searching habits of 354 top executives confirms the need for relevant content.  Some key survey findings from these execs (firms with $1 billion-plus in annual revenues):

• Executives cite a more than 2:1 preference for viewing work-related information online (70%) instead of in print (30%).

• 53% of executives surveyed prefer to gather information online themselves.  Not delegate it.

• Are you selling to execs under the age of 40? These folks search online for information over 20 times each day.

• 86% said they occasionally or frequently click on linked words from Web articles and content

So, as an example, given the specific data provided in this post, how likely are you to click through to review the Forbes CSuite Digital Survey?  Or to read more about it at Forbes.com?

Related posts:

How to: 5 Social Media Marketing Tips from IndustrialInterface.com Co-Founder

If you’re marketing and selling to a technical customer, you’ll be interested in how startup company IndustrialInterface.com is creating and sharing valuable content. The interview below with T. Brian Jones, President & Founder
of Industrial Interface, offers key insights. Read on to find out how they are building their brand online using blogging, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Brian: It’s not always about marketing. Internet users can smell marketing speak a mile away. Why? Because it’s usually meaningless drivel that conveys no real benefit to anyone. Social media marketing is all about people sharing with other people.

1. Describe IndustrialInterface.com and what you do.

Industrial Interface is the quickest, easiest, and most efficient way for engineers to find industrial products and services. An engineer posts a project to our website, we notify relevant suppliers of the sales opportunity, and sometimes within minutes, the engineer is collaborating with a supplier who has a solution. Suppliers can review all the technical details of the leads we share with them, but the posting engineer remains anonymous. When suppliers find sales opportunities that are a good fit for their business, they pay us for the engineer’s contact information.

2. Who are your customers and prospects, and what problems do you solve for them?

Our customer base is two sided–Engineers and Suppliers.

The engineering side includes anyone who sources industrial products and services. This group includes degreed engineers, technicians, purchasing agents, project managers, manufacturing supervisors, maintenance personnel, among others. They currently rely heavily on past experience with suppliers or dated online industrial directories to find products and services for their projects. It literally takes weeks or months for an engineer to find an appropriate supplier for a particular need.

The supplier side includes anyone who sells industrial products and services. This group includes sales reps and sales engineers at manufacturers and rep groups. These salespeople currently must sift through endless cold leads to find a single sales opportunity. This is because current industrial marketing avenues cost a lot of money upfront and don’t guarantee any value over time.

An email vs. dozens of calls…

Industrial Interface makes sharing a design problem with dozens of relevant suppliers as easy as sending a single email. Engineers don’t need to call dozens of suppliers to track down the few that can fulfill their need, because our system does the work for them. We anonymously share their project with relevant suppliers and they either contact the engineer directly or share that lead with a colleague that is a better fit. We’ve leveraged the knowledgeable and well-networked supplier base to help us find engineering solutions.

Sample project posting from IndustrialInterface.com:

Our system also makes it incredibly simple for suppliers to qualify sales opportunities, collaborate with engineers, and share opportunities with colleagues, something our users do millions of times a day in the real world and are already doing on our website.

Leads = Sales Opportunities

By using Industrial Interface, engineers can shave weeks off their development time. We also allow them to find the best solutions during the concept and design phase of their projects, ensuring great savings over the lifetime of the design. Suppliers save time sorting through leads because every email they get from us is a sales opportunity. If they call an engineer from our site, it’s guaranteed that the engineer is ready to buy.

3. How are you using social media to build awareness, generate leads and win customers?

We are using a number of online tactics in unison. Our overall goal is to present our brand as a professional yet comfortable environment for engineers and suppliers to collaborate. Our social media efforts reflect this as they are generally tied not only to the Industrial Interface name, but also to Chris’ and my name and face. This allows us to leverage our expertise in the manufacturing industry to enhance the image of our brand, something that can be hard to do as a startup.

Blog = Quick Reads, Useful & Fun

Our blog is a major outlet for us to communicate with the online engineering community. We write mostly thought provoking articles that are interesting and quick to read. This way the blog is professional, useful, and fun. We don’t want to just be more technical white papers, as we need to appeal to a broader audience and only have limited time to produce content.

Twitter has been a great distribution model for our blog and other great content that we come across via my account @help4engineers. Chris has also grown @techsalesleads that we use to distribute leads that come into our site.

LinkedIn is a way to share information and interact directly with our customers. Along with various other engineering based social networks, LinkedIn allows us to spread our content and news about our company through groups and via direct emails to users.

We have also created an engineering resources toolbar via a website called conduit.com. We share the most relevant online resources for engineers and have created a toolbar of great value to our users. This way our brand is in front of them every time they use their browser, and our site is listed as one of the many useful resources at their disposal.

4. What led you to use Twitter as a lead generation/customer acquisition tool?

Twitter seemed like another great way to interact directly with our customers. It was also an early and quick way to get a “blog” up and running, as Twitter is often referred to as microblogging. What better way to share interesting information with your audience, present yourself as an expert on a subject, engage directly with your target users, and promote your brand all at once, with only a few minutes a day?

5. What kinds of results are you seeing?

With the combination of all these efforts, we had over twenty thousand visits to our site in October.

• Messages and content we share on our blog, twitter, LinkedIn, EngineeringExchange, and Globalspec’s CR4 often see dozens of comments combined and always result in meaningful and direct contact with our target customers.

Since our product requires a lot of trust for a user to try the first time, continued and positive exposure is key to our marketing efforts, as is speaking with them directly.

6. How much time and budget (approximately) does it take to grow your business using social media?

To distribute all of the content we create and to maintain an active presence on the sites we’ve discussed take roughly 20-30 hours per week. Since all of these services are free, the cost consists entirely of our time. To keep this effort reasonable, however, it’s important to know what process to follow every time a new blog post goes up or we have a product announcement. If it’s not clearly outlined, we can waste a lot of time.

So much of social media promotion is monotonous and tedious, but it can pay off over time, and every so often you get lucky. We have a recent blog post that has been viewed over 12,000 times via Stumbleupon, and it’s continuing to be viewed a few hundred times a day. This makes sense though, because I think it’s one of the best posts we’ve done.

There is a lot more to all this than simply distributing content, however. Our sites need to constantly be optimized to work with our marketing efforts and to more successfully convert visitors to customers. This is a never-ending effort, and one that we’re just starting to work on.

Recommendations

In our next post, Brian shares recommendations for small/startup B2B companies that want to begin to use social media to stimulate leads and find prospects—but aren’t sure where to start.

Learn more about or follow IndustrialInterface.com here:

IndustrialInterface.com

@Help4Engineers

@TechSalesLeads

Related post: 5 Social Media Marketing Tactics from IndustrialInterface.com

For those of you producing and selling a ‘lumpy object’ like a beverage, or widget —you’ve got to be innovative in order to get your potential customers to sample/try  your product.  One proven business to consumer approach is to take a page from the Jones Soda Co. story.

Hang Out Where Your Customers Are

In 1996 CEO Peter van Stolk launched Jones Soda by making coolers of the brand new soda available in independent music stores, tattoo parlors, and surf, snowboarding and ski shops, among others.   Peter van Stolk really knew his customers and where they hung out.

He took one giant genius step further to connect with his consumers.  He invited them to be an integral part of this new brand.  Jones Soda customers submit their own photos online for use on the constantly-changing soda bottle labels.

Jones Soda built its brand the old fashioned way.  They earned it using word of mouth.  Today (according to the firm’s web site) the soda is sold in major retailers including Starbucks, Panera Bread, Barnes & Noble, Safeway, Target, Cost Plus,
7-Eleven stores and more. (Follow Jones on Twitter.)

Peter van Stolk would probably agree with Mark Rampolla, the CEO/Founder of Zico Coconut Water about how to connect with customers when launching a new product.

Build an Intimate Relationship

Rampolla said in a recent quote in a WSJ article here (subscription required)

“The best way to build a brand, particularly a beverage, is to build an intimate relationship with consumers using one-to-one marketing.”

Zico is a health oriented sports drink and knew that folks working out intensively—like in Yoga classes—would benefit from the potassium and other healthy attributes.  So the startup connected with consumers by establishing a partnership with a well known yoga guru.   Forbes.com reports that Zico’s founder

spent two years handing out the coconut drink in yoga studios, where it is often now sold.  The brand has been embraced by a yoga guru, Bikram Choudhury,

Sounds like this one-to-one approach to building an intimate relationship with consumers is paying off for Zico Coconut Water.  Forbes.com also noted that they’ve grown 300 percent in the last year.  Of course Zico has some company (competition) in winning customers in the emerging coconut healthy water market.

It will be interesting to see how the different marketing approaches taken by the coco water companies work out.

Use New & Old Marketing

To create more buzz, Zico is applying both traditional and new, social media marketing to get the word out.  Follow Zico on Twitter.

• They placed Zico logos on pedicabs; WSJ ran a cool pic alongside the article.
• Outreach to bloggers: A quick Google search shows the Zico drink is getting some ink on several fitness type bloggers.  One, Biking Diva wrote a nice post about trying the product after receiving a sample from Zico’s PR person.  The Bike Diva’s post is here.

• Traditional Public Relations:  Zico’s PR firm is doing a nice job, they’ve appeared in Redbook magazine among others.

Can you find more ways to connect (personally) with your consumers?  Are you hanging out where your customers hang out?

Update: Building both consumer relationships & buzz maybe paying off for Zico.  Just found this Reuters news release from Aug. 28, 2009:

Coca-Cola Co is near a deal to invest in Zico, a California-based maker of coconut water drinks, according to industry publication Beverage Digest.  Beverage Digest reported news of the possible Coke-Zico deal late on Thursday via Twitter, and Sicher confirmed the Twitter report to Reuters on Friday.

Success in the new world of marketing is based largely on creating and publishing killer content that attracts prospects to your site.   Marketing is—always has been—99 percent education.

Photo: iStock.com

The so-called ‘content marketing’ approach boils down to doing (on your site) what you do best when you’re talking face-to-face with prospects and customers: educate them on how to solve problems and achieve goals.

Create Compelling Content: You’ll benefit from providing regular updates of fresh content that get web (or blog) visitors so excited about your approach/way of thinking/solutions that they return or call you.  Or (even better) make a purchase.  Mastering the latest social media tools like Twitter or Facebook alone won’t make you successful without useful content that helps buyers solve problems.

So if the business with the best website content, wins.  What does the ‘best content’ mean?  Content that works hard:

• Educating prospects on a variety of ways to solve a problem

• Sharing your knowledge freely about solving problems

• Explaining objectively the pros and cons of multiple solutions (including those that you do not offer)

• Creating an online video series to demonstrate solutions

• Demonstrating how to solve the problem at hand for the web visitor. (Think ‘beginner customers/prospects’.)

Content Worth Sharing: Do you open links to articles sent to you by trusted friends and colleagues? I sure do.  Think about the value of creating content that web visitors and your loyal customers send along as links to their contacts.  That’s inbound marketing, viral marketing or word of mouth marketing at it’s best!

Consider the pass-along aspect when you’re developing content ideas.  How can you create content that your customers will share with others?   Some people believe that you can’t miss with ‘how to’ content.

Keywords are (well) Key: Prepare your valuable content using the same keywords your buyers use when searching online for solutions.  Customers love valuable, specific, no-nonsense problem-solving content.   And using the right keywords in your content makes your corporate web site more “findable” by your target customers.

‘Listen’ Online for Content Topics: How do you decide what to write about?  How do you find the specific compelling topics that your customers are trying to find answers to?  First, you  “listen” to the online conversation.  You monitor what’s being discussed, asked, requested, and debated.

More hints for content inspiration:

• What are the most commonly asked questions by prospects?
• What are the most frequently asked questions by users and customers?

• What are the questions customers forget to ask when they begin using your products and services?

• Which topics would make useful online videos?  Helpful PowerPoint online videos?

Any other ideas for content inspiration? Stop by the excellent Marketing Interactions blog here for more on content for customers, content for prospects.

For you business to business marketers and owners asking for relevant examples of other btob companies “like me” that have successfully used social media as a marketing tactic–this bud’s for you.

My erstwhile fellow marketers and bloggers have been on their toes and documented an interesting example, BreakingPoint Systems.

Brian Carroll and Jennifer Leggio both blogged about the company’s social media success in late 2008.

Brian wrote a step-by-step case study and Jennifer published a guest post from Kyle Flaherty, BreakingPoint’s (then) Marketing Director on the pesky question of ROI results.

Here are the tools and strategies they used; in a future post I’ll provide you with a Social Media checklist you can use to adopt these practices.

BreakingPoint (a high-tech startup in the network testing equipment space) used social media to generate leads and establish thought leadership.  They started with a company blog and monitored online conversations for industry topics to create the content. TweetScan gave them ideas for keywords and issues mentioned in Twitter conversations.

They used a Twitter account to alert interested folks to blog posts, webinars, contests and focus group questions.

Establishing a LinkedIn Group to discuss industry issues around networking security allowed BreakingPoint to further their thought leadership positioning.  They do not directly promote their products but act as hosts, letting the 450 group members take the lead in topics and discussions.  They contribute to the conversation when it’s appropriate.

To get the word out about the company’s social media presence, employees added LinkedIn Group and Twitter links to email signatures.

The last key step in BreakingPoint’s social media success story was to diligently track, measure and analyze the results.   In his guest post Kyle Flaherty reported that his team used a mash-up of tools (which took a lot of work and some time) to help with ROI.  (Sorry, dear readers, Google Analytics alone won’t get you where you need to be…)

In addition to Google Analytics, some of the online monitoring tools he listed: GetClicky, BUDurl, Google Reader, HubSpot, and more.  Above  Here is a snapshot of their results posted on Jennifer Leggio’s blog.

Kyle talks about the ability to tie integrate social media efforts with other marketing tactics such as webinars.  He says in part,

“For example, we are running an upcoming webinar and I’ve used all of our social media outlets to let the community know and interact. Using BUDurl I can tell how many folks have signed up for the webinar through Twitter, I use GetClicky to see the folks who went to the webinar page from our LinkedIn Group and I’ll even be able to view the folks who watch the webinar live on USTREAM the day of the event.

We can see how many participants then sign up for a product demo, choose to do a product evaluation and ultimately buy the product. I’m obviously simplifying this process, but it is just that, a process of measurement based on certain triggers that can show me the business impact of social media.”

Interesting stuff, right?

BreakinPoint’s blog is here.  Follow them on Twitter here or (for all of you network security fanatics) check out their LinkedIn Group here.

Brian Carroll’s full post is here.  Kyle’s guest post on Jennifer Leggio’s blog is here.

Source: Marketing Sherpa Chart of the Week

Marketing Sherpa’s chart of the week  ( July 28, 2009) provides key insights for businesses and marketers targeting buyers spending over $25,000.  The survey looked at the ‘information resources’ (events, web sites, ads, etc.) most popular among these large buyers when making purchase decisions.

Findings of the popularity of information sources are not surprising with this teetering economy:

- Pinched travel budgets make face-to-face events and trade shows and events the big losers: down 37 percent

- Virtual events/tradeshows (online tradeshows) up 30 percent.  And there is evidence tracking leads is easier for virtual events.  See article here.

- Social media (blogs, social networks) increased as an info source increased by 24 percent

- Video programming is even up 10 percent.  Serena Software’s been there, done that.

Makes you want to dust off your corporate blogging plan, right?  Or get out your video camera and aim it at your company’s best “explainers” of how to solve problems with your products and services.

How to jump on the information resource bandwagon:

- Make a list of frequently asked questions and develop a killer series of how-to webinars.  Invite your best customers and prospects.

- Ask one or two of your raving fan customers to be guest speaker(s).  Hey, no plane ticket; just a speaker phone and 10-15 minutes to explain why he or she loves using your products and services.

- You record this wonderful webinar and offer the link for playback to prospects that couldn’t make it to the original recording.

- Make sure your sales folks are listening into the webinar.  Customers say the darndest things.

View chart and full article here.

Under the heading of ‘damn I wish I’d said that’ yesterday the Wall St. Journal’s Kyle Smith reviewed yet another (yawn) book on the blogosphere.  Smith’s book review begins:

Reading blogs, in the words of the sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling, is like being “beaten to death with croutons.”

Kyle Smith’s book review is here.

Photo source: Flickr, dlayphoto

Update:

I think the time has come for small businesses to figure out the best way to use blogs and other social media to grow their companies.  Unfortunately, for many overworked business owners, reading some blogs will be required.  Sorry about that.

Step one in successfully using social media to increase visibility, visitors to your company web site and generating leads is to “listen” to the online conversations.  There are 3 key audiences to listen to:

- Customers and prospects

- Competitors

- Analysts and other industry influentials or thought leaders

Next post, best ideas for finding and listening to online conversations that are relevant to your industry.

DemandGen Report surveyed 218 BtoB sales and marketing professionals and found that social media is (actually) driving leads and helping to connect with prospects.  The study took place in June.  (DemandGen Report is an online publication that focuses on sales and marketing automation tools to help companies drive growth.)

Source: DemandGen Report

LinkedIn (58 percent) and company blogs (36 percent) are the top two social media tools producing these results.  Interestingly, Twitter came in third at 31 percent.

In no surprise to me, only 17 percent of these folks report Facebook as a source of leads.  It seems unless you are a large, well known brand Facebook is probably not a good use of lead generation time/resources for a small to midsize business-to-business company.  Although the article does not state the size of the companies surveyed, DemandGen Report offers a webinar series for small to midsize companies so I think SMBs are their readers.

Here are some highlights of the survey results:

• Some early adopters are generating from 10 to 15 percent of leads via social media connections
• While marketers and PR folks are driving the most activity, other teams are participating: Sales –  41 percent; Product management – 21 percent; Engineering – 13 percent

• The top 3 most successful social networking tactics reported by this group are:   Joining/participating in industry groups (25%;  Starting conversations on industry topics (25%); Answering questions on industry topics (23%)

Is LinkedIn helping your company blog to drive leads and connections with prospects?  How about your company blog?

Read the entire DemandGenReport article here.

Brian Carroll offers a great how-to for using LinkedIn for lead generation here.

Mike Sachoff cites another study showing company blogs as the most valued Social Media tool here.